Whenever there is a massive outbreak of tornadoes in areas where they were previously rare, or a huge rain-heavy storm brings catastrophic flooding to cities along the coast, or record temperatures make formerly cool areas intolerable, Republicans always have the same answer—that’s not the climate crisis. That’s just weather.
It’s always possible to find someone willing to step in front of network cameras and proclaim that “you can’t pin any individual event on climate change.” That’s also true of massive wildfires that destroy homes, devastate towns, and leave thousands of square miles reduced to ashes.
Right now, the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic are experiencing a sky that looks as if it was borrowed from some dystopian future. That’s because it is. This is the dystopian future, where people keep saying, “It’s just the weather.” What’s filling the skies is hubris as much as woodsmoke, the visible expression of our passivity in response to an existential crisis.
The hardwood forest along the Appalachian Mountains is one of the most biodiverse environments in the world, filled with rare animals, unique plants, and hundreds of tiny microenvironments that preserve everything from giant salamanders to gorgeous wildflowers. The Appalachians gained that biodiversity due to climate change.
When glaciers plunged down from the north during the last ice age, trees, animals, and whole ecosystems retreated down the spine of the mountains, moving south as the world cooled. When the world warmed again, many of those ecosystems moved up the hills, keeping cool as a hotter world nipped at their heels. Repeat that cycle over millions of years, add in plenty of nooks and crannies to create almost infinite microclimates, stir well. Wait.
The Appalachian forests we have today are nothing like they were just two hundred years ago. Shorn of their massive chestnuts, deprived of the stately elms, tortured by acid rain, with hundreds of peaks flattened by mining, they are a shadow of what was. And they are still pretty damn magnificent.
But all that diversity, all those plants and animals that have been carried south, and north, and up, and down on the tides of the world’s changing climate, are unlikely to survive the next few decades. Because this climate change doesn’t run at the slow, multi-generational speed of advancing glaciers or shifting rains. This is a climate crisis, racing along at a breakneck gallop.
When the climate changes, forests relocate over generations—long, slow tree generations. The individual trees can’t pack up and move. In the face of rising temperatures and shifting rainfall, forests become stressed. Stressed forests have more debris. More dead branches. More standing deadwood. Stressed forests burn.
That’s what people in the northeast are inhaling this week, the soot of forests who couldn’t respond fast enough to deal with what we’ve put them through. The remains of trees who couldn’t get away.
That’s what happened in Australia in 2020.
It’s what happened in California in 2021.
It’s what is happening in Canada right now, driving smoke toward New York and other towns and cities in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic.
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Over the last decade, such fires have happened over and over again. The ones in California have been highly visible. The ones in places like Siberia which have raged over the last several years, and which are burning again this year, or the fires that burned across 4 million square kilometers of Africa last year, get much less time on American TV. The huge fires burning across Canada would have evaded notice, except that they’re dumping their smoke across the George Washington Bridge and smelling up the National Mall.
As the rising level of CO2 and the rising temperatures put stress on the forests, the forests burn. These burning forests release more CO2 into the atmosphere. In a stable environment, those forests would gradually grow back, absorbing that carbon as they did. But even then, that reabsorption of carbon takes place over decades.
We don’t have decades. We don’t have a stable environment. Some of those forests will grow back weaker and even more prone to fire because the trees will be stressed during their growth. Some of those forests simply won’t grow back, because the conditions in those locations no longer support the growth of the same trees that were there in the past.
In some of these areas, the result of the fires will be the same as in the wake of slash-and-burn agriculture everywhere it has been practiced—soil erosion, waterways choked with sediment, and hillsides eroding without the plants that held the soil in place. The season of wildfires will be followed by seasons of mudslides, fishkills, and collapsing ecosystems.
Eventually, these forests will stop burning. Because they’ll stop being forests.
It’s just one part of what it means to be in a climate crisis. But it’s a highly visible signal of just how serious things have become—and just how much media outlets are willing to deny or ignore.
