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Earth United States

With Wildfires, California Experiences a 'Cascading' of Climate Disasters (msn.com) 271

"Multiple mega fires burning more than three million acres. Millions of residents smothered in toxic air. Rolling blackouts and triple-digit heat waves.

"Climate change, in the words of one scientist, is smacking California in the face," reports the New York Times. (Alternate URL here.) The crisis in the nation's most populous state is more than just an accumulation of individual catastrophes. It is also an example of something climate experts have long worried about, but which few expected to see so soon: a cascade effect, in which a series of disasters overlap, triggering or amplifying each other. "You're toppling dominoes in ways that Americans haven't imagined," said Roy Wright, who directed resilience programs for the Federal Emergency Management Agency until 2018 and grew up in Vacaville, California, near one of this year's largest fires. "It's apocalyptic."

The same could be said for the entire West Coast this week, to Washington and Oregon, where towns were decimated by infernos as firefighters were stretched to their limits.

California's simultaneous crises illustrate how the ripple effect works. A scorching summer led to dry conditions never before experienced. That aridity helped make the season's wildfires the biggest ever recorded. Six of the 20 largest wildfires in modern California history have occurred this year. If climate change was a somewhat abstract notion a decade ago, today it is all too real for Californians... "If you are in denial about climate change, come to California," Gov. Gavin Newsom said last month.

Officials have worried about cascading disasters. They just did not think they would start so soon...

Philip B. Duffy, a climate scientist who is president of the Woodwell Climate Research Center, said many people did not understand the dynamics of a warming world. "People are always asking, 'Is this the new normal?'" he said. "I always say no. It's going to get worse."

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With Wildfires, California Experiences a 'Cascading' of Climate Disasters

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 12, 2020 @09:44AM (#60499032)

    In California, you can't even remove standing dead timber from your own land without getting permission from a goddamned idiot who will lecture you about how it's "bad for the owls" to take dead trees down. You know what else is bad for owls? THE WHOLE FUCKING FOREST BURNING DOWN.

  • by olsmeister ( 1488789 ) on Saturday September 12, 2020 @09:44AM (#60499034)
    Is that there are just too damn many people that live there, and in places that they really shouldn't.
    • by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Saturday September 12, 2020 @11:09AM (#60499278) Homepage Journal

      It's really not too many people. It's the other thing you said. Cities are efficient. But people just can't live in the woods and not expect their house to burn. The woods need periodic fires.

      You do know that this sort of thing is coming to everywhere else in the USA that has trees though, right? Almost no forests in this country are managed worth a damn.

  • by MrKaos ( 858439 ) on Saturday September 12, 2020 @09:58AM (#60499062) Journal

    California is following the fire season that Australia had at the beginning of the year. We were lucky that the next disaster was a flood.

    Then a global pandemic.

  • It's a neat science fiction novel by Stephen King, with his signature darkness. It's AFAICT are rare quasi-political book by King with a solid comment on climate change and the people bringing it about. It's a good read and the parallels to California today are striking. There's a less dismal TV series adoption that's sort-of OK and had Kings blessing and co-operation (Stephen King Cameo [youtube.com]), but the Book is harder at driving the point home and worth the read.

    Just in case you aren't scared enough of the global

  • by Pinky's Brain ( 1158667 ) on Saturday September 12, 2020 @10:13AM (#60499104)

    A century worth of fire fighting and population increase haven't made a tiny little impact too. There is this totally fake assumption of stability underlying climate change claims. There is no stability ... a mild climate is just one of the resources we're running out of, not even the most important one in the short term.

    You could drive horse and wagon through California forests before fire fighting began, the forests didn't become dense tinder boxes because of climate change.

  • California mismanages their forests, actively suppressing all fires while preventing reasonable harvests, allowing huge build ups of dry dead wood, they mismanage their electricity generation capacity, and they mismanage their water resources, all combining to cause this catastrophe, but it's all the fault of cow farts and SUVs in the rest of the country? Sure. Right. Uh-huh.

    Let California burn.

    • Cow farts and SUVs right here in California are part of the problem. Go ahead and visit Bakersfield, you'll see. There is a balance, California has gone too far in one direction but there is a balance. We have a lot of people and people in different parts of the state have different needs. Its not so easy to apply practices from smaller and less diverse places to all of California, there is no single right answer.

    • by urusan ( 1755332 ) on Saturday September 12, 2020 @10:33AM (#60499160)

      You mean to tell me that California is mismanaging the forests that are mostly owned by the Federal government? California is just over 45% federal land, and most of the forests are going to be in that 45% because the rest is going to have all the development.

      https://ballotpedia.org/Federa... [ballotpedia.org]

      Here's a sampler of stories on this issue:
      https://www.nbcnews.com/news/u... [nbcnews.com]
      https://www.redding.com/story/... [redding.com]
      https://www.forbes.com/sites/c... [forbes.com]

      • by urusan ( 1755332 )

        Yup, most of the forest is federally owned, and most of the rest is private:
        https://www.forestunlimited.or... [forestunlimited.org]

      • by zizzu ( 5211981 ) on Saturday September 12, 2020 @12:36PM (#60499560)
        As a Californian hiker and mountain biker, there's a bit of info that is missing. I live just a few miles from the bobcat fire down in Southern California and we are save but drowning in smoke, it's pretty bad. I've hiked and biked those hills. I see the thread is about mismanagement of land and who's to blame for that. I think the point is another, you have to see the bigger picture. California was just out of severe drought, due to el nino being late (look up el nino if you don't know what it is). This unprecedented drought killed a lot of trees - I could see it with my own eyes , some of my favorite spots, trees - not brushes, trees, like hundred of years old big trees - dead because of the drought. Once they die and dry up they're fuel. That's why these fires are so bad, it's a consequence of the drought a few years ago. Some of those areas haven't burned in 80 years. You can't remove them, there is way too many of them, and they are in wilderness. The only way to work that is with controlled fires. However, those can go terribly sideways, and require certain conditions that are hard to achieve, plus the bureaucracy as there are multiple agencies involved. The issue is systemic - trying to find one culprit is useless, yet it is what most people do in these partisan times.
  • by eatvegetables ( 914186 ) on Saturday September 12, 2020 @10:24AM (#60499140)

    Fires are the result of inept management of public lands. Do you know what you get when you don't adhear to a strict regime of removing dead folliage and over growth? Yup, a tinder box. Mother nature has her own way of management. You got it, wild fires!

    People don't trust politicians' WRT global warming, because these yahoos are so quick to blame it for their own failures. We will never pass reasonable legislation to protect our planet if these weasels are allowed to perpetrate such frauds.

  • by Terrigena ( 782337 ) on Saturday September 12, 2020 @11:08AM (#60499268)
    The US wildfire climate narrative is easily debunked by data: https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/... [nifc.gov]

    What has changed is human encroachment into once rural forest and brushlands, and our decision to intervene and prevent fires in otherwise fire-adapted ecosystems. The result is larger fires, more invasive species resulting in declining forest health, and greater cost due to private property loss.
    • The site you referenced contains this quote
      "Prior to 1983, sources of these figures are not known, or cannot be confirmed, and were not derived from the current situation reporting process. As a result the figures prior to 1983 should not be compared to later data."

    • The US wildfire climate narrative is easily debunked by data: https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/ [nifc.gov]...

      And how do you suppose that data debunks the notion that wildfires are being exacerbated by AGW?

  • California's climate anomaly of the past 100 or so years has resulted in a population far exceeding what the area can support safely or comfortably. Most wildfires are started by self-centered irresponsible narcissists, a large fraction of the population.

  • by oldgraybeard ( 2939809 ) on Saturday September 12, 2020 @12:16PM (#60499506)
    "California Experiences a 'Cascading' of Climate Disasters "

    Could be just decades of really bad forest management.
    • If fact don't the fires release large amounts of green house gases? Seems to me the forest environment is a sink for things we want to keep looked up.
      So is the failure to do proper forest management a "huge" failure by California and the environmental community.
  • The layering of disasters that we face is pretty bad. Cant go out because the air quality is 200 AQI right now.. Need to stay inside and all infect eachother with the virus. The virus that is caused by people continuing to eat meat as a primary protein. Another reflection of climate mismanagement. And its been 25*c... So you need to open the windows and cant. Brain gets fuzzy if you breathe the air. Luckily we have one hepa filter portable unit and its working so im not coughing anymore.

    We are already in fr

  • This pales in comparison to the economic and social damage done in the last few decades by California's politicians. It's an unlivable, overtaxed wasteland COMPLETELY unrelated to any natural disasters.
  • Maybe if they're practiced proper forestry, clearing bush, building fire breaks, etc.
    Instead of spending billions on a boondoggle public transit project nobody's ever going to use...
    But no! That might disrupt the breeding range of the last Shutsucker Owl in existence that died 40 years ago!

    So, had they done their due dilligence...FEWER TO NO FIRES.

    Instead, the entire west coast is Hell's Hibachi.

    And these idiots keep rebuilding WOOD homes out there.

    If you live in a fire-prone area, BUILD IN CONCRETE with m

  • Every year (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Saturday September 12, 2020 @02:51PM (#60499906) Homepage

    Do people not remember last year? ND the yeay before? And the one before that?

    California burns every year. Poor forest management, plus people building where it burns, have madd things a bit worse. But wildfire is part of the natural cycle. Reading "OMG eleventy" headlines every year just shows how dumb the media is.

Algebraic symbols are used when you do not know what you are talking about. -- Philippe Schnoebelen

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