Should have taken warning, it's just\
People mourning\
Running, hiding, lost\
You can't find\
Find a place to go\
So it's...
Red skies at night\
Red skies at night\
Oh oh...
- "Red Skies," The Fixx
This is not good (from Astig Magaling's channel):
(from BOSSCARS channel):
This one has better music but is more unsettling:
This isn't Blade Runner. This is Real Life.
Right now, the West Coast is shrouded in the smoke of dozens of wild fires from Washington to Southern California, all part of an ongoing cycle of bad weather and hotter-than-normal conditions. To quote from Jane Hu at Slate:
In case you’re wondering if this is normal: It absolutely is not. Historically, fire season in California peaks in October, and Denver hasn’t gotten snow in September for two decades. Often, vacationers in San Francisco complain that the weather isn’t as warm as they were expecting for California—“the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco,” people like to say—but the Bay Area hit 100 degrees this weekend. And these aberrant patterns aren’t the only extreme weather we’ve seen across the U.S. lately: Hurricane Laura pummeled the Louisiana coast less than two weeks ago, and a couple of weeks before that, a derecho whipped through Iowa, where winds over 100 miles an hour damaged more than 800 buildings and up to 43 percent of the state’s soybean and corn crop, according to Radio Iowa...
Hurricane Laura was two weeks ago and there's barely any talk about the damage done there. The storm that hit Iowa was a freaky thing called a derecho and the scale of it has wrecked the state for years to come.
And we've already forgotten as a planet the devastating wildfires of Australia that opened this annus horribilis of 2020. We're talking an environmental disaster that will take decades for humanity to recover and that may wipe out the natural wildlife forever.
Back here in the U.S., all of this is taking place with a Republican-led federal government that has said little and doesn't seem to be doing anything to help with resolving the climate change woes that are fueling the extremes in national and global weather.
None of this is normal weather. None of this is getting fixed as long as the Republicans drag their feet on any action that might dare cut into CEO bonus pay.
And it's still red skies tonight on the West Coast...
1 comment:
The Creek Fire is three ridges over from here. 175,000 acres. The temps have cooled and I'm wearing a sweatshirt because of the thick smoke in the air, like a low cumulus cloud, so that's helping slow the spread of the fire, at least in our direction. So far.
Last weekend was strange. There was one day when it was as dark as night at noon. The air is barely breathable, and ash is raining down like a slow motion snowstorm from hell.
But everyone is nervously optimistic that we won't get actually burned by the monster growing just over the horizon to the east.
Yesterday, at China Peak, someone remembered that they store blasting caps up there for avalanche mitigation. Apparently only one of the storages burned and blew up, and nobody was hurt, then the firefighters were able to secure the other one before the fire got to it.
And let me rant about those firefighters for a minute: The covid that is raging through the California prisons has halted the usual use of prison labor to fight wildfires, so there is a major labor shortage being filled as well as possible by firefighters coming from all over the place. Into triple digit temperatures during the goddamn apocalypse to try and save our asses.
I fought on a couple of forest fires when I was young, so I know what these men and women are up against in the best of times, which these most certainly are not.
Then there are the beetles. Those would be the bark beetles that have moved into what was previously (before the drought) healthy timber and just killed around a third of the standing trees, making them kindling in a wildfire and treacherous as hell for the firefighters who have to work among them.
Fires have burned in the forests ever since there were forests, and brush fires are actually good for the health of the forests, as they clean out the understory, and put all of that nitrogen back into the soil. The larger trees tend to not burn in brush fires and thus the ecosystem renews itself.
Ever since people began moving into forested areas (like I am right now, for example) allowing brush fires has been deemed too risky, and fire suppression efforts have allowed the fuel load in the understory to accumulate to dangerous levels. Those loads burn hot enough to ignite the canopy into the superfires that are so common today. And those beetle-killed dry dead trees work as igniters in a brush fire to transition it into a canopy fire that can devour square miles.
Climate change is real. My dad worked for the US Forest Service for thirty years, and it was just not like this back then in the sixties and seventies.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
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