Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
The Biden administration on Monday said the government will plant more than one billion trees across millions of acres of burned and dead woodlands in the U.S. West, as officials struggle to counter the increasing toll on the nation's forests from wildfires, insects and other manifestations of climate change.
Destructive fires in recent years that burned too hot for forests to regrow naturally have far outpaced the government's capacity to plant new trees. That has created a backlog of 4.1 million acres (1.7 million hectares) in need of replanting, officials said.
The U.S. Agriculture Department said it will have to quadruple the number of tree seedlings produced by nurseries to get through the backlog and meet future needs. That comes after Congress last year passed bipartisan legislation directing the Forest Service to plant 1.2 billion trees over the next decade and after President Joe Biden in April ordered the agency to make the nation's forests more resilient as the globe gets hotter.
[...] To erase the backlog of decimated forest acreage, the Forest Service plans over the next couple years to scale up work from about 60,000 acres (24,000 hectares) replanted last year to about 400,000 acres (162,000 hectares) annually, officials said. Most of the work will be in western states where wildfires now occur year round and the need is most pressing, said David Lytle, the agency's director of forest management.
[...] But challenges to the Forest Service's goal remain, from finding enough seeds to hiring enough workers to plant them, Fargione said.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday July 29 2022, @03:13AM (4 children)
ENSO outlook from Aussie BoM [bom.gov.au]
Cali is likely to be shafted one more year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Friday July 29 2022, @04:47AM (3 children)
Just a few days ago I read:
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/july-2022-la-ni%C3%B1a-update-comic-timing [climate.gov]
In this article the author speculates on the chances of a third La Nina in a row. It of course is still up in the air (and in the Walker circulation).
"It is easier to fool someone than it is to convince them that they have been fooled" Mark Twain
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday July 29 2022, @06:51AM (2 children)
I find a bit surprising that Americans agreed so easy to let Australia have some rain for 3 years in a row (large grin)
Thanks for the confirmation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Friday July 29 2022, @04:02PM (1 child)
I wish we could get some of that rain. A few years ago Oz was burning and we had winter rains. If only there was some way to work it out so we both had enough water and less fires.
"It is easier to fool someone than it is to convince them that they have been fooled" Mark Twain
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday July 30 2022, @02:26AM
We tried to reason with the Pacific ocean to warm and evaporate more uniformly instead of sloshing warm water between its East-West coasts.
But it's kind of an old grumpy geezer, it won't fucken listen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Friday July 29 2022, @03:59AM (15 children)
Wood already was strangely expensive. Wood shelves have always cost way more than steel shelves. Sounds like the price is going up even more.
And so, to save money, so much "wood" furniture uses particleboard, or, "engineered wood" as the new deceptive term has it. I loathe particleboard. Weak, heavy, and outgasses nasty chemicals.
(Score: 3, Informative) by istartedi on Friday July 29 2022, @04:58AM (7 children)
Several years ago I found a small kitchen table and chair set at Ikea. I had been wanting such a thing and was so stunned to find that it was all real wood that I immediately bought it. We weren't even expecting to find anything decent there. It's pine, but that's OK. It's real wood. I still feels like some kind of coup. Such a strange world we live in sometimes.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday July 29 2022, @06:32AM (3 children)
I bought some inexpensive pine tables and chairs from IKEA that lasted over 20 years and survived several house moves. They were great value for money. I like pine.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday July 29 2022, @08:04PM (2 children)
I bought an oak table in 2000. It has a couple of marks from cigarettes, and the spacer in the middle to make it bigger warped in two years in storage, but otherwise is like new.
Plus, if worse comes to worst, you can burn oak in a fireplace. Not pine.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday July 29 2022, @08:24PM (1 child)
I burn pine (home grown) in my fireplace. Oak's expensive.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mcgrew on Monday August 01 2022, @06:19PM
Burning pine can cause a chimney fire. Burn maple, it's cheap. Anything with needles is bad for a firelace, don't know about a wood stove but I imagine it probably applies.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Saturday July 30 2022, @02:47AM (2 children)
I'm right with you. Or why my ever-growing stack of pallets (mostly fir and some sort of oak) are not trash, but future shelves. Probably half the wood is usable. There's a guy on YT who makes custom furniture from salvaged pallets, and it looks great.
I hate particleboard, at best it's disposable.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Saturday July 30 2022, @09:59PM (1 child)
If you're really in to that, presumably you know how to tell which pallets are safe. I forget, but I went through this checking pallets left around here by previous occupants. I'm not inclined to build much of anything with them, although they're the "flooring" for my wood pile, supported by concrete pier blocks and they hold up quite well at that task. I burned the rest. At the beginning I was crazy enough to think I could dismantle them and leave the boards intact but after a while I realized it wasn't practical because some of the "nails" are actually sort of spiral and don't pull out easily. I broke them with the maul, cut them to size, and sifted the various fasteners out in the ashes later.
You can't even burn particle board and other composites (at least you shouldn't). AFAIK, they just have to be trashed if they're no longer usable. Such a shame.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday July 30 2022, @10:51PM
These are all livestock feed pallets, and for the most part brand new, so have never had anything toxic on them, certainly nothing leaking chemicals or the like. Yeah, the nails are designed to not work out under stress, and an absolute bitch to pull, and doing so often splits the flats; it's more practical to just cut along the crosspieces and accept that you'll have shorter pieces to work with. Since what I need to make (Real Soon Now!!) are Lots of Bookshelves, 22" or so is plenty long, and the widths are mostly convenient too. Will need planing, but when I look at the price of decent finished lumber vs a cheap planer from Harbor Freight, suddenly this seems worthwhile. Also, very few of these are warped, whereas even at the private lumber yard that's miles above Home Despot, one needs to fish through the pile to find straight pieces.
And I acquire another one every month whether I need it or not... some will wind up as fencing, since they make pretty good snow fence and windbreak.
Yeah, particle board is a total waste at its end of life. Aside from the toxicity if burned, it's treated with stuff that means you can't even use its soggy corpse for garden mulch (unless you intend for nothing to grow).
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by gnuman on Friday July 29 2022, @08:58AM (3 children)
Well, steel shelves don't look nice in your bedroom. But YMMV.
Particle board is very useful for large, flat surfaces. It makes countertops cheap. It's then conveniently covered with plastic wrap and injected with glue to hold together. Particle boards mostly use the wood for filler and it's not really part of its strength. It comes from the plastic glue -- may have heard of melamine at some point ;)
OSB though, is how most of American housing is built. It has all sort of scrap wood that is oriented and glued together. It makes the board strong, mostly in one direction. This is why it's used on the walls and roof between 2x6s in one direction. You nail it wrong way, and it will be weak ;) So, OSB is not good for furniture because you want same tensile stregnth in both directions. Particle board is more predictable.
The problem with particle boards is they are easily destroyed if you abuse them. Old style furniture had bolts that would screw into the particle boards -- you can only do that once or twice. Today, they have anchors so you don't destroy the board.
Finally, EVERY SINGLE BOARD that you have for furniture, if it's wider than a few inches, it most likely will be glued together. This glue is same like in particle boards. And even if you have a solid wood table, unless it's raw wood you have there, it's covered by plastic anyway, I mean liqueur (a synthetic polymer == plastic). You see, you can't get rid of plastic in the world anymore. Even the "solid wood" is effectively plastic wrapped and your houses are covered by plastic on the inside (paint). Effectively, solid wood is hidden away as a construction detail. So, particle board? Engineered wood? They all reduce waste and are not so much worse than "solid wood". They will last you a decade or two (or longer if you don't abuse them), and in most cases, people don't hold on to their "solid wood" furniture longer either.
Outgassing? Same like every carpet, paint and plastic furniture you have (like, virtually all of it that is not solid, including floors of all types, especially carpets). You want to reduce your exposure to this? You need to open the windows (or have HRV) and invest in some air quality sensors. The better ones will measure CO2 which is actually most associated with poor air quality.
Anyway....
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Friday July 29 2022, @06:01PM (1 child)
I actually like plywood. Waferboard is okay too. There are several standards that grade their formaldehyde and other chemical emissions. In Europe, E0 is the best, Nand E1 is still considered pretty good. The US has TSCA Title VI. Japan and even China have standards.
It's the stuff that's basically sawdust glued together that's so awful.
Melamine? Why, yes, I recall the scandal around a Chinese business that added melamine to baby formula. Sickened a lot of babies, and some died of it.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday July 30 2022, @02:56AM
> It's the stuff that's basically sawdust glued together that's so awful.
Yeah, "particleboard" is terrible. There are some better grades of it, but don't let it get wet!
There are some "engineered wood" products that are much finer grain sawdust, compressed much tighter with much better bonding resins. You see it very much in flooring that's everywhere suddenly, and I've installed some. Also exterior siding.
And then you have "composite decking" boards that are made mostly from sawdust and recycled plastic- largely shopping bags. It's expensive stuff, but very easy to work with and holds up very well. Sometimes park benches use it.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday August 02 2022, @12:37AM
Zarquon forbid it get wet. It tends to swell up and crumble away.
(Score: 4, Touché) by driverless on Friday July 29 2022, @10:40AM
That involves Viagra doesn't it?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Freeman on Friday July 29 2022, @03:44PM (1 child)
Particleboard is cheap to produce. Though, probably the biggest reason that companies like it, is that it has limited life. Who wants to sell a bunch of furniture that'll still be good in 100 years? When you can sell a piece of furniture that's super cheap and requires the customer to keep coming back every few years. It's super heavy, it swells like a sponge, if you get a bit of water on it. You can't refinish it or repair it, without essentially replacing the whole thing. When it's as cheap as it is, may as well just buy a new one at that point. Then again, you could actually buy good furniture. That way, you're not constantly buying junk and throwing it away.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by acid andy on Friday July 29 2022, @09:22PM
I've made softwood frames / braces to support sagging particleboard furniture though if you leave it too long like that, exposed to moisture, you'll end up with just the outer plastic or wood veneer, resting on the frame.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2022, @04:13AM
First smart thing to do I hear from the Biden administration after a year and a half! This is quite an event!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by PinkyGigglebrain on Friday July 29 2022, @04:54AM (17 children)
one of the reasons why the fires were so devastating in the first place was that dry conditions that weakened the trees againt insects or just killed them outright.
Doesn't mater how many saplings get planted, if there isn't enough rain for them to stay alive they will die just like the trees they are supposed to replace.
in my travels around the Western areas of the USA I've seen a lot of clear cut and burned out areas that are still mostly barren a decade or more after being replanted because there wasn't enough rainfall after the replanting effort for it to do any good.
Not to mention that the saplings being planting will probably be only specific commercially valuable varieties , creating mono-cultures that will be even more susceptible to future insect and disease events..
I applaud the intent, but I'm skeptical of it's long term benefit
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by istartedi on Friday July 29 2022, @05:05AM (3 children)
Maybe our expectations are set too low? I hope. If they're planting Douglas fir where it was already dying, sigh... a lot of fir habitat is going to be too hot going forward. That's why it died. They should, AFAIK, plant a mix of various oak varieties, madrone, and perhaps a few long-needle pines, and OK... maybe some fir because we might get lucky but they should certainly be planting a mix and not a monoculture like you say. I too am skeptical and the timber companies probably have their thumb on the scale. These are the people who brought us "hack and squirt". Look it up. You'll be disgusted, and no it's not a double-entendre... but make sure safe search is on if you're at work because you never know.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by acid andy on Friday July 29 2022, @12:38PM (2 children)
Yes I read a piece pointing out that any market-driven attempt to save our ecosystems is almost certainly doomed to failure. It's because no-one can put a meaningful financial value on the continued existence of an ecosystem. The market will always be about increasing profit margins which means the work will go through an optimization process, limiting its scope to the minimum tasks necessary to receive payment. So if the contract permits monocultures, you'll get monocultures. If a clause is added to require mixed woodland, something else will be left out--perhaps the spacing between the trees, perhaps the type of habitat for animals and fungi on the woodland floor, perhaps the processes used will kill organisms that would otherwise become part of the ecosystem.
Basically, human business is the antithesis of the natural world. We have some excellent conservation charities but if you just pumped billions of dollars into those they would likely turn into corrupt, profit-driven entities themselves. The solution lies with the motives and beliefs of the people. Conservation and rewilding work needs to be done by people singly focused on doing it for its own sake, not for profit. Arranging that quickly on the scale that is needed is another matter. Environmentalism needs to effectively become the largest global religion, but a religion guided by science.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Friday July 29 2022, @04:28PM (1 child)
This executive order directs the Forest Service to research and implement these protective policies.
So it is definitely NOT a market based solution.,
And it definitely IS being run by people smart enough to know what kind of trees to plant.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by acid andy on Friday July 29 2022, @05:30PM
Sounds like a good start, but there could still be problems if bean counters are involved at any stage.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 5, Funny) by c0lo on Friday July 29 2022, @07:30AM (6 children)
We can give you some of our gum trees - they manage without much water and grow fast when they have it, have a very hard wood (oak pales by comparison), quite dense (the wood of some species [wikipedia.org] have a 1.2 the water density when dry), extremely resistant to forest fires. They create their own fire conditions by perspiring eucalyptus oil, as good a fuel as kerosene: when a forest fire starts in hot weather, it jumps almost as fast as you can drive especially when the road is covered in smoke. Here's 3 minutes worth of living through a fire hell [youtube.com] as captured by a dashcam.
After the gum trees eliminated your forests and grew tall enough, we may offer you some drop bears too (this is how we'll open wide the US market to our Vegemite).
Interested?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 3, Funny) by driverless on Friday July 29 2022, @10:42AM (1 child)
You forgot to mention that you'd need to convince people to park their Ford Mastodons under them, which would solve the fuel shortage problem as well once the widowmaker gums lived up to their name.
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Friday July 29 2022, @01:14PM
Eh, everyone needs a new home, car and/or significant other once in a while
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2022, @12:00PM (1 child)
Give me a home among the gumtrees, with lots of plum trees, a sheep or two and a kangaroo . . .
(Score: 3, Funny) by driverless on Friday July 29 2022, @01:19PM
Give me a home well clear of any gumtrees, a legal-age sheep or two, a wombat and a didgeridoo...
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Friday July 29 2022, @05:01PM (1 child)
We already have plenty of your Eucalyptus (blue gum) trees here in California. About a 150 years ago someone thought they'd be great for ships masts cause they grow fast and straight and are strong. Until folks figured out they don't cure very well because they split and twist when they dry. For those reasons you can't build anything with them. Then farmers thought they make a great windbrake for their crops. They did make a good good windbrake, but they spread like crazy, nothing would grow near them, and they suck up ground water. On top of that in dry conditions a spark sets them off like a bomb. :-))
"It is easier to fool someone than it is to convince them that they have been fooled" Mark Twain
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday July 30 2022, @02:16AM
Not quite true - otherwise the argument of "oh, you got fires out of control because of you let excessive undergrowth accumulate" would be even more wrong (I want to see the armchair foresters managing tens of thousands of hectares of forest on 40-60° slopes with deep gullies).
It happens mostly because they are very efficient at water (and other nutrients) harvesting - but there are plants that can compete equally.
Secondary, the dried leaves and bark they shed are rich in tannins - but if you rack the leaves away and water regularly, you can have even a lawn under them. I have some chestnut trees quite close to gum trees (about 5-7m, been too lazy to clear back the gumtrees more), has been a pain to establish them due to dry weather but, now that they are past 7y, the chestnut trees manage quite well on their own) - chestnut doesn't care that much of tannins, they make their own too.
Oh, well, if you offer it to them, they are quite happy to oblige, indeed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 5, Interesting) by gnuman on Friday July 29 2022, @09:08AM (1 child)
Not water. Mountain Pine Beetle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_pine_beetle [wikipedia.org]
These have had more effect on the forests than any single drought. And these beetles are spreading because of Global Warming. Their story is 100% due to warmer climates that allowed them to spread in the first place. The rest, like droughts or floods, is just noise. And the funny thing is, these beetles have evolved with a special type of pine over thousands of years. They were contained by cold temperatures around their warm inner "island" near the coast. They were a ticking bomb for the rest of the pine population. But as soon as the temperatures stopped dropping below -40 or so in the winter that killed them, they spread. Now, they will probably eat their way across Canada and US. If they reach Siberia, it will be same disaster. Some believe that many species of pine will become extinct in our lifetimes thanks to this critter.
Also, if you have trillions of dead pine trees, these tend to burn rather hot.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Captival on Saturday July 30 2022, @02:08PM
>>But as soon as the temperatures stopped dropping below -40 or so in the winter that killed them, they spread.
Slight problem with your story here. It was NEVER below -40 in much of the USA. Ever. [bestlifeonline.com]
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday July 30 2022, @02:57AM (2 children)
Rural roads in the high desert in north Los Angeles County used to be largely lined with trees, mostly Siberian elms.
About 15 years back the county hired a "tree service" to "trim" (read: top) all the trees.
Which stressed 'em enough that these big healthy trees that had survived multiple droughts since they were planted (probably about 1940) mostly died over the next couple years. A very few tried to come back from the resulting stumps.
The county then hired the same tree service to plant young trees (lacking roots ten feet deep to reach the layer of water that sits above the calichi, almost none of those survived) and grind the old stumps.
Meanwhile the trees that escaped due to being on private property or a dirt road are still fine, drought or no.
So, I have all sorts of faith that the Federal gov't, being even more remote from reality, will do exactly as well.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Nobuddy on Saturday July 30 2022, @02:39PM (1 child)
Sounds more like corrupt privatizing did those trees in. The private company killed the trees, since they have the contract to plant new ones. Double dipping at the expense of the environment.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday July 30 2022, @02:50PM
Actually the idea behind topping is revenue stream -- once it's been done, the tree is permanently unstable and needs to be re-topped every 3 years or so, so it doesn't drop sucker-branches on hapless passersby. That revenue stream was what the tree service was after; they didn't expect the trees to just die on them. But since they did, here's an idea, and you can give us the contract! (At the time I lived in the area and got to be furious about this firsthand.)
So, yeah, corrupt privatization, or pretty much how everything in California is run nowadays. It accelerated the moment a law was passed encouraging construction and maintenance to go to private bidders. Uh, did no one notice that the same money meant to cover costs now has to ALSO cover profit margin? Where exactly do you expect that to come out of??
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday August 02 2022, @12:51AM
A good number of those forests originally grew in much moister conditions as the ice sheets retreated 12,000 years or so ago. We simply don't have the conditions available to regrow those forests. Whether by fire or clear cut, once gone they are not coming back. What grows rapidly in California and other arid and semi-arid places is scrub of various sorts, mostly consisting of plants that are resinous by nature to minimize water loss. Once ignited, they burn like tinder, continuing a cycle that prevents the climax forests of the past from reappearing.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AnonTechie on Friday July 29 2022, @10:21AM (3 children)
They could use something like this:
AirSeed Technologies, a start-up from Australia, is using artificial intelligence to find areas in need of some trees and firing seed pods from the sky with drones. The drones can plant over 40,000 seed pods per day, which the company argues is 25 times faster and 80% cheaper compared to the seed-planting methodologies currently being used.
https://airseedtech.com/ [airseedtech.com]
Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2022, @12:03PM (1 child)
Imagine enjoying a lovely picnic when a formation of drones rises above the treeline, shooting seeds at you while blasting The Ride of the Valkyries as you dive for cover!
(Score: 3, Funny) by driverless on Friday July 29 2022, @01:28PM
"It scares the hell out of the picnicers. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. The smell, you know that pine-seed smell, the whole hill. Smelled like…victory".
(Score: 3, Informative) by captain normal on Friday July 29 2022, @04:36PM
The seeds need water to sprout.
"It is easier to fool someone than it is to convince them that they have been fooled" Mark Twain
(Score: 2) by srobert on Friday July 29 2022, @03:08PM
All of the climate change issues are energy issues. Burning fossil fuel for energy releasing green house gases. We'll have to have an affordable alternative to that to solve any of these problems. The water issue in the west is getting dire. Imagine if we just had a very inexpensive alternative to producing energy. We could even desalinate sea water, treat it to match the water chemistry and pump it to refill the Colorado river. Perhaps foresting a portion of the world's desert areas could absorb a bit of the excess CO2. It's the cost of energy that makes such solutions prohibitive.