[BartSimpson]

llama66 llama66:

apocalyptic. But I do think that President Trump should wait until the fires are out and dead buried before casting blame.

Why? I've been casting blame since before the last catastrophic fire in Santa Rosa.

And now forty-plus people are dead because dumbshit enviroweenies don't want the forests cleaned up.

[llama66]

Because it's not helping. Get the fires out, bury the dead, begin rebuilding, then if a motherfucker needs to go under a bus, then cast the blame, and actually make it worthwhile... charge them with negligence or some shit. but to me, right now this is more serious threat than the zombie migrant horde that's shambling through Mexico right now... Trump better be allocating some federal resources to assist, I should think Canada and other nations will fire fighters if we haven't already.

[xerxes]

The Long Night

[xerxes]

Also:

What Trump gets wrong about wildfires, by a fire scientist

$1:

You cannot possibly understand what it means to live with the risk of wildfire until you have to do so.

I’m a fire scientist and have spent most of my adult life in the flammable south-west. At the start of the fire season, you pack up the things in your house you cannot replace and stage them so they are ready to be thrown into the car. You make a plan for your family and your pets. You identify escape routes and put together a bag with clothing and you spend the summer alert to smoke, radio reports and evacuation notices.

Unfortunately, Donald Trump is one of those who does not understand wildfire. In a tweet, Trump blamed “poor forest management” in California for the devastating conflagrations currently burning in the state, and he threatened to withhold federal aid as if in punishment for this negligence.

But that is not what’s going on. For one thing, a large portion of the area burning is not forest.

Trump probably has in mind how a century of putting out wildfires in the American west has caused forests to grow dense with trees, making large, hot fires more common than they once were. This is not the predominant cause, however, of the fires currently making the news. To comprehend what is currently taking place in California, you have to comprehend how it has historically burned – and the vast changes now occurring across the landscape.

Fire is an integral part of California ecosystems because it consumes dead vegetation, creates space for new plant growth, and helps limit the density of vegetation. It affects almost every vegetated part of the state, from the conifer forests of the Sierra Nevada mountains to the oak woodlands lower down and, in the valleys, the grasslands and chaparral.

The severity of these fires is moderated by rain and snowfall. California’s Mediterranean climate means that the state receives heavy precipitation for only a few short months in the winter, and this is all that the vegetation has to tide it over until the winter storms begin the next year. As the temperature increases in spring and summer and plants use up the water stored in the soil, the amount of water held in plants decreases, making them more flammable. Similar to fire wood, the drier it is, the easier it burns.

Climate change is causing warmer temperatures, which dry out vegetation more. It is also causing winter precipitation to fall over a shorter period and the length of the fire season is increasing. Vegetation in California is increasingly primed for fire.

So if these are not classic forest fires, as Trump suggested, what are they? Down south in the Woolsey fire, in the Malibu area, it is actually grass and shrubs that are burning. The native chaparral shrublands are dominated by shrub species that evolved with fires occurring every several decades to every century or so. Human activity has shortened the time between fires, however, which kills native chaparral species before they can produce seeds. These frequent fires also allow non-native grasses to invade. Unlike shrubs, such grasses are capable of burning nearly every year and still recovering. This mix of invasive grasses and chaparral is what is fueling the Woolsey fire.

Up north, in the Camp fire, it is grass, brush and timber. Here another wildfire factor comes into focus: human development patterns. We like to live in beautiful places and oftentimes this includes building our homes and communities among the flammable vegetation. Fire hazard is very high across large portions of the state where building in forests and shrublands is common. In these flammable environments, when a wildfire occurs and buildings begin to burn, vegetation can become irrelevant. This is due to the fact that buildings, once ignited, are an incredible source of heat that can spread fire to neighboring buildings.

Seeing as fire is an important natural process in many of California’s ecosystems, from grasslands to forests, it makes sense that in many of these ecosystems, the most effective tool for managing the risks to society from wildfire is more fire. Prescribed fires, which are planned fires lit by managers, are conducted during much more benign weather than the warm, dry and windy conditions that are driving the current flames. Prescribed fires help reduce the buildup of vegetation and break up the continuity of these fuels across the landscape. Extreme weather will continue to occur, but at least when vegetation is more variable, it acts as an impediment to fires spreading rapidly.

Earlier this year, Donald Trump tweeted that more “forest clearing” was needed to stop destructive forest fires. In fact, clearcutting is not going to solve the wildfire problem in forests either. Cutting trees won’t stop wildfires from occurring where there are no trees. We cannot cut our way out of this problem.

Matthew Hurteau is an associate professor in the department of biology at the University of New Mexico

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/13/donald-trump-wildfires-science-forest-management

And furthermore:

$1:

Speaking for the emergency services personnel on the ground, the president of the California Professional Firefighters union commented: “Wildfires are sparked and spread not only in forested areas but in populated areas and open fields fuelled by parched vegetation, high winds, low humidity and geography.

“Moreover, nearly 60 per cent of California forests are under federal management, and another two-thirds under private control. It is the federal government that has chosen to divert resources away from forest management, not California,” Brian K Rice said.

[BeaverFever]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

llama66 llama66:

apocalyptic. But I do think that President Trump should wait until the fires are out and dead buried before casting blame.

Why? I've been casting blame since before the last catastrophic fire in Santa Rosa.

And now forty-plus people are dead because dumbshit enviroweenies don't want the forests cleaned up.

This is a lie. California isn’t doing anything different than anyone else in the USA or Canada ir anywhere else. Also I understand that most of the land burning is federally or privately managed and is not even forest but brush. Just more of Trumps politically motivated fact-free attacks Lies and ignorance.

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/amp.theguar ... management

[Strutz]

Wow Bart.

Thanks for sharing your experience there with us. Good that you and others are doing what you can to assist the many people directly affected by this devastation.


I have a colleague who has family in southern California that have been evacuated from their homes. At least they are safe at a temp shelter area.

[bootlegga]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

The smoke is so bad at my office right now that we can't even see the outlines of the buildings downtown...just about a mile from here.

Sounds similar to what Edmonton dealt with this summer.



If Sacramento looks anything like this, stay inside as much as possible, or even better, get yourself an N95 mask to filter out the particulates in the air.

I got a lung infection from breathing that air that lasted a month and had me breathing like an asthmatic.

[BartSimpson]

BeaverFever BeaverFever:

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

llama66 llama66:

apocalyptic. But I do think that President Trump should wait until the fires are out and dead buried before casting blame.

Why? I've been casting blame since before the last catastrophic fire in Santa Rosa.

And now forty-plus people are dead because dumbshit enviroweenies don't want the forests cleaned up.

This is a lie.

Here's an article from the very liberal San Francisco Chronicle that says the same thing I said. The article is from October 14, 2018. A few weeks ago.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/art ... 301265.php

$1:

Dear California Trees,

When will you stand up and take responsibility for all the damage you do to this state?

It’s not just the blossoms that you jacarandas use to stain Californians’ cars, or the rats you palms harbor. It’s not even that your out-of-control-fires foul California’s air, destroy homes and drain the state budget.

No, what most upsets me is that, instead of being accountable for the trouble you cause, you leave us humans to solve your problems.

You trees get away with this irresponsibility because you have millions of human apologists who engage in a vast conspiracy of blame-shifting. We are told that the damage trees do is really the fault of environmentalists who make it hard to cull you, or loggers who cut down too many of you, or utilities who don’t keep you away from power lines, or government agencies who don’t manage you, or rural homeowners who live among you.

Your defenders even rail against human overpopulation! That’s pretty rich, since there are 4 billion live trees in California — 100 times more than the mere 40 million people who live under you.

To your credit, you pull your weight in some ways: You store carbon, helping limit climate change. You collect and clean the snowpack and watersheds that California humans depend on for water.

But, lately, trees, your job performance has slipped.

Why? It starts with your exploitation of human fire-suppression policies in order to grow far too great in number. While humans did you the favors of reducing our birth rate and giving up newspapers, you grew everywhere, creating dangerously dense forests with smaller, weaker trees.

Such overcrowded forests are more vulnerable to drought and diseases. Exhibit A is the drought and the infestations of bark beetles that caused an estimated 129 million California trees to drop dead between 2010 and 2017.

Did you responsibly clean up your dead? No. Instead, deceased trees fell onto buildings, roads and power lines, and fueled apocalyptic fires across vast swaths of the state. These mega-fires badly lowered that air and water quality you trees are supposed to protect.

To reverse these trends, your forests must be thinned, with smaller or diseased trees being removed so that larger healthy trees survive. This is hard work, because you trees tend to die in inaccessible places. But do you tax yourselves to help with this expensive thinning work? No, just like California’s human taxpayers, you seem to think that someone else will pay to restore the forests.

Your lack of leadership has created a void that has been filled by polarized human politics. It’s sad. Once, you trees — especially the great coastal redwoods and the signature sequoias like General Sherman — were great unifiers. But today you just fuel the partisan fires. When Gov. Jerry Brown proposed regulatory changes to speed up forest thinning, he got mostly grief, from environmental and logging interests alike.

You trees even gave an opening to the political arsonist in the White House, who blamed environmental lawsuits for fires. This was dishonest scapegoating, because many of our tree problems are on federal lands that his government doesn’t manage adequately.

I’ve even seen commentary about state agencies not moving fast enough to address tree problems. But years ago, Gov. Brown convened a Tree Mortality Task Force that included every tree stakeholder except the trees themselves. Without their work, the tree situation in California would be even worse. They might have accomplished more if you trees had demanded a much greater budget allocation for yourselves, but you remained quiet.

You can’t play shy anymore. California’s tree problems are too big for humans. For us to solve your crisis, we’d have to engage in well-funded long-term collaborations to restore and manage forest lands, and embrace new approaches to fire prevention. Such farsighted governance has been impossible for California even when it comes to housing ourselves or educating our own children, so it’s unlikely we’ll get our act together to save you trees.

So if you California trees want to solve your problems, you will have to do the work yourselves.

Also, this is what you have to go through to get permission to remove dead trees on your own land in California:

http://www.fire.ca.gov/resource_mgt/res ... iewprocess

You can expect to spend as much as $100,000 to get permission to clear dead trees on a large property because each tree must be individually assessed by a licensed arborist.

Therefore few people ever bother with the application and few people bother with removing the trees...it's too costly.

Oh, and fuck you very much for calling me a liar.

[BartSimpson]

48 people confirmed dead now.

The death toll is still expected to top 100 in the official numbers and 200 in the unofficial numbers which will include missing people who will never be found and illegal aliens who were working in remote marijuana farms in the area.

[PluggyRug]

Interesting article on California's Eucalyptus problem.

https://www.kqed.org/science/4209/eucal ... ve-species

[BartSimpson]

Here's our air quality for today.

http://www.sparetheair.com/aqmaps.cfm

I'm in a supposedly advanced building and right now my eyes are burning and my sinuses are going crazy.

Can't see downtown right now...a Chinese coworker says this is still better than Beijing.

[llama66]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

Here's our air quality for today.

http://www.sparetheair.com/aqmaps.cfm

I'm in a supposedly advanced building and right now my eyes are burning and my sinuses are going crazy.

Can't see downtown right now...a Chinese coworker says this is still better than Beijing.

Quit bitching, it'll put put hair in your chest (and lungs)... make you a real man.

[BartSimpson]

Right now the real man wishes he had a real respirator!

[llama66]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

Right now the real man wishes he had a real respirator!

Fuck, I hate the smoke. Try to get a N-95 or a R-95 mask (or a fullface H-6105 mask and Tyvek coveralls, if you want to be dramatic), if you can... They're rated for the shit you're trying to breathe.

[DrCaleb]

llama66 llama66:

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

Right now the real man wishes he had a real respirator!

Fuck, I hate the smoke. Try to get a N-95 or a R-95 mask (or a fullface H-6105 mask and Tyvek coveralls, if you want to be dramatic), if you can... They're rated for the shit you're trying to breathe.

^^^

After the last couple of summers we've had, these things are sadly needed.

Anything is better than breathing straight air, even in a climate controlled building.