Like pumpkin spice season, I’m back
I don’t actually consume PSLs (AKA pumpkin spice lattes) as I am allergic to an important ingredient. But y’all know it is pumpkin spice season again. Or did it ever leave?
Hello, world.
It’s been a bit. Since I last posted a few things have changed. I moved to California (west coast is best coast), lost my mother, was the rock for my family, and was promoted at work. Now I find myself in a time where many would rather burn the place down around them than to watch it inevitably change.
Seems like a good time to start writing about science again. On my own time. (Disclaimer: the thoughts and opinions expressed here are mine and are not necessarily shared by my employer, NASA, and/or the U.S. Government. So help me God.)
Now for a partial list of “that’s obvious, but bears repeating”:
Science, the field with the capital “S” and not just the subject you learned at school, is not doing too well. Turns out, enough folks would rather hitch their wagons to magical thinking than to hear (what are at times cold, hard) truths. It will remain a difficult season to be a scientist, to want science-based actionable knowledge, when a solid minority of folks respond to solid data, observations, and well thought-out communication on climate change, wildfire mitigation, water resource strategies, considerations for animals and the land, etc. with “Lie to me.”
Everyone knows how to code, but few know how to make computing systems work efficiently. You are not special or smart if you can code. Hell, hallucinating LLMs can code correctly at least 60% of the time. And yet, I am still being asked to perform data calls in Excel to correct the horrendous output of natural language processing. This is why I am not on the AI hype anything: “Don’t piss on my shoes and tell me it’s rainin’.”
There is really no choice but to keep doing the science. The work continues, the problems persist. The knowledge is a good in of itself. Educating our children and our fellow human beings is one true catalyst for improvement in a world that often seems to be “enshittifying”. My mother, who the Lord took home in May 2024, spent her adult career trying to improve access to vocational and higher education for people living in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky. She originally trained to work with secondary (think: middle school and high school) students, but quickly changed career objectives when she realized that she couldn’t help her classroom kids if she didn’t improve the standing of their families first. And that meant educating the parents. We scientists can learn from that kind of dedication and awareness - for it is the hard work in the trenches that often improves the lives of so many. Looking forward to catching up with all y’all in the foxholes. ;)
The Dixie Fire in Plumas County and Butte County produces a pyrocumulus (PyroCb) cloud in summer 2021. PyroCbs form when smoke and strong winds caused by a wildfire meet moisture in the atmosphere, and punch above the tropopause . Image by Frank Schulenburg - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=107802721
Well, let me leave you with some science and a thought.
A group from the University of Utah, U.S. Forest Service, and the UC Berkeley published a really important study on wildfire risks for private timber lands this past week (a shout out to the first author, Jacob Levine, who led this work as a NSF-funded post doc). It finds that the dense and uniform structures often lead to higher ladder fuels (which fires like to climb) that make wildfires more severe during extreme fire weather events. Their focus was on northern California, specifically the Sierra Nevada mountain range where fires like the Dixie Fire (which burned more than 960,000 acres/~389,000 hectares) were at times fueled by private timberlands. But this finding has huge implications for industrial forests in Canada, the Nordics (specifically Finland), and parts of Siberia, where even stand age is a common practice to increase timber management and harvesting efficiencies and profit. And where increased heat and drought have driven extreme fire seasons in the pan-boreal, like the past three fire seasons in Canada. The key takeaway: Private forests, especially those managed for timber, need to be viewed as potential tinderboxes and managed as such. Prescribed and cultural burning, as well as mechanical fuel treatments, on public lands will not cut it - private timber owners have to start reducing fire risk now.