Earlier this year there was a landslide that blocked the Chilcotin River. The land slid because wildfires in 2016 killed all the trees on the steep slopes beside the river. Without the trees and their roots to stabilize the soil, it slipped.
The first disaster happened 8 years ago. But then the second disaster happened this year. Eight years is not enough time for a forest, to reestablish. And this is going to become increasingly a problem.
As climate change increases the severity and crucially the frequency of dangerous weather events, the time between events will become shorter and shorter. In the case of serious damage to woodlands that period will rapidly become too short for any recovery to ever occur.
The trees that were downed in North Carolina and Tennessee by Helene, they might have a chance to regrow before they are exposed to a similar event, but as the the climate worsens the odds of local ecosystems having time to recover will just keep getting worse.
We should at least be aware that areas that get burned over or wiped by floods, they are very likely never to get a chance to recover in the next several decades, being hit over and over by similar events.
And while to some extent the consequences of our worse-than-no-progress on mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions so far has baked in a certain degree of future peril, there is no time like the present to start doing something effective to actually replace the largest part of our fossil-fuel dependence with an actual source of large quantities of low-carbon energy.
