Redwood Fog Bomfoggery
California fog is disappearing due to global warming! It’s a disaster! The redwoods will die!
“If the fog is gone, we might not have the Redwood forests we do now.”
So says Professor Todd Dawson, Director of the Center for Stable Isotope Biogeochemistry at UC Berkeley, according to Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent, UK Telegraph [here].
Fog over San Francisco thins by a third due to climate change
The sight of Golden Gate Bridge towering above the fog will become increasing rare as climate change warms San Francisco bay, scientists have found.
By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent, UK Telegraph, 15 Feb 2010
The coastal fog along the Californian coast has declined by a third over the past 100 years – the equivalent of three hours cover a day, new research shows.
And it is not just bad for scenery, the reduction in the cooling effect of the fog could damage the health of the huge Redwood Forests nearby.
“Since 1901, the average number of hours of fog along the coast in summer has dropped from 56 per cent to 42 per cent, which is a loss of about three hours per day,” said the study leader Dr James Johnstone at the University of California.
He said that it was unclear whether this is part of a natural cycle of the result of human activity, but the fog is receding because of a reduction in the difference between the temperature of the sea and the land. …
Professor Todd Dawson, co-author, said the decline could be disastrous for the nearby ecosystems.
“Fog prevents water loss from Redwoods in summer, and is really important for both the tree and the forest,” he said. “If the fog is gone, we might not have the Redwood forests we do now.”
This news is all over the MSM (Main Stream Media). It’s in the Orange County Register, the SF Chronicle, Reuters, the NY Times. Science Daily, USA Today, and who knows where else. It’s on all the TV news. It’s a Big Deal, a science breakthrough!
Or is it?
Could it be that it’s all a steaming pile of bull manure?
Here’s a clue. Last summer the SF Chronicle reported on a study in the journal Climate by Robert Bornstein, a meteorology professor at San Jose State University (and others) that asserted that global warming is going to make the California coast foggier! [here]
Get ready for even foggier summers
Janny Hu, Chronicle Staff Writer, July 6, 2009
The Bay Area just had its foggiest May in 50 years. And thanks to global warming, it’s about to get even foggier.
That’s the conclusion of several state researchers, whose soon-to-be-published study predicts that even with average temperatures on the rise, the mercury won’t be soaring everywhere.
“There’ll be winners and losers,” says Robert Bornstein, a meteorology professor at San Jose State University. “Global warming is warming the interior part of California, but it leads to a reverse reaction of more fog along the coast.”
The study, which will appear in the journal Climate, is the latest to argue that colder summers are indeed in store for parts of the Bay Area.
Scientists began sounding the alarm 20 years ago when looking at greenhouse gases and their possible reverse effects along the foggy Northern California coast. The theory, then and now, is that the hotter the Central Valley gets, the greater the temperature and pressure gradients between the inland and coast will be - therefore forming more fog. …
Oh no! Dueling scientists! Who’s right? Could it be that the whole steaming pile of “scientists” are wrong?
We could have them duke it out in a cage match, last “scientist” standing wins. Frankly, I’d enjoy that spectacle. But there may be a more peaceful way to resolve this dispute.
First, according to today’s UC Berkeley press release [here], Johnstone and Dawson evaluated “fog frequency data” from two (count ‘em, two) airports, in Arcata and Monterey (neither of which is within 100 miles of the Golden Gate Bridge). Then they got temperature data from inland sites and built a theoretical temperature inversion model (it’s a model, folks).
Compare and contrast that with Bornstein et al. [here], who used a GCM (Global Climate Model) to hypothesize that global warming would increase the temperature gradient (coast/inland) and cause “increased sea-breeze activity” and hence MORE fog.
Maybe the models should duke it out in a cage match.
Nobody but nobody bothered to point out that redwoods have been around since at least the late Cretaceous (65+ million years) and metasequoia dates from the Carboniferous (350 million years), and so the genus has survived every climate change ever in the history of the world since way back there.
And nobody but nobody bothered to point out that human beings have been setting the redwoods on fire for 10,000 years or more, and that didn’t extinctify them, either.
Except for us, of course. That’s what we do, point out the obvious and sometimes the less than obvious. For instance, we posted in the W.I.S.E. Colloquium: History of Western Landscapes Norman, Steven P. 2007. A 500-year record of fire from a humid coast redwood forest [here]:
California’s coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) forests have long been associated with moderately frequent to frequent fire, particularly in the southern and interior portions of the species range. The historical importance of fire in northern coast redwood forests is generally thought to be much less because lightning ignitions are rare, and cool coastal temperatures and summer fog ameliorate the fire hazard. … I found that fire frequency was substantially more frequent than previously thought. … Fire intervals did not correspond to a latitudinal, coast-interior or a topographically defined moisture gradient.
Instead, patterns of fire frequency better fit a cultural burning gradient inferred from the ethnographic and historical record. Areas close to aboriginal villages and camps burned considerably more often than areas that were probably less utilized. Summer season fires, the ones most likely set by the Native Tolowa for resource needs, were 10 years shorter than the mean fire interval of autumn season fires.
In the dryer eastern portion of the study area, frequent fire resulted in unimodal or bimodal pulses of Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) establishment suggesting moderate to high fire severity. Near a Tolowa village site, a frequent fire regime before the late 1700s initiated a pulse of Douglas fir establishment that dominated the forest canopy for centuries; long after the village was abandoned, possibly due to epidemic disease. …
So it appears that redwoods survived the various fog regimes of the last umpteen million years, and they also survived Indians setting them on fire for the last 10,000 years!
Howsat?
It turns out that redwoods are not fragile, that they are not about to go extinct from fog shift, that the fog shift could be more or less fog, depending on which model you believe in (as in religious belief), and the whole PANIC ATTACK is based on utter steaming piles of etc.
Oh no! The panic attack is useless Chicken Little hysteria? OMG!!! Let’s have a PANIC ATTACK about that!!!
If your poor heart can take it, that is. Personally, I have just about burned out on panic attacks in the MSM. I’d rather remain calm and not get worked up over the ravings of steaming pseudo-scientists who like to see their names in the paper.
Our fine educational institutions such as UC Berkeley and San Jose State University (chuckle) have devolved into clown circuses. They might as well be shut down and boarded up.
You can get a better education on the Internet, particularly at the Western Institute for Study of the Environment. We don’t give out diplomas, but we don’t GO STARK RAVING BONKERS every day, either.
by John Marker
I am sorry I didn’t have all of this important information about redwoods before launching my “scientific” study of redwood trees and their habitat. During our years of moving around the nation we have successfully planted coast redwoods in Bakersfield, CA, Ogden, UT, Bethesda, MD and Portland. OR. Admitedly the planting in Ogden was not highly successful, but the trees made it after recovering from some episodes of cold. However, in the other locations they did just fine without fog. So I guess I am not ready to play “Chicken Little” with this latest panic that is probably the result of a slow news day.
The redwood population has been repeatedly limited to coastal refugia during the 18 or so continental glaciations over the last 1.8 million years. So have been many other species. During the interglacials, like our present Holocene, most plant species rapidly invaded newly (but temporarily) ice-free regions.
While redwoods grow well in many other areas besides the foggy California coast, redwoods failed to invade inland areas during the Holocene. It is not because they will not grow in inland areas; we know that they do. It has been amply demonstrated.
The limited distribution of redwoods is hypothesized to be because redwoods reproduce by root suckering. They do not produce much in the way of viable seed, and the small seeds do not have wings to sail them long distances.
In contrast, most of the other conifers reproduce mainly through seed, and the seeds have wings.
There is one anomaly to this hypothesis: western red cedar. WRC has small seeds without wings and with low viability. WRC, like redwoods, produce abundant seed almost every year after age 20, but only 1 to 3 percent of the seed are viable, and some trees are entirely sterile. For the most part, WRC reproduces by root suckering and layering, like redwoods.
Yet WRC has successfully spread out of Ice Age refugia and may be found from California to Alaska and east to the Rocky Mountains. However, WRC is not well-distributed across the landscape — it is mainly found in isolated “pocket” stands, often monospecific.
WRC is also the most utilized tree by Native Americans. Every part of the tree was used: stem wood, branches (withes), bark, leaves, and roots. It was the favored fiber used by fiber-dependent cultures for houses, canoes, clothing, utensils, boxes, baskets, and you name it.
One theory regarding the spread of WRC out of refugia during the Holocene is that people had something to do with it. The same theory is offered for the wide distribution of black and white oak, camas, and many other plant species used by humans for millennia. Some plant species even appear to have been spread by people to other continents long before Columbus [here].
So that’s something to think about, and a fertile field of study.
I thought the value of convection fog rising when air cooled by the Pacific flowed over warmer land was that it allowed redwoods to beat gravity and failing osmotic pressure to get water to the tops where the needles are. I s’pose there is foliar watering going on as well, as condensed fog on needles penetrates the needles (or whatever you call redwood’s fern like greenery) because they have some biological/chemical gate that allows water to pass either way, in or out, of the greenery.
Therefore, the issue is ocean temperatures in accordance with terrestrial temperatures, and the fog triggering dew points or saturations or whatever. If we are hard into an El Nino, there is a lot more rain, and I s’pose, less fog due to warmer ocean waters and in a place like San Francisco, so much thermal inertia from all the vertical steel and concrete, and asphalt, all with exhausting ports for heat from air conditioning and heating. Or not.
The real deal is that Marker is right on. Redwood trees planted in the Willamette Valley don’t get tall, but they shore do get fat!!! And a cold winter does denude the coastal variety. I remember the one just west of Eddyville that lost all its greenery in 1970 something. I thought it had been killed. It had been seventeen below at my house in Monmouth. And cold in the Coast Range. But, in a year, all new greenery grew out on the bole of the freeze damaged semper virens, and life was once again normal and that tree is still thriving next to Hiway 20. And will be forever as the new bypass will allow it to further its encroachment onto the old highway…
I cruised a Washington DNR timber sale that was on the very edge of the blast zone of Mt. St. Helens. And by edge, I mean edge. You dropped off the road in total destruction, and no standing trees, and in a few hundred feet you were walking through 200 year old trees with the tops blown out like cut with a scythe, and another hundred feet or so you were into undamaged green forest of the same age. I noticed as I negotiated feet of ash and the jumble of blow down, and then blown out tops, that the yew wood in the blast zone, just limbless boles sticking with the familiar flat bark, had individual needles growing out of the bark. Green new needles. The only green in the black and grey monotones of the blast zone. Tough buggers. Nature’s survivor. All the doug fir, hemlock and noble fir were dead. Fried dead. Blast dead. But here and there a yew was starting to put out new needles, one at a time, out of the bark of a mostly limbless remaining damaged trunk. I imagine redwoods are just as tough over time. Survivors of so much have to be.
You can cut down an ancient coastal redwood, and fifty years later, around the giant stump, are a dozen 50″ dbh second growth redwood. I have often wondered if allowed to grow forever, if those trees would grow to amalgamate into one tree.
You look at those huge old trees, and the nutrition they need to grow and thrive, and how they might get it from the earth, and you do wonder if it was all genetics that put them to such great size, or was it part that and part someone setting fires to reduce competition and reinvigorate the nutrient levels. I also wonder if salmon carcasses were a part of that deal. The biggest and tallest seem to be on deflation plains and flood plains, where soil deposition just triggers new roots from the bole, instead of introduction of soil born pathogens to kill the tree like so many when they get new dirt piled against them.
No matter what, just being able to gaze at them is a gift. Now if we can just keep the public land managers from burning them all up.
I recall one time in Salem, OR, listening to an ODF “service forester” telling me that a tree species just wouldn’t grow on a property if Mother Nature hadn’t put it there “natchurly”.
And right outside the window was a giant redwood that had been there 80 years!
ODF planted a ton of off site stock in the Tillamook Burn. Some of it is now sorely impacted by Swiss needle cast. Others just didn’t grow or were overgrown by the doug fir weed. There was a a ridge of planted doug fir between Burnt Woods and Harlan, off the top of those switchbacks and off to the north on Wolf Creek, that had Port Orford cedar struggling mightily in the understory. No phytopthera had gotten them. And there were white pines over the Sunset Summit on the way to Seaside. ODF messed around considerable with species movement.
But, moving species was a national deal, carried out at the Federal level early on as part of the push to expand science. Shad in 1876 to the Sacramento River at Auburn. They expanded coast wide, with the dammed Columbia with fish ladders being especially fruitful for them. The US Bur of Fish and Fisheries discovered oxygen use and metabolic thermal releases when they shipped eyed chinook eggs to Germany packed in peat moss and ice. We got brown trout back on the deal.
Arboretums. Plant species world wide, a la Darwn, et al, to expand the knowledge of science. Not all it worked out as planned. Mostly there were failures. Like Captain Bligh and the Bounty with the breadfruit. Lots of transplants stuck and are now a part of the problem, and others just now recognized as a part of the problem. I just love the Columbia River. Slack water is friendly to introduced shad, walleye, large and small mouth bass, Asian carp, pan fish. People are scared spitless of pike which ended up in some reservoirs tributary to the Sacramento. They are in the Bitterroot River. That means water that eventually passes Astoria.
KMX pine, gene altered cottonwood. Super trees. Rust resistant white and sugar pines. Is Round Up ready doug fir coming soon? It is the nature of man to move stuff. To experiment. We are a curious critter with a large brain. Some larger and work better than others. Thus, in the anthropogenic landscape management, you just have to understand that species transplants have been going on for a long, long time. Critters to amuse the despots and moguls. Domesticated wildlife. Pets. And it all works for plants, as well. We would be dodo’s if we were not altering species distribution. Sedentary and eaten in time.
While growing up in the Napa Valley, there was a place on the eastern slopes above the vineyards that has seen catastrophic fires and had thick brushfields. However, within the area are very interesting canyons with old (but small) redwood trees, ferns, and waterfalls. This one particular canyon was so lush with “wetter” vegetation that we called it “Hawaii”. As a kid, back in the 60’s, I remember looking up at the hills and seeing the big flames from the town of Napa itself. The 80’s had another equally catastrophic fire that again perpetuated the brush but enhanced the redwoods down in the spring-fed canyons. As one logger once said “It’s awful hard to kill a redwood tree”.
Besides, redwoods will never go extinct because, there are too many people planting them where they shouldn’t be planting them. It’s pretty silly to be planting coastal redwoods on the city streets of 104 degree Sacramento.
Too many “scientists” are quite willing to do one-sided “studies” that pay quite well. Alas, science often goes to the highest bidder, and scientific objectivity is now on the Endangered List.