California Fires

[69GTX]

Originally Posted by StevieC
I'm no expert but wouldn't it suggest it's man causing it if we are entering into an ice age and temperatures are getting warmer? Wouldn't the opposite be true then? (Not being sarcastic, asking truthfully)


One has to look at trends over decades, even centuries. We've only become an "environmentally aware" species in that past 10-25 yrs....at least to the point where politics drives environmental thinking and "science." That's too short a time to be trending anything. The changes in temperatures and CO/CO2 over the past century are fairly tiny...and not up anywhere near the level environmentalists were forecasting 20-25 yrs ago. By this time oceans should have been many feet higher, major USA east coast cities going underwater. Global warming morphed into "climate change." And it's big bucks. Universities only get govt funding if you provide the answers the govt is looking for. And global cooling is not an option. With 6 ice ages under our belt, it's quite reasonable that we're not going to circumvent the next one. If the sun's activity is a major player....nothing we do will have much of an effect in comparison. The answer lies between the 2 camps of thought....neither one has it right. I would submit that during ice ages, forest fires are much less of an issue. The earth has gone through some mini-ice ages and heating cycles over the past 1000 yrs....and man wasn't industrialized enough to have had any input to them. IIRC the last mini-ice age last 50-150 years. Lots of extreme swings in weather have occurred in the past 500-1000 yrs....and most of them were not studied or tracked or even recorded. The tools weren't available.

 

[StevieC]

But what about the CO2 samples from really old ice showing what it used to be? Doesn't that prove that the extra CO2 is from us?

As for an agenda, yes I agree, this does exist and it is really adding noise to the discussion and swaying a lot of people too far for sure.

 

[PandaBear]

Originally Posted by Donald
The interesting thing is that they are finding out many of these fires are started by the electric company's equipment, downed poles, wires and transformers. Yet you do not hear anywhere else that the electric company is to blame. Is it this electric company or is stuff just too dry and ready to ignite if you sneeze too hard?

I believe Calif passed a law that the electric company can pass these losses back to the customers in the way of rate hikes.

My daughter handles a portfolio of commercial claims for a major insurance carrier. Hundreds of millions in claims. From last year they are going back to the electric company for payment of 1200 claims.

Around here in NY we loose the power a lot. But never hear of fires from downed wires, etc.

Glad I live on the east coast.

Good luck to those in the path.


It is a catch 22. Imagine your utility company over build because they can get a percentage of their investment in guaranteed return. You end up with a system where they build so much excess, that they will just sell the excess at a loss and still make money from customers.

So in a way keeping it balanced at an "acceptable loss" vs "reasonable investment" make the most financial sense. You do not see mandates of termite proof wood for home building, or mandatory automatic emergency braking, or mandatory 10 year water heater retirement (to prevent leak) for a reason, the same reason.

 

[69GTX]

Originally Posted by StevieC
But what about the CO2 samples from really old ice showing what it used to be? Doesn't that prove that the extra CO2 is from us?

As for an agenda, yes I agree, this does exist and it is really adding noise to the discussion and swaying a lot of people too far for sure.


Those same millions of yearsold samples will also show time periods were levels of CO2 and CO far exceeded anything we've recorded in the past 100 yrs. CO/CO2 also cycle with epochs - right along with the temperatures. During the peak of the dinosaur period (100-300 MILL yrs ago) much of North America and well up into Canada was a warm and lush paradise...almost tropical. We certainly don't have that now. And man didn't cause that huge shift. Why isn't that part of the discussion? They had some massive global warming in that cycle....followed by an ice age. Dinosaur farts?

Today's politically motivated mankind knows relatively little about the interactions of our oceans, the core, and the sun/orbit on our changing weather patterns. It's a work in progress. We're still in the 5th grade overall when it comes to truly knowing. We were only in the 1st grade 200 yrs ago. Moving along nicely. If we indeed have global warming caused by mankind over the past 150 yrs, then we need to be able to explain how similar shifts occurred without us 6 times in the planet's history. It was rather embarrassing when in the last decade a major Climate Change think tank/study group (UK based iirc) was found to be intentionally doctoring their results to get what the govt wanted. I lost a lot of faith in "science" at that point. Just because thousands of scientists sign a petition to address global warming...it's also true that they are mostly paid by and published by those who want a specific result. You don't earn a good living and succeed in your field unless you play along.

 

[Trav]

Not to be overly simplistic but with the earth in an ice age something had to warm up or it would still be frozen. I would call that a global warming event.
Follow the money and the agenda exposes itself as clear as fine crystal.

 

[Trav]

A little story then I am done with this stuff.
In about 1985 my wife and I were invited to a BBQ, it turned out that the BBQ was also a communist/socialist part meeting, we high tailed it out of there like a shot.
FF to about 1993 I saw the wife of the BBQ couple coming out of the bank and said to her" well Renate it looks like that's the end of your communist parties since the wall came down". Her reply shocked me and I will never forget it. She said..
Oh no problem we are now Green party environmentalist, its the same thing, social manipulation through regulation and taxation. Being a much younger man and not political (still not) that was one of the most enlightening statements I ever heard.

Unfortunately for many people the dots are just too many and too far apart for them to connect.

 

[CourierDriver]

We finally got around to discussing a fire that's been burning for some time and many dead,,amazing...

 

[Vuflanovsky]

OP, hope all is well and you're safe. Personally, I think the sunspot / solar minimum thing is more correlation vs. causation when you're talking about real or imagined global warming over longer stretches of time. It's not really the same type of cycle as a periodic ozone hole versus any warming that's occurring over 75-100 years plus. You'll have people emphasizing the short cooling and disregarding the increase in sunspot activity over the last 100 years...or inferring that a 20-30 year cycle indicates the start of a new Ice Age. A solar minimum mini-ice age like the one that occurred in the early 1600s might have a temporary effect but likely wouldn't change the longer cycle if both the earth science and the inputs remain the same. IMO, equating pseudoscience or politicized science vs. "normalcy" as the reality doesn't give a full picture unless you want to turn earth science into least effort, red/blue-type tribal garbage. This site is definitely good for that...

"Mismanagement"...if anyone is inferring...of a forest didn't cause the Oakland Firestorm in '91 which I was a survivor of ( fire stopped 30 yards from my house and it was 3 days before I knew if it was still standing or not ) probably any more than it caused these current ones. Pacific Gas and Electric ( and maybe SoCal Edison ) has a history of lax maintenance/records/infrastructure and starting conflagrations...I would start there first independent of anything else as everything from San Bruno to Butte County points in their direction...A PG&E mismarked gas line killed 5 pipeline construction workers a couple hundreds yards from my house in 2011. Just incredible...

As they say, Malibu isn't a forest...and things are ultra dry in many places waiting for lightening, an idiot, or PG&E....add Santa Ana winds and it's over....just like in Oakland and in some of these recent fires. It's jaw dropping to see Paradise..a town of 27,000 people, basically burned to the ground but all you need there are co-factors and not specific global warming.

 

[slo town]

I think another factor is actual fire "fighting". Imagine thousands of years ago, when the planet was vegetated similarly to what it is today. Lightning strikes would result in fires that burned tens of millions of acres. Each. What's not there can't burn. And I think there was a lot of "not there" areas back then that are now heavily forested.

Scott

PS I am not proposing any solution or placing any blame. I only have sympathy for those who have suffered.

In the San Francisco Chronicle today they had a partial list of the missing. For example, take Vern Hartje, age 88, and Josephine Hartje, age 94. They might have been married for 65 years or more. Or maybe they were siblings. And to make it that far in life and then to die that way... Unimaginably tragic for so many. Bless their souls and RIP.

 

[PandaBear]

Originally Posted by SLO_Town
I think another factor is actual fire "fighting". Imagine thousands of years ago, when the planet was vegetated similarly to what it is today. Lightning strikes would result in fires that burned tens of millions of acres. Each. What's not there can't burn. And I think there was a lot of "not there" areas back then that are now heavily forested.

Scott

PS I am not proposing any solution or placing any blame. I only have sympathy for those who have suffered.

In the San Francisco Chronicle today they had a partial list of the missing. For example, take Vern Hartje, age 88, and Josephine Hartje, age 94. They might have been married for 65 years or more. Or maybe they were siblings. And to make it that far in life and then to die that way... Unimaginably tragic for so many. Bless their souls and RIP.


This is the reason why the super long life trees all have fire resistant outer layers. When you are going to live that long it is not a matter of if but when a fire of that scale will happen. In 1000 years our petty politics would be nothing compare to local climate and mother nature.

RIP to the couples.

 

[CT8]

Originally Posted by StevieC
Wishing you all the best. Terrible that we have destroyed the planet to this degree that this is normal now.

How have we destroyed the Planet? California has a drought flood weather cycle depending on the ocean current temps and the high or low pressures steering the jet stream. Study history !

 

[user52165]

Originally Posted by PandaBear
Originally Posted by StevieC
Wishing you all the best. Terrible that we have destroyed the planet to this degree that this is normal now.

I think this has always been part of the California climate though. Without the Colorado River for irrigation the Central Valley would have been a desert instead of the most productive agricultural region.



This is incorrect. The Central Valley get its water from Ca sources, not from the Colorado River. About half the water in Southern California is from the CR, but not for the Central Valley.

 

[CT8]

We have a severe problem with the people not being able to tell the forests from the trees and having an opinion. The TV news doesn't tell the truth. Via actual scientists [foresters] I have spent days in the high Seirras and Cascades above Redding California with shows via tree ring study is the area has shown the area to be in a +350 year drought cycle.

 

[CT8]

Originally Posted by Donald
The interesting thing is that they are finding out many of these fires are started by the electric company's equipment, downed poles, wires and transformers. Yet you do not hear anywhere else that the electric company is to blame. Is it this electric company or is stuff just too dry and ready to ignite if you sneeze too hard?

I believe Calif passed a law that the electric company can pass these losses back to the customers in the way of rate hikes.

My daughter handles a portfolio of commercial claims for a major insurance carrier. Hundreds of millions in claims. From last year they are going back to the electric company for payment of 1200 claims.

Around here in NY we loose the power a lot. But never hear of fires from downed wires, etc.

Glad I live on the east coast.

Good luck to those in the path.

Either the state pays and raised the taxes or the power company pays the state back then lobbies the politicians to allow the rates to rise to pay the fire suppression costs. The Calif public utility commission is as corrupt as the politicians and unionized government employees are. California is tinder dry. Arson happen as well. Look up Cal Fire incident reports there are always many fires .link to Cal fire

 

[StevieC]

This information is all interesting. As a citizen of earth I'm tired of all the conflicting information.

 

[spasm3]

This article on fire ecology is interesting. If you want to look at mans influence, they indicate that part of the problem has been fire suppression by man.

If fires are prevented or stopped the tinder builds up and then the fire is much worse.

Read page 3.

http://dendro.cnre.vt.edu/Forsite/valentine/Fire_ecology.htm

http://techalive.mtu.edu/meec/module11/FireandJackPine.htm

 

[DoubleWasp]

The biggest problem with the "science" of weather history is that we don't really know the reasons why a lot of changes happened to the Earth. There is still a lot of debate over whether some of the ice ages were really cold winters with cold summers, or regular winters with cold summers. That primitive man survived them tends to indicate more the latter than the former. But who knows?

 

[Danno]

A good video on California videos by Juan Brown - a Youtuber that lives in the Chico/Oroville area. Flies a 777 for a living. Great channel in general. The Oroville dam series is fascinating good work by Juan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajPpP3vbD5c

StevieC - Been following this website since the '90s when Anthony Watts started it. Wealth of info on it. Anthony started it after he was studying US temperatures and found the ground station data was suspect, one key reason due to bad station siting.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/

 

[StevieC]

Thanks.