eponymous_anonymous

May their souls rest in peace

Everyone gets old, my friend. Some survive to be older than they ever expected to be - we can’t assume that these are faraway consequences that will happen to faceless others.

I agree absolutely - we owe a debt to our future generations to try as hard as we can to avoid the worst of the potential consequences, and teach them the skills to survive in a world turning sideways. It’s strange, and scary. Those that will take care of us when we grow old might not have been born yet. Or, robots that will take care of us when we are old haven’t been built yet, as the case may be.

May we have the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Thanks, I’m glad you liked the idea. I’m really just throwing concepts out into the ether with that Amazon biodiversity thing, but it feels like there could be something there. We can transplant and propagate far faster than natural selection can move populations of trees northwards.

Invasive species are already wrecking our shit left right & centre, let’s throw a bunch more species into the mix, move a bunch things simultaneously, and see if it steadies things out a bit. If we have statistical modelling, then why not use it to our advantage? Give plants & trees a head start, move them north and the animals will follow naturally

120,000 years. Why 120 thousand years? Did a little digging and that turns out to be roughly coinciding with the peak of the second-to-last interglacial maximum, known as the Eemian (the current being the Holocene).

And what do we know about the Eemian interglacial period? We have found some very interesting things. These things may not happen again, they may be wildly inadequate as predictors of future consequences of this global climactic shift. Nevertheless, although history doesn’t repeat itself, it sometimes rhymes.

From Wikipedia:

The Eemian climate is believed to have been warmer than the current Holocene.[8][9] Changes in the Earth's orbital parameters from today (greater obliquity and eccentricity, and perihelion), known as Milankovitch cycles, probably led to greater seasonal temperature variations in the Northern Hemisphere.[citation needed]

During the northern summer, temperatures in the Arctic region were about 2-4 °C higher than in 2011.[10] The warmest peak of the Eemian was around 125,000 years ago, when forests reached as far north as North Cape, Norway (which is now tundra) well above the Arctic Circle at 71°10′21″N 25°47′40″E. Hardwood trees such as hazel and oak grew as far north as Oulu, Finland.

At the peak of the Eemian, the Northern Hemisphere winters were generally warmer and wetter than now, though some areas were actually slightly cooler than today. The hippopotamus was distributed as far north as the rivers Rhine and Thames.[11]

Trees grew as far north as southern Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago: currently, the northern limit is further south at Kuujjuaq in northern Quebec. Coastal Alaska was warm enough during the summer due to reduced sea ice in the Arctic Ocean to allow Saint Lawrence Island (now tundra) to have boreal forest, although inadequate precipitation caused a reduction in the forest cover in interior Alaska and Yukon Territory despite warmer conditions.[12]

The prairie-forest boundary in the Great Plains of the United States lay further west near Lubbock, Texas, whereas the current boundary is near Dallas. The period closed as temperatures steadily fell to conditions cooler and drier than the present, with a 468-year-long aridity pulse in central Europe at about 116,000 BC,[13] and by 112,000 BC, a glacial period had returned.”

Hippopotamus… in the Thames??

Trees on the southern edge of Baffin Island??

A 468-year long aridity event?

Fuck. Buckle up, this shit could get very very interesting. Turns out ecological recessions have winners and losers too, at this point we kind of have to wait and see which species have advantageous adaptations for the approaching climate conditions.

Fifty years from now we could be faced with replacing entire ecosystems for depopulated areas that have died out and burned off because the environment hasn’t been able to keep up with the pace of change. It’s possible that one of the best things we could do for the Amazon at this point is start propagating its dirt, its microbes, and its unique fauna & flora to other areas of the globe. It’s a genetic backup hard drive, we should use it as such

Well said, great comment. Thanks for your perspective, I wasn’t aware of that. Down near Ottawa we’ve gotten a lot of rain since that dry spell back in the spring, we’re definitely hitting that emerald green shade you speak of but largely seem to be in the same situation. As long as we don’t get too much heat and keep on getting rain, we’ll be ok.

From what I can see in the forest down here, it’s only a matter of time. The logging industry’s reforestation techniques take fifty years or more to demonstrate whether they lower or raise the risk potential; a lot of the areas in the Ottawa Valley were heavily logged, often repeatedly, and the reforestation strategies have changed drastically over our history. We’ve now got a mix of forest that was logged and clearcut at various times and with different techniques; patches that range from freshly logged to more than a century since they were destroyed.

It’s difficult to find trees more than 150 years old around here, you have to hunt for them down in the nooks & crannies of the geography. To find them consistently you almost have to shift your mindset to a different time, squint your eyes a bit to see the spots where it was too difficult to hook chains to draft horses & haul the logs out to the river during the winter months.

The emerald ash borer has destroyed the ash trees, in some areas up to 10% of the forest is dry, standing deadwood. The Downy, Hairy, & Pileated Woodpecker populations are way up, Northern Flickers too, but it’s a serious liability unless we manage to avoid drought conditions for the next ten years or so while the ash tree corpses fall & decompose.

Up past Arnprior the forest has a short memory. There’s some stone fences here & there where the forest has reconquered territory, old plots of land that were abandoned long ago.

What stands out to me is the Boy Scout forests, though; have you ever seen those? Stands of red pine arranged in a perfect grid pattern, completely unnatural looking and far too close together for sunlight to hit the ground below. Odd dead zones where almost nothing grows on ground level, and the immediate layer of branches overhead create a spindly web of dry tinder between the trees.

Any one of these types of areas could hit a tipping point if we get consistent drought conditions. After that, the whole forest goes up in flames. It’s a tragedy in the making, Centennial Lake was just the beginning. Our forest management techniques basically need the slate to be wiped clean at this point in order to manage the problem effectively moving forward.