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Thanks to a concerted effort by American social media ‘influencers’, everybody and their grandmother is now aware of the fact that wildfires – many of which were allegedly started illegally by farmers seeking to clear out more land for farming or pasture – are tearing through the Amazon.

What many don’t realize is that the wildfires in the ‘lungs of the Earth’ – as French President Emmanuel Macron described the Amazon – actually aren’t that uncommon. In fact, they’re a natural part of the rainforest’s process of self-restoration. In total, this year, fires are up by 83% compared with last year.

And while the rest of the world uses the fires as an excuse to slam Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and his environmental policies (some have accused him of tacitly condoning the farmers who set the fires), Bloomberg reports that Brazil is actually third in the world in wildfires over the last 48 hours, citing data from the MODIS satellite analyzed by Weather Source.

Weather Source recorded 6,902 fires in Angola over the past 48 hours, 3,395 in the Democratic Republic of Congo and 2,127 in Brazil.

Like in the Amazon and in California, wildfires aren’t all that uncommon in Central Africa.

As for the total number of active wildfires, they’re also nowhere near some of the highs recorded in recent years. According to NASA, more than 67,000 fires were reported in a one-week period in June last year, most of which were started by farmers.

Over the past two days, roughly 16,500 wildfires were recorded in the top 10 countries.

Actually, as far as wildfires go, 2019 isn’t out of the ordinary in any meaningful sense.

But we’re sure the Instagram influencer set will soon clarify all of this in a series of sponsored posts putting the Amazon wildfires in context…right?

Why are We Still Logging Our Forests?

January 9, 2019

Why are We Still Logging Our Forests?

Anyone who accepts true science realizes that today’s big forest fires are driven far more by climate warming than by a lack of “active forest management” as claimed in previous editorial opinions.

Active forest management, more honestly called “logging,” has always been the timber industry’s cure-all for every perceived problem in our forests.Until science confirmed the amazing diversity and value of our old forests, they were deemed to be “decadent,” badly in need of logging and replacement with more efficient tree farms. When there were budworm or bark beetle breakouts, industry said our forests were being decimated and needed logging to “restore” them. Science disagreed, noting that insects and disease were important components of healthy forest ecosystems. When our forests burn, industry claims quick logging and replanting is necessary to salvage their value. Science again exposed their myths, showing the value of leaving burned forests as critical habitat and how forests reseed and recover naturally from fires like the Biscuit.

I kept a cabin within the huge weather-caused and weather-extinguished Biscuit Fire in Oregon. It was years of cutting and burning non-merchantable understories that saved my cabin, not logging. In the aftermath, I witnessed how little difference commercially thinned stands made to fire spread or intensity. I photographed sites where flames consumed thinned stands only to lie down when they hit the cooler, moister, unthinned forest.

To me, as a timber cruiser and broker who’s tracked timber data and sale prices for decades, it’s obvious why industry preaches logging for all that ails our forests. They make grossly unfair profits from logging public timber sales — far more than the environmental attorneys who litigate them. Scorched old sugar pines and Douglas firs from Biscuit salvage sales sold at literally a dime to the dollar of real value. These sales were sold at a net loss to us as the forest owners, as are many federal timber sales.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

California’s Next Calamity: Storms Compounded By High Tides

December 20, 2018

California’s Next Calamity: Storms Compounded By High Tides

The wildfires that have taken their toll on California could be just the beginning of the state’s calamities. Now, the high tides of winter are coming and if those tides are worsened by an incoming storm, they could devastate entire cities on the coasts.

On December 10, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released a report stating there is an 80 percent chance of an El Niño event this winter. Such events are associated with wetter and more intense winter storms. However, NOAA does caution that its data are from September through November and the intensity of the El Niño will not be known for quite some time still.

Tides are determined by the sun and moon’s gravitational pull on the oceans. This warning from NOAA comes as heavy storms bear down on California’s Pacific Northwest. In central and northern California on Monday, waves were as high as 30 feet, with 40- to 50-foot breaks. Coastal flooding and erosion were reported. And sn even-more-powerful storm smacked the region yesterday, prompting flood watches, high-wind alerts, and winter storm warnings across nine states.

According to ABC News, holiday travelers along I-5, which runs north to south through Washington, Oregon, and California, can expect to be drenched with heavy rains. Although that storm has mostly passed and is headed to the Rocky Mountains, California is not out of the woods just yet. High surf warnings were issued by the National Weather Service from Point Conception, California, north of the Los Angeles Basin, to the coast of southwestern Washington, highlighting an especially heightened threat to life and property within the surf zone, reported Weather.com.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Yet Another Trillion-Dollar Unfunded Liability: WHY California Is Burning

December 9, 2018

Yet Another Trillion-Dollar Unfunded Liability: WHY California Is Burning

The apocalyptic fires that hit California last month have left observers scratching their heads and wondering how destruction on that scale could be possible – and how much it will cost in the future if the causes aren’t addressed immediately.

This morning’s Wall Street Journal concludes that 1) the problems aren’t being addressed and 2) this failure is going to cost a fortune that no government is prepared to cover (emphasis added below).

Why Californians Were Drawn Toward the Fire Zones

Building codes, state grants and low insurance rates have encouraged people to flee expensive cities for their dangerously fire-prone fringes.

A Nov. 15 view in Paradise, Calif., above, shows charred remains of houses among the trees after the Camp Fire burned down more than 11,000 homes. PHOTO: CAROLYN COLE/LOS ANGELES TIMES/GETTY IMAGES

The historically deadly wildfires that have roared through California this fall, and a string of similarly destructive ones over the past two years, are boosting calls to do more to slow climate change. But another underlying problem has contributed to the fires’ tragic damage: For decades, California, supposedly the greenest of states, has artificially lowered the cost of encroaching on nature by living in the woods.

Permissive building codes, low insurance rates and soaring taxpayer spending on firefighting and other services have provided an economic framework that has encouraged people to flee the state’s increasingly expensive cities for their leafy fringes. The forested exurbs, including places once thought too hilly or too dry to develop safely, have offered comparatively affordable living with jaw-dropping views.

The upshot: More houses have been packed into the fire-prone border between civilization and forest—known among planners as the “wildland-urban interface,” or WUI—in California than in any other state.

…click the above link to read the rest of the article…

Warnings of Doom, Amid a Smokescreen of Denial and Distraction

December 6, 2018

Warnings of Doom, Amid a Smokescreen of Denial and Distraction

Photo Source reurinkjan | CC BY 2.0

The Trump administration predictably tried to bury the dire warnings contained in the fourth National Climate Assessment by releasing it the day after Thanksgiving, when many people would be distracted by the mass consumption frenzy known as Black Friday. It didn’t work, of course, since the findings were nothing short of warnings of doom if humanity doesn’t radically reduce the production of greenhouse gases caused primarily by burning fossil fuels.

Equally predictable was the response from the Climate Denier-in-Chief that he simply “didn’t believe” the findings. The rays of hope are that, thanks to the Mueller investigation, indictments and convictions, as well as the recent election that erased the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, Donald Trump’s “reign of error” on the environment is coming to an end — and not a minute too soon for our nation and the planet.

Considering that the congressionally mandated Climate Assessment was put together by more than 300 scientists and 13 federal agencies, there are plenty of good reasons to heed its assessments and predictions, summarized right up front in the report as: “Climate change creates new risks and exacerbates existing vulnerabilities in communities across the United States, presenting growing challenges to human health and safety, quality of life, and the rate of economic growth.”

Here in Montana, the “risks and vulnerabilities” are particularly acute as a warming climate produces longer and more extreme wildfire seasons, less snow and drought-caused water shortages, rivers warming beyond the tolerable limits for our world-famous wild trout fisheries, and a host of impacts to a wide variety of businesses from agriculture to recreation.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Here’s the Dire Climate Report the Trump White House Didn’t Want You to See

November 24, 2018

Here’s the Dire Climate Report the Trump White House Didn’t Want You to See

“The decision to release this damning report when families are beginning to celebrate the holidays and newsrooms are short-staffed is a brazen attempt to bury the truth.”

A house burns during the Woolsey Fire on November 9, 2018 in Malibu, California. (Photo: David McNew/Getty Images)

In a move environmentalists and journalists denounced as a blatant effort to bury facts that conflict with the president’s denialism and pro-fossil fuel agenda, the Trump administration used the Friday after Thanksgiving to quietly release Volume II of the Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4), which warned “Earth’s climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization” and concluded that “greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are the only factors that can account” for planet-threatening warming.

“Climate change is spawning more extreme weather, causing irreparable harm to communities, costing billions of dollars a year, and leading to countless deaths. We can stop climate destruction, but only if we act quickly to end the use of fossil fuels.”
—Wenonah Hauter, Food & Water Watch

“The decision to release this damning report when families are beginning to celebrate the holidays and newsrooms are short-staffed is a brazen attempt to bury the truth from the public that we must act now to move off fossil fuels and stabilize the climate,” Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, said in a statement.

“Releasing this report when no one is looking, tweeting his annual nonsense about global warming and cold weather, and announcing that he’ll use the upcoming U.N. climate meetings as a fossil fuel tradeshow, Trump is doubling down on his climate denial for the holidays—as many families are still reeling from unnatural climate disasters across the country,” Hauter continued. “The science is way past in on climate change… We must prepare for our climate future in spite of Trump.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Who or What Is Really Responsible for the Huge Forest Fires in California?

November 18, 2018

Who or What Is Really Responsible for the Huge Forest Fires in California?

Once again, faced with the failure of the “press” to educate us on an issue, we decided to go out and research the truth about what appears to be the significant increase in huge forest fires. Once we did the research, we found out major differences in facts from the random barkings in the MSM.

Let us start with this simple aspect. Forest fires are a normal thing. Often caused by lightning or other natural causes, they are God’s way of clearing forests. In those natural forest clearances, the wildlife that exists in them are threatened or their habitat is destroyed. What has changed is mankind’s intervention in the natural process. The question is, what other factors may be causing the change in the intensity of recent forest fires?

We also came armed with a thought. If you believe that global warming is making life more challenging for forest management, then you should support proper forest clearance. Otherwise we will be left with even more intense fires.

For this column, other than reading everything available, we went to two sources: our national Forest Service and the Union of Concerned Scientists to get different perspectives.

Speaking with Chris French, the Acting Deputy Chief of Forest Service (FS), we received a primer on what is really going on with forest fires today.

When asked what he believes is the primary cause of the intense forest fires, Mr. French’s immediate response was “Forests are overstocked. There are more trees than 100 years ago.” He went on to say that part of the problem was the Forest Service’s good work in the recent past stopping forest fires. This meant, however, that their focus was largely directed away from forest maintenance, which caused the elements that fuel a fire like underbrush, dead trees or more density to occur.

The changes French would like to see would be more active forest clearance and clearance of the underbrush. He also wants to do more controlled fires when the risks are minimized. If you are wondering why they are not doing that now it is because of budget restraints.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Air Quality Health Crisis from the California Wildfires

November 17, 2018

The Air Quality Health Crisis from the California Wildfires

The smoke from the California wildfires near Paradise, CA is producing the greatest air quality health crisis in the modern history of California. Schools, universities, and sports events are being cancelled.

Although the terrible loss of life directly caused by wildfires in and near Paradise should not be minimized in any way, the health impacts of smoke will be profound, with millions of people being exposed to high concentrations of wood smoke. Hospitalizations will surely increase and some increase mortality of vulnerable populations should be expected.

MODIS satellite imagery on Thursday at noon. Dense smoke filled the central valley of CA and moved directly over the Bay Area.

For me, it is also personal. My son, a healthy young man of 28 living in San Francisco, is greatly feeling that smoke as is his similarly aged co-workers and friends. If young, healthy individuals are being sickened, can you image the impacts of those that are vulnerable?

The current air quality conditions around the Bay area are pretty extreme (see below), with much of San Francisco and neighboring areas in the very unhealthy range (200-300). Looking at data around the world, it appears that San Francisco now has worse air quality than any major metropolitan area in the world, worse than even Beijing and Mumbai.

But what really stands out is the longevity of this poor air quality event– extending 7-9 days now for many central CA locations. From my perusal of the air quality data of the Bay Area Air Quality Agency and other sources, this event is unprecedented in the 20 year period of data available.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Climate Change and Wildfires: The New Western Travesty

November 16, 2018

Climate Change and Wildfires: The New Western Travesty

Photo Source BLMIdaho | CC BY 2.0

The following is an excerpt from Jeffrey St. Clair & Joshua Frank’s new book, The Big Heat: Earth on the Brink.

As my wife Chelsea and I drove through Arizona on our annual pilgrimage from California to Montana, orange smoke billowed along the darkened horizon, signals of hearts shattered and landscapes scorched. Days earlier nineteen hotshot firefighters died together as they battled the intense blazes near the mountain town of Yarnell. It was the most lethal wildfire America had witnessed in 80 years.

The Yarnell flames were so erratic and intense the team became suddenly trapped, and despite each of the men deploying their individual fire shelters, all fighting the flames that day perished.

The lone survivor was out fetching a truck for his crew, only to return to the gruesome scene. It was the single deadliest incident for firefighters since the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

Fires like the one that charred the small Yarnell community are only growing in size and ferocity in the West. According to the National Interagency Fire Center, the number of wildfires every year in the U.S. has remained relatively steady, but their size has increased dramatically. In 1987, a little over 2.4 million acres burned across the country whereas 2012 saw over 9.3 million acres go up in flames.

That’s more than the size of Rhode Island and Maryland combined and it’s a trend many see as only increasing as more droughts plague Western states and climate change continues to rear its ugly head.

“Today, western forests are experiencing longer wildfire seasons and more acres burned compared to several decades ago,” says Todd Sanford, a climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). “The greatest increase has occurred in mid-elevation Northern Rockies forests, which are having higher spring and summer temperatures and earlier snowmelt. These conditions are linked to climate change.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Build in a Fire Plain, Get What You Deserve

November 15, 2018

Build in a Fire Plain, Get What You Deserve

Photo Source Robert Couse-Baker | CC BY 2.0

My girlfriend and I are trying to figure out a place to live, build a cabin. Somewhere in our native country probably, in the Catskill Mountains of New York, the land we know best, beloved to us. We live in one of the fastest-depopulating counties in New York State, and thank god for that.

First step in cabin-building: understand the land, know its history, and try to predict where it’s headed in the age of climate change. Don’t build in a deluge-prone valley. Many naifs before us have done so, not expecting two-hundred-year floods could flourish in our lifetime. Witness the hurricane-rains that swept through the Catskills in recent years, wiping out homes, storefronts, villages.

Second, related to the cognizance of floods: read the average hydrology, walk the streams, look for the springs, know where the water flows, and where it likely won’t. We will need good water in the future, when it becomes scarce. We don’t want too much water but just enough for sustenance now and in the long term for subsistence.

Third: recognize that some ecosystems are fire-dependent, and will always be so. The deciduous forests of the northeast, humid, rain-tossed, do not fall under this rubric.

Fourth: consider that there are stupid popular places to set up shop that are incentivized by being alluring but also cheap, because no one – not the buyer, not the seller, not anyone in the deal – is thinking about the long term.

In arid California, where stupid cheapness has driven development, fire has been the norm for tens of thousands of years. Humanity has built its prodigious idiot outposts in fire plains during a period of anomalous rainfall in the 20^th century, and humanity now pays the price.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

We Are Witnessing The Most Destructive Fire In The History Of California, And “Devil Winds” Threaten To Make Things Even Worse

November 12, 2018

We Are Witnessing The Most Destructive Fire In The History Of California, And “Devil Winds” Threaten To Make Things Even Worse

California has been absolutely devastated by horrific wildfires in recent years, but the state has never seen anything quite like this. At this moment, three major wildfires are raging, and the Camp Fire in Butte County is already officially the most destructive wildfire in California history. Thousands of firefighters are desperately trying to contain this fire, but they haven’t had much success. More than 6,700 structures have already been destroyed, and that shatters the all-time record that was set just last year. In fact, five of the ten most destructive wildfires in California history have happened within the last two years. The Camp Fire and the two mammoth fires in southern California have forced hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate from their homes, and authorities are warning that “devil winds” of up to 40 miles per hour could accelerate this crisis in the early morning hours of Monday.

The death toll from these fires continues to rise, and the numbers are being continuously updated. At this point, the latest official number of deaths is up to 31…

Firefighters battled heavy winds and parched conditions throughout the day in their herculean struggle against the Camp Fire and two blazes in Southern California that have killed at least 31 people, destroyed thousands of homes and forced 250,000 to flee.

But that number is expected to increase, because there are at least 228 people that are unaccounted for right now.

Many of the headlines have been about homes of celebrities that have been destroyed, but that is only a very small part of the story.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Death Toll In CA Wildfires At 25; New “Devil Winds” Expected; Choking Air Quality; 250,000 Evacuated

November 11, 2018

Death Toll In CA Wildfires At 25; New “Devil Winds” Expected; Choking Air Quality; 250,000 Evacuated

The death toll from California’s multiple wildfires has risen to 25, after 14 more bodies were discovered in or near the Northern California town of Paradise, bringing the number of confirmed dead in the so-called Camp Fire to 23. Over 6,700 structures were destroyed just one day after the fire began, while 110 people remain missing according to authorities.

5 People Found Dead in Cars while Escaping #CampFire in #Paradise #wildfire #californiawildfire

“We are doing everything we possibly can to identify those remains and make contact with the next of kin so we can return the remains to the family,” said Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea Saturday morning.

A red flag warning remains in effect in Northern California due to strong winds and dry conditions, while Southern California officials have warned similar gusts expected to kick up on Sunday.

“We’ll get sustained winds of up to 40 mph and gusts between 60 mph and 70 mph,” said NWS meteorologist Marc Chenard, adding that he expectes Santa Ana “devil wind” to hit the Los Angeles area.

“It’s nothing but bad news,” said Chenard.

Two fatalities have been reported in the Southern California Woolsey fire, which has ripped through more than 83,000 acres as of Saturday night, destroying 177 structures, and is just 5% contained. California fire officials estimate full containment by Thursday, while over 3,200 firefighters are on the scene. Approximately 57,000 structures are considered at risk.

A Reuters cameraman recorded himself trapped inside his car as the Malibu area fire rages around him:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tree Teachings: How Forests and Wildfires Are Critically Linked

November 4, 2018

Tree Teachings: How Forests and Wildfires Are Critically Linked

First in a series about the work of famed botanist .

Diana Beresford-Kroeger: The global forest ‘forecasts our future in every breath it takes.’

I have called up Diana Beresford-Kroeger, the famed Irish botanist and bestselling author, to ask about the megafires that carpeted much of North America in dense smoke last summer.

In British Columbia alone, wildfires released between 150 and 200 megatonnes of carbon dioxide in 2017. That’s more than twice the volume created by human activities in the province.

Beresford-Kroeger, who calls herself a renegade scientist, has been studying forests all her life and is one of the world’s leading experts on the many medicinal properties of trees.

Coming from a strong Celtic tradition, the 74-year-old plain speaker delivers a good dose of traditional knowledge with her science, combining data with old-fashioned wisdom.

The global forest, which keeps the atmosphere rich in oxygen and low in carbon dioxide, “forecasts our future in every breath it takes and every seed it releases into the leaf mold of the forest floor,” she has written.

On the day when I reach her to discuss the megafires that consumed parts of California, Chile, Sweden and B.C. last summer, she says she has both good and terrifying news.

But first Beresford-Kroeger tells me she has just walked into her house just south of Ottawa from her research garden, where native and endangered trees thrive, and is covered in mud.

“You should know,” she begins with a laugh, “that you are talking to a dirty woman.”

And then she plunges into the subject of wildfires, which burned almost 3.4 million hectares of forest last year across Canada — a nearly threefold increase over 2016.

Fires foretold

The first point Beresford-Kroeger wants to make is that the fires consuming places like California and B.C.’s Interior were foretold by Indigenous people thousands of years ago.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Summer of No Return

October 13, 2018

The Summer of No Return

Photo Source NASA Goddard Space Flight Center | CC BY 2.0

The forecast for August 8^thwas ominous. The temperature in Portland was predicted to breach 100 hundred degrees for the second time in a couple weeks. In the end, the mercury stalled at 96 degrees because the sun was blotted out for most of the day by a thick pall of pinkish smoke from the Mendocino fires 500 miles to the south. Two days later the undulating jet stream carried traces of the smoke another 3000 miles east to New York City and beyond.

In just two weeks, the Mendocino Fire complex had scorched 340,000 acres, making it the largest wildfire in California history. The Mendo fire started four days after the Carr Fire ignited, which destroyed more than 1000 homes and killed eight people near the city of Redding in northern California. The Carr Fire, still burning in mid-August, has seared more than 210,000 acres. In the Sierras, the 100,000 Ferguson Fire closed the Yosemite National Park and killed two firefighters. In southern California, the Holy Jack Fire erupted in a mushroom cloud of smoke on Hiroshima Day. California was burning from border to border.

Clarence Sibsey is a fire refugee. For the second time in two years, he was forced to evacuate his home near Clear Lake. “We’ve never had fires like this before,” Sibsey told the Los Angeles Times. “Why now?”

In one of his most mystical Tweets, Donald Trump tried to give Sibsey an answer. The president blamed the California fires on the state’s policy of allowing some of the waters from its much-molested rivers to empty into the Pacific Ocean, instead of being totally diverted into the irrigation ditches of the Central Valley and the Klamath Basin. It may have escaped the President’s keen grasp of California geography that the two biggest fires are burning adjacent to several of the state’s largest lakes, including Lake Shasta, Trinity Lake and Clear Lake.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is Global Warming A Significant Contributor to Washington State Wildfires, Now or in the Future?

October 5, 2018

Is Global Warming A Significant Contributor to Washington State Wildfires, Now or in the Future?

During the past several summers there have been major wildfires in Washington State producing a lot of smoke. And many people have been asking an important question:

To what degree is anthropogenic global warming contributing to Washington State wildfires?

If 90% of the blame for Northwest wildfires is due to anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming and 10% is due to fire suppression, poor forest management, or people starting more fires, then the logical response is to put most of our efforts into reducing atmospheric CO2. A climate-dominated problem.

If 90% of the blame is due to past fire suppression, forest mismanagement, invasive species, and human encroachment, then we should put most of our efforts into fixing the forests and other non-climate measures. A surface-management problem.

And yes, the percentages could be somewhere in between.

Supporters of the carbon fee initiative (1631) are suggesting that the recent wildfires are mainly the result of anthropogenic climate change and using the fires to push their carbon fee plan.

And Governor Inslee has stated explicitly that the fires have been made much worse by climate change.

In contrast, others, including a number of folks in the forestry community, have suggested that poor forest practices are the main cause of most of the wildfires over the eastern side of the state.

It is important to note that relative role of global warming in influencing the threat of wildfires may change in time. For example, global warming could be relatively unimportant today for wildfires, but of great importance later in the century when temperatures will be much warmer.

The Need for Better Information

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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