[MCN] Fossil fuel combustion drives necessity of triage for planning the future of forests

Fri Jun 3 21:13:09 EDT 2022

"Thus, while acknowledging the resilience of many forests, we highlight here the nature and consequences of changing environmental conditions that increasingly threaten widespread regions of temperate forest. In particular, we describe the rise of an especially potent threat to forest health … that is, persistent and recurring drought combined with high temperatures”

"f we can identify in advance the most vulnerable forests, in some cases management intervention might be able to ease the transition to new and better-adapted forest states, minimizing losses of ecosystem services. Because the scope of the challenge is vast, triage exercises will almost certainly be necessary to identify the highest-priority forests and those where management action might have the greatest effect.”

Constance I. Millar and Nathan L. Stephenson.Temperate forest health in an era of emerging megadisturbance. SCIENCE 21 AUGUST 2015 

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Using over a century of ground-based observations over the contiguous United States, we show that the frequency of compound dry and hot extremes has increased substantially in the past decades, with an alarming increase in very rare dry-hot extremes. 

A century of observations reveals increasing likelihood of continental-scale compound dry-hot extremes 

Mohammad Reza Alizadeh, Jan Adamowski, Mohammad Reza Nikoo, Amir AghaKouchak, Philip Dennison, Mojtaba Sadegh

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Michael Mann: “A new normal makes it sound like we have arrived in a new position, and that's where we're going to be. But if we continue to burn fossil fuels ... we are going to ... get worse and worse droughts, and heat waves, and super storms, and floods, and wildfires.”
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/climate-change-is-making-wildfires-more-extreme-heres-how <https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/climate-change-is-making-wildfires-more-extreme-heres-how>

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 More Intense, More Frequent, and Longer Lasting Heat Waves in the 21st Century. 

Gerald A. Meehl and Claudia Tebaldi. 
Science, 13 AUGUST 2004

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“Here we established a geo-referenced global database documenting climate-induced mortality events spanning all tree-supporting biomes and continents, from 154 peer-reviewed studies since 1970. Our analysis quantifies a global “hotter-drought fingerprint” from these tree-mortality sites—effectively a hotter and drier climate signal for tree mortality—across 675 locations encompassing 1,303 plots. Frequency of these observed mortality-year climate conditions strongly increases nonlinearly under projected warming.”

nature communications <https://www.nature.com/ncomms>  Published: 05 April 2022 <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29289-2#article-info>
Global field observations of tree die-off reveal hotter-drought fingerprint for Earth’s forests

William M. Hammond <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29289-2#auth-William_M_-Hammond>, A. Park Williams <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29289-2#auth-A__Park-Williams>,et al

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If there’s one thing Ebi wants to avoid, it’s thinking of this catastrophic heat wave as the “new normal,” which she calls “really misleading” as it actually underestimates the gravity of the situation. “It implies we’re going from one state to another state. We’re in a period when there’s going to be ongoing change for decades.

“The new normal is not the current temperature. The new normal is the constant change.”

https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/07/western-canada-burns-and-deaths-mount-after-worlds-most-extreme-heat-wave-in-modern-history/ <https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/07/western-canada-burns-and-deaths-mount-after-worlds-most-extreme-heat-wave-in-modern-history/>

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“The changes experienced by the biosphere over the past century ... have raised concerns about the possibility of rapid shifts from green to desert states.” 

Richard Sole. Scaling laws in the drier. Nature 13 September 2007

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Droughts of the twenty-first century are characterized by hotter temperatures, longer duration, and greater spatial extent, and are increasingly exacerbated by human demands for water. This situation increases the vulnerability of ecosystems to drought, including a rise in drought-driven tree mortality globally (Allen et al. 2015) and anticipated ecosystem transformations from one state to another—for example, forest to a shrubland.

Causaby et al. Defining Ecological Drought for the Twenty-First Century. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. December 2017

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“Our results indicate that terrestrial ecosystems are highly sensitive to temperature change and suggest that, without major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere, terrestrial ecosystems worldwide are at risk of major transformation.”

Nolan et al. Past and future global transformation of terrestrial ecosystems under climate change. 
Science 31 August 2018 

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“We contend that traditional approaches to forest conservation and management will be inadequate ... in the 21st century. New approaches ... acknowledge that change is inevitable and sometimes irreversible, and that maintenance of ecosystem services depends in part on novel ecosystems, i.e., species combinations with no analog in the past.”

Forest Ecology and Management 360 (2016) 80–96 
Review and synthesis 
Achievable future conditions as a framework for guiding forest conservation and management 
S.W. Golladay, K.L. Martin, J.M. Vose, D.N. Wear, A.P. Covich , R.J. Hobbs, K.D. Klepzig, G.E. Likens, R.J. Naiman, A.W. Shearer 

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" ‘Triage’ is a dirty word in some conservation circles, but like many dirty words, it describes something common. Whether they admit it or not, conservationists have long had to make decisions about what to save.

"As more and more admit it, open discussion about how the decisions are best made — by concentrating on particular species, or particular places, or absolute costs, or any other criterion — becomes possible. Whichever criteria come into play, one thing remains constant. The decisions have to be made quickly."

Emma Marris, "What To Let Go.” NATURE November 8, 2007

https://www.nature.com/articles/450152a.pdf

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"An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well 
and does not want to be told otherwise.”

Aldo Leopold
A Sand County Almanac

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"But the scale of climate change engulfs even the most fortunate. There is now no weather we haven’t touched, no wilderness immune from our encroaching pressure. The world we once knew is never coming back.

"I have no hope that these changes can be reversed. We are inevitably sending our children <https://onbeing.org/blog/kate-marvel-we-should-never-have-called-it-earth> to live on an unfamiliar planet. But the opposite of hope is not despair. It is grief.”

"We are all fated to live lives shot through with sadness, and are not worth less for it. Courage is the resolve to do well without the assurance of a happy ending." 

"We need courage, not hope."

Kate Marvel, physicist, climate scientist, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University’s Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics

<<https://onbeing.org/blog/kate-marvel-we-need-courage-not-hope-to-face-climate-change/ <https://onbeing.org/blog/kate-marvel-we-need-courage-not-hope-to-face-climate-change/>>>

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