Filming Logs 2026 – From Niagara Falls through New England and down to the Banks
Forest mortality in the Northeast is beginning to be obvious to normal citizens. This means it is well established and far beyond normal mortality of a single individual out of 100 every few years. The curious thing about mortality in the Northeast however, is that it’s almost all from non-native insects and diseases, verus the West where it is almost all from native insects and diseases.
We started the trip in texas of course, and on a track rom Austin to Texarkana, widespread juniper (cedar)mortality was evident, from drought and likely from juniper bark beetles. This is quite surprising, but matches mortality rates east of the Plains in the more humid and wetter parts of North America. “Climate” doesn’t matter to trees. What matters is departure from their evolutionary boundaries. This is where climate change gets weird.
A little bit of warming doesn’t create a little bit more evaporation and drying, it creates a lit more. Evaporation from water, soils and plants increases nonlinearly with heat. In Austin, we have seen a 15 percent increase in rainfall over the last 30 years, but drought is now more prevalent that every before. Nonlinear evaporation is more meaningful to trees than heat. If it becomes markedly drier, trees cannot survive. They succumb to insect and disease that takes advantage of the s stress caused by less available water than when the tree species evolved into our current forests assemblages.
We drove like mad persons possessed until we reached northern Ohio and the shores of Lake Erie and exited the Interstate for the 5 along the immediate shoreline and more interesting observations. A local we talked to in Barcelona, NY, north of Erie PA, said the ice always comes very late these days and some years not at all. Back on the interstate to get to Niagara, Ash borers had done a fair job of eliminating ash. In Nigara, there was not much climate change evidence, but plenty of Las Vegas forcing! What a place! they light the falls now, from massive banks of color-changing spotlights on the Canadian Side. this is where all the Vegas-like development is; zoo-like, but the falls were cool as can be, from both sides of the border.
Across northern NY, tree mortality in lowland bogs was widespread and extreme, and most of our route on I90 seemed like it was line with bogs. There are a number of things causing the mortality beginning with drought stress, then inundation where drought damaged roots are infected with fungal disease that create mortality, and red pine scale too, with red pines common in saturated soil areas. We camped in upstate New York amidst scattered ash mortality, obvious enough, but more obvious were the low water levels. The drought was unprecedented in some areas and water levels in rivers looked like Texas’. You could lay down in them and hardly get wet. Very rare for these rivers with normally abundant and deep waters.
We looked at Whiteface Mountain in Lake Placid, and at Mount Washington in new Hampshire, vor arctic greening, where trees grow up in alpine tundra and stick up above the snowline where they absorb heat from the sun and create local warming that messes with the tundra. At moth places it was evident in that treeline forests had begun to grow taller. At Acadia National Park in Maine last year, we observed wholesale trees growing on top of Cadillac Mountain where none grew in our old climate. This arctic greening effect is particularly troublesome globally because of the large amount of arctic tundra now being affected and creating what is known as the albedo feedback, where the dark green of conifer needles absorb up to 90 percent of the sun’s energy and change it into heat, while snow reflect up to 90 percent harmlessly back into space.
Forest mortality was the same across Vermont and New Hampshire, with the exception that the more mountainous areas had less low wetlands. To compensate, high altitude firs were decimated by woolly adelgid and a range in southern Vermont told us that a new disease, a poplar canker, would likely create mass mortality among poplar in a few years.
All across northern new England, folks constantly repeated that the snow does not stay on the ground between snowstorms any longer. Another interesting observation: the deniers seemed to have evaporated in the heat. Admittedly, our audience is a little biased as we generally hang around at campgrounds with the outdoor crowd that is more tuned to the natural world. But still, to have zero deniers make rude remarks across a 6,000 mile journey in the U.S. northeast, seems quite meaningful to me.
We took the Icemelter down Fifth Avenue this trip – what a hoot!
We spent a few days with Cousin and Aunt on the Chesapeake. No change from last year, minor ash and pine mortality, and salt water poisoning here and there along the shore. One day we scooted down to Historic Jamestown near Williamsburg, on the James river during a high King Tide and rain. This is a national historic park and it was closed due to high water – 4 to 5 feet above normal. The flood had inundated the digs there, and sea level rise in general has been wreaking havoc on the archeological resources as salt water intrudes into area that were once in the fresh water table.
Last stop was the Outer Banks where we repeated observations at Rodanthe and new ones at Buxton. It was in the middle of a King Tide pulse and water was over The 12 on Pea Island. Rodanthe had been experiencing a depositional event this King Tide as many of the severe erosion areas beneath remaining beach houses had filled back up with sand, far above the normal level, blocking staircases and doors. Still, two more houses had fallen at Rodanthe. It happens, currents and storm winds mean a lot to whether an event is erosional or depositional.
Buxton has had it bad this year. The concept that the Banks are always moving and the beach erosion disaster is not new, is highly inaccurate. Yale Climate 360 tells us that about 50 homes were lost between 1970 and 2022, mostly during hurricanes. The National Park Service says that 27 have gone down from 2020 to today, and that in 2025, 16 were lost in September and October with no hurricane strikes. The Banks erosion is very modest without sea level rise. Long-shore currents erode a bit here and there and then they shift and sand accretes, then hurricanes wreak havoc. This havoc is very rapidly restored naturally though, at the Banks with little meaningful sea level rise. From 1900 to 1990, the global sea level rise rate was 1.2 to 1.7 mm per year. By 2000 it was 2 mm per year. By 2010, 2.5. By 2016, 3.4 mm per year and in 2025 ot 4 mm per year but at the Banks, because of slowing of the Gulf Stream, the rise rate is 10 mm per year. The second image of this post is a graphic from the US Global Change Research Program showing that all of The Banks are already beyond the threshold of fragmentation and collapse. It’s only a matter of time now, unless we rapidly restore our climate with greenhouse gas removal and emergency temporary cooling, remembering that future emission reductions only limit future warming.
One other observation on the trip back. We visited another couple of aunts in Georgia and took a more southerly route home. Constant mortality, of ash and bark beetle origin, was evident along the interstates. It wasn’t obvious of its own right, but if asked to look, normal citizens saw and questioned. To me, this last circumnavigation of the US we have been performing for nearly two decades now, was extremely revealing in the amount of degradation our world’s forests are currently experiencing. With these rates, it is likely that because forests themselves are relatively slow absorbers of greenhouse gases, that most forests globally have now flipped from sequestration to emissions. The literature backs this up. See the post below on how our planet’s biosphere’s perpetually increasing ability to absorb carbon has now reversed to a decline, based on publishing in the Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society.