Water, water, everywhere, but not a drop for trees to drink.To better understand the long-term impact of climate change, it is useful to understand how life has adapted to the conditions that have existed where they have lived for hundreds or even thousands of years.
Since wildfire constitutes the greatest present threat to North American mining operations, we importantly should examine the situation of our conifer forests in which many in the West live and work. A conifer, like pine, fir, or cedar lose water through their leaves that we call needles in the process of making food or photosynthesis. The tree must replace this moisture or suffer vulnerability to disease, insect attack, along with the potential fire threat of the drying needles themselves. Just as important is that the moisture is available at times when the plant can take it up and use it.
However, the need to maintain a water balance is common for all plants, and those other plants, native grasses and herbs will also fail to prosper or reproduce. So, we get it. Give a forest less water than before and the plants living there now will die out. Now here’s the rub, plants that have adapted to low moisture regimes elsewhere don’t have legs. They can’t just pick up and move. Plant species do spread but only slowly by seed dispersal and it could take hundreds of years before dry-country chaparral establishes itself where pines once stood, and in the meanwhile the soil is now open to … now get this … excessive rainfall while lacking the native plant community that previously stabilized the soil.
If this trend establishes itself and continues, theoretically the soil in these previously forested areas will become sterile and devoid of organic material and require hundreds of years to reach a climax vegetation once more. On a more immediate concern are of course hydrophobic soils in fire scars. Megafires are becoming a year-around feature in the West, and a disaster that will spread across Canada’s vast northern forest.
So, what’s all this got to do with Nevada Copper? Nothing, not a damned thing. The nearest pine tree is twenty miles away up in isolated mountain canyon. We don’t even have grass growing on most of the desert. If we were to get a “range fire”, and they do sometime happen up north in sagebrush country– the flames are so low and the fire poor on fuel they usually pose no threat to people, buildings, or whatever organisms might exist in our poor soil.
Actually, PH demonstrates the best bet, that I know of against the deleterious effects of extreme weather events. Nevada Copper’s greatestenvironmental risk IMO is a spring runoff flashflood that potentially could cut road traffic to the railhead, but would never reach the mine.
IMO those who take the time to learn about this phenomenon and adjust their investment criteria accordingly will benefit greatly by avoiding costly loss in the future.
b.