interesting article regarding the fires...

They Know How to Prevent Megafires. Why Won’t Anybody Listen?

This is a story about frustration, about watching the West burn when you fully understand why it’s burning — and understand why it did not need to be this bad.
The pattern is a form of insanity: We keep doing overzealous fire suppression across California landscapes where the fire poses little risk to people and structures. As a result, wildland fuels keep building up. At the same time, the climate grows hotter and drier. Then, boom: the inevitable. The wind blows down a power line, or lightning strikes dry grass, and an inferno ensues. This week we’ve seen both the second- and third-largest fires in California history. “The fire community, the progressives, are almost in a state of panic,” Ingalsbee said. There’s only one solution, the one we know yet still avoid. “We need to get good fire on the ground and whittle down some of that fuel load.”


Yes, there’s been talk across the U.S. Forest Service and California state agencies about doing more prescribed burns and managed burns. The point of that “good fire” would be to create a black-and-green checkerboard across the state. The black burned parcels would then provide a series of dampers and dead ends to keep the fire intensity lower when flames spark in hot, dry conditions, as they did this past week. But we’ve had far too little “good fire,” as the Cassandras call it. Too little purposeful, healthy fire. Too few acres intentionally burned or corralled by certified “burn bosses” (yes, that’s the official term in the California Resources Code) to keep communities safe in weeks like this.

Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres. The state passed a few new laws in 2018 designed to facilitate more intentional burning. But few are optimistic this, alone, will lead to significant change. We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire.

Here in Bastrop County, the authorities regularly do 'controlled burns' to manage the brush. The worst fire, in 2011, came during a severe drought - no outdoor burning, period - and unusually high winds. Caused by a tree or trees falling on a power line - Asplundh recently paid $20 million+ to settle a lawsuit.

BUT, property owners in CA and OR have voted against fire mitigation practices over and over again. And much of the land on fire now is Federally-owned. Hmmm...
c.

interesting article regarding the fires...

They Know How to Prevent Megafires. Why Won’t Anybody Listen?

interesting article regarding the fires...

They Know How to Prevent Megafires. Why Won’t Anybody Listen?

This is a story about frustration, about watching the West burn when you fully understand why it’s burning — and understand why it did not need to be this bad.
The pattern is a form of insanity: We keep doing overzealous fire suppression across California landscapes where the fire poses little risk to people and structures. As a result, wildland fuels keep building up. At the same time, the climate grows hotter and drier. Then, boom: the inevitable. The wind blows down a power line, or lightning strikes dry grass, and an inferno ensues. This week we’ve seen both the second- and third-largest fires in California history. “The fire community, the progressives, are almost in a state of panic,” Ingalsbee said. There’s only one solution, the one we know yet still avoid. “We need to get good fire on the ground and whittle down some of that fuel load.”


Yes, there’s been talk across the U.S. Forest Service and California state agencies about doing more prescribed burns and managed burns. The point of that “good fire” would be to create a black-and-green checkerboard across the state. The black burned parcels would then provide a series of dampers and dead ends to keep the fire intensity lower when flames spark in hot, dry conditions, as they did this past week. But we’ve had far too little “good fire,” as the Cassandras call it. Too little purposeful, healthy fire. Too few acres intentionally burned or corralled by certified “burn bosses” (yes, that’s the official term in the California Resources Code) to keep communities safe in weeks like this.

Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres. The state passed a few new laws in 2018 designed to facilitate more intentional burning. But few are optimistic this, alone, will lead to significant change. We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire.

 miamizsun wrote:
 

Yeah we're almost surrounded - all ablaze but the West and South. But the wind has really died down and, locally, we have about 33% humidity overnight.  I'm counting on them putting what few resources they have on saving Oroville.  Dozers, air support, boots on the ground. We're in the foothills, not in the town proper but I still think  our little pocket neighborhood will be spared.

i'm seeing a sw wind with the main body of flames to the ne of you

 miamizsun wrote:
 

It's tough with all the animals. I can't figure out how to transport all the birds let alone hawks (including a bunch of falconry gear, perches, frozen quail, etc) and a few cats. Plus an extremely autistic roommate. I don't know what hell is going on. Fortunately the weather is favoring us and they haven't cut our power. Tomorrow I have to go out of town. I hope they let me back in. It's a bleedin'  nightmare... but it will be OK. 

 miamizsun wrote:
 

It's tough with all the animals. I can't figure out how to transport all the birds let alone hawks (including a bunch of falconry gear, perches, frozen quail, etc) and a few cats. Plus an extremely autistic roommate. I don't know what hell is going on. Fortunately the weather is favoring us and they haven't cut our power. Tomorrow I have to go out of town. I hope they let me back in. It's a bleedin'  nightmare... but it will be OK. 

yo manbird make sure you've got your bug out gear ready

essential stuff

seriously

yo manbird make sure you've got your bug out gear ready

essential stuff

seriously

 haresfur wrote:
 


You are obviously not reading what I have been posting. I have only been talking about the earth's magnetic field, not the sun's.

No worries though. There is no point to move forward with as you are 100% sure that CO² is the only factor responsible for both Global Warming and Climate Change and is 100% settled science.

Your mind is made up and totally closed to any possibility of other factors that could have an influence.

So if we do lower the amount of CO² in the earth's atmosphere we must watch out for the danger of triggering an ice age, which would be much more devastating than warming.

Your unsolicited interjections into ongoing conversations always raise the level of discourse.  By the way, degrees do not measure linear distance.  Just saying ...

 haresfur wrote:
 


islander wrote:So Haresfur is going to fly into a rage (We can speculate why, but it's really impossible to tell) and search you out. He's going to lash you to a chair and then proceed to use his amazing ambidextrous skills and two sets of garden sheers to cut off the end of your fingernail one one hand, and your whole finger on the other hand. We are all outside the door and ready to burst in and stop him. But since he has such skill we can probably only grab one of his arms. Would you prefer we stop the fingernail side, or the finger side? They are pretty much the same, just different by a matter of degrees right? Maybe we should just debate it for a while, since something is probably going to happen anyway.

and then you wrote:

Cut him at the knuckle, it's a fair compromise.

 kurtster wrote:
 
Just pointing out that you aren't the only one coming up with random bizarre concepts that have no bearing on reality. You say the earth's magnetic field has been changing but there is no scientific mechanism which relates the changes to climate. The timescale isn't even the same with the magnetic pole motion only increasing rapidly in the past few years. My point, as I said below, which you apparently didn't read - you need to come up with a mechanism where greenhouse gases are not responsible given the scientific understanding of how and why they act to warm the planet. 

The thought that stopping adding to the CO2 released to the atmosphere will spin us into an ice age is pretty hilarious. Maybe you should read up on global geochemical cycles and residence times. Tell you what, leave the hydrocarbons in the ground and if, in a few hundred years, the world, starts heading into an ice age, feel free to start burning them again.

On the other hand your ice age idea does seem to indicate that you admit that greenhouse gases are causing significant global climate change. So I suppose that's a start.

 haresfur wrote:
 


You are obviously not reading what I have been posting. I have only been talking about the earth's magnetic field, not the sun's.

No worries though. There is no point to move forward with as you are 100% sure that CO² is the only factor responsible for both Global Warming and Climate Change and is 100% settled science.

Your mind is made up and totally closed to any possibility of other factors that could have an influence.

So if we do lower the amount of CO² in the earth's atmosphere we must watch out for the danger of triggering an ice age, which would be much more devastating than warming.

So Haresfur is going to fly into a rage (We can speculate why, but it's really impossible to tell) and search you out. He's going to lash you to a chair and then proceed to use his amazing ambidextrous skills and two sets of  garden sheers to cut off the end of your fingernail  one one hand, and your whole finger on the other hand.  We are all outside the door and ready to burst in and stop him. But since he has such skill we can probably only grab one of his arms. Would you prefer we stop the fingernail side, or the finger side?  They are pretty much the same, just different by a matter of degrees right?  Maybe we should just debate it for a while, since something is probably going to happen anyway.