Massive wildfires rage in California

[NorthStar]

Some videos are people driving to escape the fires; the intensity is palpable.
One video is a car driving by and filming all the cars left on the side of the road because people had to flee by foot.
I watched several reportages today and yesterday and it is devastating; five people were found inside a car.
A journalist who reported the news about the shooting recently have to flee her home.
This is a terrible year for fires in California.

My prayers go to all the families and friends of the victims who lost their loved ones.

 

[Steve Williams]

It’s devastating here in Southern California watching the carnage of people’s homes and possessions. The Santa Winds were whipping up the frenzy and countless homes have been lost. It is always sad to see something like this. Plus these are homes and properties of huge value. I have a friend who lives on 5 acres just above Zuma Beach that probably was worth well oiver $10 M. His home was totaled. Apparently Lady Gaga has a house down the street from him. Hers also was destroyed Here is the photo taken from the beach looking up at their home burning

 

[Number9]

Many of the flights into SFO are delayed up to 3 hours due to the smoke filled skies. Would be guests at a wedding I am attending in Morgan Hills tonight are stuck dealing with the devastating consequences of the fires.

 

[DaveyF]

These fires are devastatingly bad! Unfortunately, with all of the immense amounts of dead brush that we see in California these days, it doesn't really come as much of a surprise. What concerns me is how these fires started in the first place....Arson, downed power lines, something else??

 

[NorthStar]

Or it could be as simple as a small lightning bolt, or a spark from a rock driven by a car.
It's a very dry year. Where I live on the island we had plenty of fires too this summer. One of them was just within few miles, the air quality was the worst ever and it lasted three weeks.
There were fires in Portugal, in Northern Europe. There were fires everywhere this last summer.
California is a hot dry area.

 

[cjfrbw]

It would be easy to believe eco-terrorism, since these fires are so much more regular and fierce compared to what they used to be (already regular features of Cali life). However, the 'authorities' never want to deem it such for whatever reason.

I've been breathing the smoke in Santa Cruz, and it hurts, baby! Snot, sneeze, hachooo!

 

[Folsom]

Cj, it is much more complicated than that.

 

[cjfrbw]

Cj, it is much more complicated than that.

I'm sure it is, but since the last several years, three or more months of the year with smoke when I don't remember so much from the past tickles my conspiracy cortex.

 

[BlueFox]

It is terrible this year, has been for the last few years, and most likely will get worse each year in the future. I do expect water rationing to be reimposed this year, and probably made permanent. I’m glad Global Warming is a hoax. I hate to see what will happen if it weren’t.

 

[NorthStar]

Steve, that picture above is scary, the sky is black, a tall orange flame, and from seeing the cars below it looks like it's daytime. It's apocalyptic looking.

 

[Ron Resnick]

Government’s primary function is to provide for the local security of citizens’ homes, garbage pick-up, roads and street repair. Surely protection from annihilation from wildfires is part of this fundamental governmental purpose and obligation.

Why is such a tiny part (less than 1%) of the State of California’s annual budget of $200 billion spent on preparing for and defending against the completely known and predictable threat of wildfires?

 

[the sound of Tao]

100% Ron,
Protecting life and property should be a fundamental priority for local, state and federal governments. One clear challenge for mitigation in climate change is the proposed ongoing increasing risk of wildfires in the fire cycle. Australia faces a similarly phenomenal challenge.

If there is no respite for our emergency agencies and they face more and more frequent back to back droughts, storms and deluge the threat we will exhaust ourselves most every year is a starkly threatening one indeed for all of us.

When in 2018 there were even outbreaks of wildfires across Sweden, Finland and Denmark the signs that we are going to be battling nature more often was very startlingly reinforced. Things are not good across the planet.

 

[NorthStar]

I was reading about where housings are built, right in the path of wild fires, right under the forest canopies. There are natural phenomena with the winds and the canyons that makes building houses there dangerous areas. And the causes of fires are winds knocking electrical posts falling on branches.

Around the town of Paradise the fire started @ Camp Creek Road (in a wild and wooden part) last Thursday. They are investigating whether Pacific Gas and Electric power lines may have caused the flames.

25 people have died in wildfires since Thursday.

Climate change (yes) contributes to the growing destruction from California wild fires. Hot, dry weather conditions help carry the fires for thousands of acres, nearly year-round now.

 

[gilles13]

100% Ron,
Protecting life and property should be a fundamental priority for local, state and federal governments. One clear challenge for mitigation in climate change is the proposed ongoing increasing risk of wildfires in the fire cycle. Australia faces a similarly phenomenal challenge.

If there is no respite for our emergency agencies and they face more and more frequent back to back droughts, storms and deluge the threat we will exhaust ourselves most every year is a starkly threatening one indeed for all of us.

When in 2018 there were even outbreaks of wildfires across Sweden, Finland and Denmark the signs that we are going to be battling nature more often was very startlingly reinforced. Things are not good across the planet.

In 1995 in South of France I have made a small exotic garden around the house. I asked for the climate to a friend who has made an university thesis on the olive cultivation since around X century. The climate was changing regularly but there was very few people and they were more adaptable as we are. So not a main problem except for 17 and 18 centuries when it become very very cold.

 

[Number9]

I was reading about where housings are built, right in the path of wild fires, right under the forest canopies. There are natural phenomena with the winds and the canyons that makes building houses there dangerous areas. And the causes of fires are winds knocking electrical posts falling on branches.

Around the town of Paradise the fire started @ Camp Creek Road (in a wild and wooden part) last Thursday. They are investigating whether Pacific Gas and Electric power lines may have caused the flames.

25 people have died in wildfires since Thursday.

Climate change (yes) contributes to the growing destruction from California wild fires. Hot, dry weather conditions help carry the fires for thousands of acres, nearly year-round now.

Not to be confused with Global Warming.

 

[the sound of Tao]

Hi Gilles,
Climate change science by expert peer reviewed scientists had only just began in earnest in the early 90’s with the first report of the United Nations Intergovernmental panel on Climate Change in partnership with the World Meteorological Orgsnisation. By the turn of the millennium scientific consensus on climate change as a result of human activity and the need for adaptation was at 66 per cent. Climate change science has moved forward considerably since then and consensus now sits beyond 95 per cent.

If you feel comfortable enough in the assurances of your 1 olive growing expert friend from the 90’s that you have better grasped the metadata of the weather patterns of the planet to the point where you can so easily dismiss the broad current understanding on the issue by the specialist scientists who have researched this and used evidence gained on data provided from over 400,000 years of recorded green house gas emissions that what we now have is clearly something beyond any natural climate patterns.

After the last 10 years of continuous researching and training in this area myself I now tell my students (as a baby boomer myself) that the coming generations are just waiting for all us baby booming dinosaurs to die and get out of the way so that the next generations can finally have a fair go at repairing the damage that the previous recent generations have done and that they need to ignore our lassitude saw an impediment to their future for the sake of their own survival.

We are only in the way of the inevitable surge to survival and our unhelpful and at times clueless anecdotal observations about how all is actually fine and dandy are among the very last gasps of a gen that now represents the tipping point in both human and planetary development. The future requires them (scary young people) to take charge and let go of the past. I am not in the least bit concerned about our generations, our time on this earth is very nearly done. My only concern is that we join their fight if necessary to let all the next generations have a real shot at the future. This isn’t about ego, this is about what’s fair for the future of all. Your mileage may respectfully vary. I say none of this to be at all incendiary. There is more than enough heat in both the planet and the debate already. But at this point our differing opinions aren’t terribly important to the future. The young will do what they need to do. They are already under way and fully engaged. We elderly audiophile types just haven’t caught on yet that we are mostly no longer relevant. Said with much love always for the human spirit and for all ecology.

 

[DaveC]

I grew up in MD, used to make money shoveling snow when I was a kid. I graduated high school in '92 and I'd say by 1990 there was a major, sudden climatic shift. It was obvious to me because 1. The snowthrower I bought to make money with sat idle most of the year and 2. The local ponds and lakes we'd play hockey and skate around on did not freeze anymore.

In '92 I moved to CO and enjoyed a few years of normality wrt climate until things started going crazy here too. The weather went from very predictable to very unpredictable.

Much later I finished school and worked for Vestas Wind Turbines in Denmark. When talking about climate they also mentioned the same thing about lack of snow and lakes/ponds not freezing over like they used to.

So IMO we saw a shift around 1990 and things have just gotten worse since then. It seems like higher elevations are taking longer to become effected. But now in the rocky mtns we're seeing more variability and drought conditions. We could easily see massive wildfires rip through the rocky mtns from New Mexico north in the coming years.

I think we're basically f'ed and will need to look into how we can regulate the amount of sunlight hitting Earth. Because it's now too late. There's too many people on the Earth and we've already put changes into motion we can't even understand. It's pretty disappointing. Turns out, we're not that much smarter than bacteria. I can't even imagine having kids, quality of life in the future is not looking up.

 

[jeff1225]

It would be easy to believe eco-terrorism, since these fires are so much more regular and fierce compared to what they used to be (already regular features of Cali life). However, the 'authorities' never want to deem it such for whatever reason.

I've been breathing the smoke in Santa Cruz, and it hurts, baby! Snot, sneeze, hachooo!

More conspiracy theories and a waste of time. A decade long drought + Asian Bark Beetle Infestation = forest fires.

 

[Steve Williams]

I live about 80 miles south of the fires. Yesterday we had blue skies and some winds. Today the skies are overcast and gray from smoke. Newscasts tell us the air is very unhealthy to breathe and today we can feel it

My thoughts are that last winter there were a lot of rains. This caused overgrowth of vegetation everywhere which followed by a very hot and dry summer lead to a tinderbox resulting in many of these fires. Then the absence of. vegetation on the hills carries with it the risk of devastating mud slides in the next rainy season. There’s no eco terrorists at work here.

 

[NorthStar]

Not to be confused with Global Warming.

Absolutely.

Global warming
Global warming refers to the upward temperature trend across the entire Earth since the early 20th century, and most notably since the late 1970s, due to the increase in fossil fuel emissions since the industrial revolution. Worldwide since 1880, the average surface temperature has gone up by about 0.8 °C (1.4 °F), relative to the mid-20th-century baseline (of 1951-1980).

Climate change
Climate change refers to a broad range of global phenomena created predominantly by burning fossil fuels, which add heat-trapping gases to Earth’s atmosphere. These phenomena include the increased temperature trends described by global warming, but also encompass changes such as sea level rise; ice mass loss in Greenland, Antarctica, the Arctic and mountain glaciers worldwide; shifts in flower/plant blooming; and extreme weather events.