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California Wildfire: Why Humans Can't Control Them - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...575740 california wildfire control nature forest fire domination
shared by Javier E on 13 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • “Fires are outrunning us. We’re trying harder than ever to put them out, and they’re continuing to win, more and more, every year,” Williams said. “And it really isn’t for lack of effort. Even when we know it’s been stupid policy to fight every single fire, we’re still trying as hard as we can to do that.”
  • As the California fires have dominated the news, he’s been asked by friends and journalists why we can’t just fix wildfires, why we can’t just put them out. We have solved all sorts of complex environmental engineering problems. Why not wildfire?
  • The question illustrates “the root problem that got us into this mess,” he told me. “We think that we as humans should be able to dominate this phenomenon of wildfire. And in reality, we can’t. Even though we can put a person on the moon, and even though we can create this global computer network, we can’t. This is a natural phenomenon that is similar to the ocean in that it is really big, that it is much larger than us when it really gets going.”
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  • In some ways, he said, a wildfire is similar to a combustion-powered hurricane. Fires put out tons of hot air at their center, which tries violently to rise. This rising air creates a vacuum at the core of fires, creating a fast-moving conveyor belt of cooler air flowing into the fire from all directions. A large fire can pull in so much air, at such high speeds, that its ability to do so is hindered by the Earth’s rotation
  • Sometimes, that channel of upward-flowing air can collapse in one small spot. Then the hot air in the atmosphere plummets through the weak point. “You get a very fast wind moving down toward the ground, and when it hits the ground, it spreads like jelly slopping across the floor,” he said. “It can also send white-hot air out in front of the flame, incinerating the landscape before the actual flame has arrived. It can cause forests to spontaneously combust without coming into contact with a flame.”
  • When this upward-moving air pattern stays strong, it creates other kinds of problems. It can loft burning wood high into the atmosphere, carrying it many miles away from the center of the fire. When this debris finally lands, it can start new fires
  • “When the fires are really moving like that, it’s because the meteorological conditions are allowing that to happen,” he said. He estimated that these California fires would not be fully contained until the winter rains arrive
  • So how should Americans react to the power of forest fires? By respecting them, he said—and understanding that we are in a new era of great fires. “The continuing increase in fire is an inevitability in the western United States. It is an inevitability that this trend is going to continue,” he told me. “If the public understood that, then they would become more tolerant of managerial tactics that are currently seen as too risky or heartless.
  • Many forest managers know that a certain tract of woodland is due for a catastrophic wildfire in the next decade, but feel they have no political ability to do a controlled burn there—lest it get out of control. If the public understood that huge swaths of Western forest will soon burn, they may be more willing to allow controlled burns when the meteorological conditions are right.
  • “Today, it’s completely impossible to say that ‘We need to have a 100,000 acre fire in that forest.’ Any politician or fire manager who brought that up? It would be a death wish for their career,” he said
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Wisconsin Governor Declares State of Emergency Over Wildfire Conditions - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...wisconsin-wildfire wisconsin wildfire climate
shared by ethanshilling on 06 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • More than 300 wildfires have destroyed nearly 1,500 acres since the start of the year, and fire officials warn this could be a longer-than-average season.
  • Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin on Monday signed an executive order declaring a state of emergency in response to elevated wildfire conditions, underscoring statewide efforts to control fires that have already burned nearly 1,500 acres this year.
  • “With nearly the entire state experiencing high or very high fire risk, protecting Wisconsinites from the destructive dangers of wildfires is a top priority,” Mr. Evers said in a news release.
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  • While wildfires can occur at anytime of the year, the department said, the majority of fires happen between March and May, making spring the most critical fire season in Wisconsin.
  • Wisconsin has seen its share of destructive wildfires in the past 20 years. In 2013, a logging crew unintentionally started a fire that destroyed nearly 7,500 acres, including 23 residences, the department said. In 2005, a fire burned 3,410 acres and destroyed at least 30 residences.
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Trump Administration Rejects California's Request for Wildfire Relief - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...alifornia-wildfire-relief.html politics us trump wildfires crisis climate
shared by lmunch on 16 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • The Trump administration has rejected California’s request for disaster relief aid for six recent fires that have scorched more than 1.8 million acres in land
  • Lizzie Litzow, a press secretary for FEMA, said on Friday that the damage assessments completed with state and local partners “determined that the early September fires were not of such severity and magnitude to exceed the combined capabilities of the state, affected local governments, voluntary agencies and other responding federal agencies.
  • President Trump visited California after a period of silence on its wildfires and blamed poor forest management, not climate change, for the crisis.
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  • Infrastructure damage estimates from the fires had exceeded $229 million
  • The state this year has suffered four of its five largest wildfires in modern history.
  • California went from a projected $5.6 billion budget surplus to a $54.3 billion projected deficit. “California’s economy is suffering in a way we have not seen since the 2009 Great Recession,” he said.
  • Over the past 50 years, excluding the last four, wildfires averaged about the same in direct damages: a billion dollars per year, adjusted for inflation.
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California Looks at Curbing Construction in Wild Fire-Prone Areas - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ornia-wildfires-insurance.html
shared by rerobinson03 on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • The proposals, many of which would require approval by the State Legislature, could remake the real estate market in parts of California and are the latest sign of how climate change is beginning to wreak havoc with parts of the American economy.
  • The building industry quickly pushed back against the recommendations. Dan Dunmoyer, president of the California Building Industry Association, said it wasn’t necessary to limit development because building standards are already strong enough to protect homes in high-risk areas.
  • In response, insurers have begun pulling out of fire-prone areas, threatening people’s ability to buy and sell homes, which depends on access to affordable insurance. That’s because banks generally require insurance as a condition of issuing a mortgage.The state has taken a series of increasingly aggressive steps, including temporarily banning companies from dropping some customers after wildfires. But those steps were meant to be a stopgap as state officials searched for more lasting changes that would allow the insurance industry to keep doing business in high-hazard areas.
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  • But other proposed changes reflect the growing consensus among experts that accelerating climate risk is fast becoming uninsurable — and if governments want insurance to remain affordable, it will mean finding new ways to limit people’s exposure to that risk.In California, like most other states, local officials have significant control over where homes are built. Those officials face powerful incentives to permit the construction in fire-prone areas: New houses mean more jobs and more residences, which translate into more tax revenue.
  • And if local officials insist on building in places exposed to wildfires, the recommendations call for preventing those homes from getting insurance through the state’s FAIR Plan.
  • State Senator Bill Dodd, a Democrat whose district includes Napa, Sonoma and other areas hit hard by recent wildfires, said he was open to many of the recommendations, including stopping access to the FAIR Plan for new homes in high-risk areas, halting infrastructure spending and expanding building codes. “We’ve got to rethink how we are developing” in those places, he said.
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California's NIMBY-Wildfire Nexus - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...601135 california fire housing crisis
shared by Javier E on 06 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • Wildfires and lack of affordable housing—these are two of the most visible and urgent crises facing California, raising the question of whether the country’s dreamiest, most optimistic state is fast becoming unlivable
  • in some ways, the two crises are one: The housing crunch in urban centers has pushed construction to cheaper, more peripheral areas, where wildfire risk is greater.
  • California’s housing crisis and its fire crisis often collide in what’s known as the wildland-urban interface, or WUI, where trailer parks and exurban culs-de-sac and cabins have sprung up amid the state’s scrublands and pine forests and grassy ridges
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  • Roughly half of the housing units built in California between 1990 and 2010 are in the WUI, which has expanded by roughly 1,000 square miles.
  • As a result, 2 million homes, or one in seven in the state, are at high or extreme risk for wildfire, according to one estimate from the Center for Insurance Policy and Research. That’s three times as many as in any other state.
  • human behavior is primarily to blame for the destruction. People start more than nine in 10 fires, according to reliable estimates.
  • built structures—houses, cars, hospitals, utility poles, barns—act as the most potent fuel, researchers have found. A house burns a lot hotter than a bush does; a propane tank is far more combustible than a patch of grass.
  • If building in the WUI is so dangerous, why do it? In part because building new housing is so very difficult in many urban regions in California, due to opposition from existing homeowners and strict building codes.
  • So housing sprawls into the periphery. And each time major fires happen—in the WUI, as well as in unpopulated regions and urban areas—the state’s housing crisis gets a little worse.
  • In the meantime, California isn’t doing enough to discourage building in fire-prone areas. “I cannot recall any development project that was denied, or where the density was substantially reduced, because of known wildfire hazards,
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Alberta wildfire: Emergency declared in Fort McMurray - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-us-canada-36209649 alberta wildfire emergency
shared by sarahbalick on 05 May 16 - No Cached
  • Alberta wildfire: Emergency declared in Fort McMurray
  • A state of emergency has been declared in the province of Alberta in Canada
  • Officials say the fast-moving blaze could destroy much of the city.
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  • after a wildfire forced all 88,000 residents of Fort McMurray to flee.
  • gutted 1,600 buildings, including a new school.
  • Several firms have shut down some pipelines
  • So far there have been no reports of deaths or injuries, but two women gave birth in one evacuation centre
  • It was something you'd see in a movie probably. I was stuck between a concrete barrier and the fire and I thought 'You know what? I might not make it out'.
  • "There's whole neighbourhoods that are gone. A hotel burned down, a gas station exploded. One lady that I met she actually was sheltered behind like an electrical box when it actually exploded and she felt a shockwave."
  • "You could hear the pop, pop, pop because of the propane tanks,"
  • Fort McMurray itself is sealed off to all but the emergency services, but it is reportedly a scene of devastation.One police officer who lives and patrols in the city told the BBC that, in his assessment, around half of it had been destroyed.
  • "It's well known that one of the consequences of climate change will be a greater prevalence of extreme weather events around the planet,"
  • he said.
  • "However, any time we try to make a political argument out of one particular disaster…that can sometimes not have the desired outcome."
  • Officials said the size of the blaze was now more than 10,000 hectares (39 square miles) and it was being tackled by 100 firefighters.
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U.S. Disaster Costs Doubled in 2020, Reflecting Costs of Climate Change - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...2020-disaster-costs.html climate change economics world
shared by ethanshilling on 07 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Hurricanes, wildfires and other disasters across the United States caused $95 billion in damage last year, according to new data, almost double the amount in 2019 and the third-highest losses since 2010.
  • Those losses occurred during a year that was one of the warmest on record, a trend that makes extreme rainfall, wildfires, droughts and other environmental catastrophes more frequent and intense.
  • Topping the list was Hurricane Laura, which caused $13 billion in damage when it struck Southwestern Louisiana in late August.
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  • The storms caused $43 billion in losses, almost half the total for all U.S. disasters last year.
  • The next costliest category of natural disasters was convective storms, which includes thunderstorms, tornadoes, hailstorms and derechos, and caused $40 billion in losses last year.
  • Wildfires caused another $16 billion in losses. Last year’s wildfires stood out not just because of the numbers of acres burned or houses destroyed, Munich Re said, but also because so much of that damage was outside of California
  • In California, officials have tried a series of rule changes designed to stop insurers from pulling out of fire-prone areas, leaving homeowners with few options for insurance.
  • The data also shows another worrying trend: The lack of insurance coverage in developing countries, which makes it harder for people there to recover after a disaster.
  • The single costliest disaster of 2020 was a series of floods that hit China last summer, which according to Munich Re caused $17 billion worth of damage.
  • Of the $67 billion in losses from natural disasters across Asia last year, only $3 billion, or 4.5 percent, was covered by insurance.
  • Without insurance, Mr. Rauch said, “the opportunity to recover fast after such an event is simply not there.”
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Another Trump assault on science as fires and pandemic rage - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html trump
shared by katherineharron on 15 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • On a day when Democratic nominee Joe Biden branded him a "climate arsonist" and global warming burst to the center of the campaign, Trump again ditched research and data for his own wild hunches and odd theories about California's wildfires.
  • Trump abruptly shut down an official who warned that climate change was fueling the flames -- by saying the weather would soon start "getting cooler." Even by his own standards, it was one of the President's most shocking comments on global warming -- which he has previously referred to as a "hoax."
  • Trump continued to flout epidemiological guidelines by cramming people into indoor events that risked spreading Covid-19, exacerbating disbelief and extreme frustration among medical experts.
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  • For years, Trump has rejected the counsel of his own intelligence services and preferred propaganda from US adversary Russia. He pushed discredited therapies for Covid-19, such as hydroxychloroquine, that federal regulators spurned. His Environmental Protection Agency has sent a wrecking ball through regulations meant to save the planet. He withdrew from the Paris climate accord to accommodate his embrace of fossil fuel polluters and has overturned fuel efficiency standards for cars.
  • "It'll start getting cooler. You just watch," Trump responded."I wish science agreed with you," the official replied."I don't think science knows, actually," Trump said, closing the official down.
  • Trump's longtime hostility to mask wearing -- which scientific experts say is critical to slowing the spread of the virus -- was clearly rooted in hostility to what many of his supporters see as an infringement of individual rights.
  • "I find it abhorrent that political influences are trying and perhaps successfully inserting themselves into the CDC communications, which have always been a model of science-based rectitude, very, very rigorous,"
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Opinion | California, We Can't Go On Like This - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ornia-wildfires-blackouts.html california suburb lifestyle American dream consumption NIMBY crisis history culture politics policy
shared by Javier E on 26 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Such has been the gagging unwinnability of life in the nation’s most populous state in the sweltering summer of 2020, in what I have been assured is the greatest country ever to have existed. The virus begs you to open a window; the inferno forces you to keep it shut.
  • What is California’s fundamental trouble? Neither socialism nor Trumpian neglect and incompetence, but something more elemental to life in the Golden State: A refusal by many Californians to live sustainably and inclusively, to give up a little bit of their own convenience for the collective good.
  • Californian suburbia, the ideal of much of American suburbia, was built and sold on the promise of endless excess — everyone gets a car, a job, a single-family home and enough water and gasoline and electricity to light up the party.
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  • But it is long past obvious that infinitude was a false promise. Traffic, sprawl, homelessness and ballooning housing costs are all consequences of our profligacy with the land and our other resources.
  • In addition to a hotter, drier climate, the fires, too, are fanned by an unsustainable way of life. Many blazes were worsened by Californians moving into areas near forests known as the “urban-wildland interface.” Once people move near forested land, fires tend to follow — either because they deliberately or inadvertently ignite them, or because they need electricity, delivered by electrical wires that can cause sparks that turn into conflagrations.
  • In many ways the 2020 election is shaping up to be a fight over the soul of the suburbs — their role in America’s future, and who they are for.
  • At the Republican convention this week, Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the couple who brandished guns at protesters in St. Louis, asserted that liberals want to “abolish the suburbs” by ending single-family home zoning.
  • The liberals who live in California’s suburbs may not identify with the McCloskeys, but their ugly spectacle has helped unmask NIMBYism, one of California’s most reckless ideologies, for the racist vision it has long been.
  • Neither Biden nor his party nor just about anyone else in national or state politics has been willing to honestly discuss the incalculable damage that California-style suburban life has wreaked on our world. In California, if anything is going to ruin the suburbs, it is more likely to be a wildfire than a new president.
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The Western Drought Is Bad. Here's What You Should Know About It. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nia-western-united-states.html
shared by rerobinson03 on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Drought emergencies have been declared. Farmers and ranchers are suffering. States are facing water cutbacks. Large wildfires are burning earlier than usual. And there appears to be little relief in sight.
  • A drought usually starts with less-than-normal precipitation (and what is normal varies from region to region). If the dryness persists, river flows and reservoir and groundwater levels start to decline. Warm temperatures have an impact, too, causing winter snowpack to melt faster, which can affect the availability of water throughout the year. Excessive heat also causes more evaporation from soils and vegetation, which can lead to crop failures and increases the risk of severe wildfires.
  • Experts with the United States Drought Monitor, a collaboration of several federal agencies and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, assess the severity of drought in a given area, ranking it from moderate to exceptional.
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  • It’s very bad, both in terms of the size of the affected area and the severity. The latest map from the drought monitor shows that all or nearly all of California, Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and North Dakota are in drought, and in large areas of those states conditions are “severe” or “exceptional.” Colorado, Idaho, Washington, Montana, South Dakota and southwestern Texas are also affected.
  • It is true that much of the West is normally hotter and drier than other parts of the country. Much of the Southwest and parts of Southern California are desert. Las Vegas, for example, averages about four inches of rain a year, about a 10th of the national average. Much of the rest of California has a Mediterranean climate, which can be wet in the winter but is hot and dry in summer.
  • The fall and winter are usually wetter in California and the Pacific Northwest, so that may help. A pattern of summer storms known as the Southwest monsoon may help in Arizona, New Mexico and other areas. But the monsoon is unpredictable — the 2019 and 2020 monsoon seasons brought so little rain they were referred to as “nonsoons,” and are one reason the drought is so severe this year.
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Summer Is Normal. Heat Season Is Deadly. - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...619302 heat season summer
shared by Javier E on 27 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • too few Americans think about heat waves, which claim more lives globally than any other weather-related hazard, as a problem for which systematic, long-term preparation is warranted. To protect human life as temperatures soar, we need to conceive of what we might call heat season as a phenomenon distinct from summer—a part of the year that people in much of the country have traditionally viewed with great fondness.
  • Historically, wildfire season in the United States has begun in May and ended in October; however, wildfires raged well into December last year.
  • The annual Atlantic hurricane season formally begins June 1 and ends November 30. The emergence of Tropical Storm Ana on May 22 made 2021 the seventh consecutive year that a storm strong enough to be named formed off-season.
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  • Meanwhile, the economic ramifications of heat waves become clearer every year. In 2017, 120-degree heat grounded flights in Phoenix. In Washington, D.C., and London, train service abruptly halted when tracks melted
  • According to the International Labour Organization, heat stress is also projected to reduce total working hours worldwide by 2.2 percent by 2030—“a productivity loss equivalent to 80 million full-time jobs.”
  • The direct physical threat may be most acute in cities, where temperatures on a scorching summer day can vary by as much as 45 degrees from a well-shaded area to one without trees. This is one more way in which poor Americans bear the brunt of broiling temperatures. As noted by the nonprofit American Forests, a map of tree cover in America’s cities is in many cases a map of income and race.
  • Heat season is upon us. We must acknowledge our risks to manage and survive them, and that process begins by calling the silent killer by its real name.
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'Potentially historic': dangerous winds expected as fires burn across California | US n... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-latest-power-shutoff-pge-tick history crisis
shared by brickol on 26 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Californians braced for power cuts and a “potentially historic” wind event on Saturday as a growing wildfire prompted fresh evacuations for 50,000 people in the northern Bay Area.
  • The tumultuous Kincade fire spread to 25,455 acres in the wine-growing region of Sonoma county, with meteorologists warning of severe, windy conditions beginning Saturday night that could see gusts of up to 80mph. The entire communities of Healdsburg and Windsor were ordered to evacuate.
  • The Sonoma county sheriff’s office said it is expected to be the biggest evacuation in the county in more than 25 years.
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  • The National Weather Service described the conditions as “the strongest since the 2017 wine country fires and potentially a historic event given the strength and duration of the winds”.
  • The Kincade fire broke out late on Wednesday night and has so far destroyed nearly 50 structures.
  • Meanwhile, millions across the state will have their power cut again as California’s largest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), said it would shut off electricity for the third time in as many weeks. PG&E said it would begin blackouts in the afternoon for about 940,000 homes and businesses in 36 counties for 48 hours or longer throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, wine country and Sierra foothills. An estimated 2.35 million people are due to be affected, thousands more than previously predicted.
  • Another blaze that forced evacuations of 50,000 residents in suburbs north of Los Angeles grew to 4,615 acres overnight. The Tick fire, which started on Thursday, has destroyed nine homes and businesses while threatening 10,000 more, according to firefighters.
  • The Tick fire is currently 25% contained, while the Kincade fire is 10% contained.
  • California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has declared a local emergency to assist with battling the blazes, and thousands of firefighters have been deployed to both locations.
  • The power shutoff in Geyserville created a dangerous challenge when it came time to evacuate residents as the blaze crept nearer. Typically during evacuations, local authorities deploy reverse 911 calls to alert individual residents. With the power out, evacuees reported being awakened in the early hours by frantic knocks on their front doors.
  • Though nine wildfires are currently burning throughout the state, none have reached the level of death and destruction witnessed in the past few years. Nevertheless fears remain, especially among those who lived through the devastation of the previous fires. The Kincade fire was starting to skirt along the path of the 2015 Valley fire, which killed four people and burned through more than 76,000 acres.
  • The harsh fire weather conditions have spread beyond the state, kicking up flames in parts of Baja California, just across the border from San Diego in Mexico.
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Australian bushfire smoke stokes health fears in cities - 0 views

nypost.com/...ke-stokes-serious-health-fears crisis
shared by brookegoodman on 16 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Modern government office blocks in the Australian capital Canberra have been closed because the air inside is too dangerous for civil servants to breathe.
  • The sun has glowed an eerie red behind a brown shrouded sky for weeks over Australian metropolitan areas that usually rank high in the world’s most livable cities indexes
  • It’s an unprecedented dilemma for Australians accustomed to blue skies and sunny days that has raised fears for the long-term health consequences if prolonged exposure to choking smoke becomes the new summer norm. Similar concerns over smoke are emerging in other regions of the globe being impacted by more fires tied to climate change, including the Western US.
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  • My daughter hasn’t shown any sort of symptoms, let’s say. For me, I can feel it in my lungs, my throat has felt weird
  • Slovenian tennis player Dalila Jakupovic fell to her knees in a coughing fit on Wednesday while competing in a qualifying match for the Australian Open in Melbourne.
  • Hospital admissions have increased in the smoke-affected cities, with some patients suffering from asthma for the first time in their lives. The government has responded by distributing 3.5 million free particle-excluding masks.
  • Short-term exposure to wildfire smoke can worsen existing asthma and lung disease, leading to emergency room treatment or hospitalization, studies have shown.
  • There is little known about the long-term effects of wildfire smoke because of difficulties in studying populations years after a wildfire.
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Climate Disruption Is Now Locked In. The Next Moves Will Be Crucial. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...climate-change-future.html climate disruption 2020 crisis politics
shared by Javier E on 23 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • Decades of growing crisis are already locked into the global ecosystem and cannot be reversed.
  • This means the kinds of cascading disasters occurring today — drought in the West fueling historic wildfires that send smoke all the way to the East Coast, or parades of tropical storms lining up across the Atlantic to march destructively toward North America — are no longer features of some dystopian future. They are the here and now, worsening for the next generation and perhaps longer, depending on humanity’s willingness to take action.
  • “And I think it’s a lot harder for people to say that I’m being alarmist now.”
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  • Conversations about climate change have broken into everyday life, to the top of the headlines and to center stage in the presidential campaign.
  • The questions are profound and urgent. Can this be reversed? What can be done to minimize the looming dangers for the decades ahead? Will the destruction of recent weeks become a moment of reckoning, or just a blip in the news cycle?
  • “It’s as if we’ve been smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for decades” and the world is now feeling the effects
  • But, she said, “we’re not dead yet.”
  • Climate change is more a slope than a cliff, experts agreed. We’re still far from any sort of “game over” moment where it’s too late to act. There remains much that can be done to limit the damage to come, to brace against the coming megafires and superstorms and save lives and hold onto a thriving civilization.
  • The effects of climate change evident today are the results of choices that countries made decades ago to keep pumping heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at ever-increasing rates despite warnings from scientists about the price to be paid.
  • Nations, including the United States, have dithered so long in cutting emissions that progressively more global warming is assured for decades to come, even if efforts to shift away from fossil fuels were accelerated tomorrow.
  • Things are on track to get “twice as bad” as they are now, he said, “if not worse.”
  • it may be time to flip that chronological framing, and consider today the new starting point.
  • “Don’t think of it as the warmest month of August in California in the last century,” he wrote. “Think of it as one of the coolest months of August in California in the next century.”
  • Their most sobering message was that the world still hasn’t seen the worst of it. Gone is the climate of yesteryear, and there’s no going back.
  • “It’s not that it’s out of our control. The whole thing is in our control.”
  • Managing climate change, experts said, will require rethinking virtually every aspect of daily life
  • how and where homes are built, how power grids are designed, how people plan for the future with the collective good in mind.
  • It will require an epochal shift in politics in a country that has, on the whole, ignored climate change
  • The fires, along with others in places including Colorado, Oregon and Washington, destroyed entire towns and sent smoke tens of thousands of feet high. San Francisco, Portland and Seattle have suffered some of the unhealthiest air quality on the planet, beating cities such as Beijing and New Delhi for the title. Smoke spread all the way across the continent, with particles coloring sunsets on the East Coast.
  • Evidence of global warming — which, scientists said, helps drive a rise in wildfire activity by creating hotter and drier conditions — was hanging visibly in the air.
  • For a long time, “there was so much focus on how climate change would affect the most vulnerable, like low-lying island nations or coral reefs — things that don’t dramatically affect the economic powerhouses of the world,”
  • “There’s often been this arrogant assumption that wealth provides protection.”
  • “we’re all in this together.”
  • Again and again, climate scientists have shown that our choices now range from merely awful to incomprehensibly horrible.
  • every coal plant in China, every steel mill in Europe, every car and truck in the United States.
  • It’s a staggering task. It means reorienting a global economy that depends on fossil fuels
  • Even if we start radically slashing emissions today, it could be decades before those changes start to appreciably slow the rate at which Earth is warming. In the meantime, we’ll have to deal with effects that continue to worsen.
  • “Seriously, it is not reversible.”
  • First, experts broadly agreed, if we want to stop the planet from relentlessly heating up forever, humanity will quickly need to eliminate its emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases.
  • Whether Americans can adopt that mentality remains an open question.“We’ve often heard the argument that it will be too expensive to cut emissions and it will just be easier to adapt,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University. But we’ve now had decades of warnings, he said, “and we’re not even adapted to the present climate.”
  • Failure to do so doubles or triples that number.
  • If we act now, sea levels could rise another 1 to 2 feet this century.
  • If we don’t, Antarctica’s ice sheets could destabilize irreversibly and ocean levels could keep rising at an inexorable pace for centuries, making coastal civilization all but unmanageable.
  • The best hope is to slow the pace of warming enough to maintain some control for humanity.
  • “In our research, we’ve found that most systems can cope with a 1.5-degree or 2-degree world, although it will be very costly and extremely difficult to adapt
  • “But in a 4-degree world, in many cases, the system just doesn’t work anymore.”
  • So, even as nations cut emissions, they will need to accelerate efforts to adapt to the climate change they can no longer avoid.
  • “The human capacity for adaptation is extraordinary — not unlimited, but extraordinary,”
  • “I’m much more concerned for the future of the nonhuman than I am for the future of humans, precisely because we’re just very, very good at adaptation.”
  • adaptation is usually a reactive measure, not a preventive one
  • Adapting to climate change means envisioning bigger disasters to come — again, flipping the framing away from history and into the future.
  • “Humans have difficulty imagining things that we haven’t experienced yet,”
  • It’s hard to visualize the entire West Coast aflame until you actually see it. And if we can’t see it, we tend to discount the risk.”
  • And there’s the moral hazard problem, which is when people are shielded from the costs of their decisions and thus make bad ones.
  • Cascading Disasters
  • Adaptation can quickly become bogged down in a tangle of competing motivations and unintended consequences.
  • Proposals for stricter building codes or higher insurance premiums face opposition from builders and voters alike.
  • If we cut emissions rapidly, about one-seventh of the world’s population will suffer severe heat waves every few years.
  • as climate change intensifies, it increases the risk of “compound hazards,” when numerous disasters strike simultaneously, as well as the risk that one disaster cascades into another.
  • Experts also noted that climate change is an accelerant of inequality. Those most affected, globally and in the United States, tend to be the most vulnerable populations.
  • One concern is that adaptability will not be a collective effort. Wealthier people may find ways to protect themselves, while others are left fending for themselves
  • A Lifetime of Clues
  • For well over a century, science has provided us with powerful clues that this was coming.
  • As early as the 1850s, researchers realized that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide could trap heat on Earth. This came at the dawn of the Industrial Age,
  • “I feel like the climate scientists have kind of done our job,” said Dr. Kalmus, the Los Angeles-based scientist. “We’ve laid it out pretty clearly, but nobody’s doing anything. So now it’s kind of up to the social scientists.”
  • ne 2017 study found that people who experience extreme weather are more likely to support climate adaptation measures than before. But the effect diminished over time. It may be that people mentally adjust to unusual weather patterns, updating their perception of what they consider normal.
  • “There’s too much complexity and, frankly, too much that needs to be changed, that we’re flitting from one concern to another,”
  • “What’s beautiful about the human species is that we have the free will to decide our own fate,” said Ilona Otto, a climate scientist at the Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change. “We have the agency to take courageous decisions and do what’s needed,” she said. “If we choose.”
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Trump Administration Rejects California's Request for Wildfire Relief - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • The Trump administration has rejected California’s request for disaster relief aid for six recent fires that have scorched more than 1.8 million acres in land, destroyed thousands of structures and caused at least three deaths, a state official said.
  • The state plans to appeal the decision, Mr. Ferguson said, adding that the state believes it has a “strong case that California’s request meets the federal requirements for approval.”
  • Infrastructure damage estimates from the fires had exceeded $229 million,
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  • While the state did not include a specific dollar amount in its request, Mr. Newsom wrote that because of a recession induced by the pandemic, California went from a projected $5.6 billion budget surplus to a $54.3 billion projected deficit. “California’s economy is suffering in a way we have not seen since the 2009 Great Recession,” he said.
  • California has been smacked in the face from climate change, one scientist said.
  • Over the past 50 years, excluding the last four, wildfires averaged about the same in direct damages: a billion dollars per year, adjusted for inflation.But in three of the past four years, including this one, fires are on track to cause damages in excess of $10 billion.
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Washington Gov. Jay Inslee On How To Stay Optimistic On Fighting Climate Change : NPR - 0 views

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  • The fires in Washington are largely under control now, but the state has been experiencing dangerous, even deadly, wildfires for years, something Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee says are only made worse by climate change.
  • "Wildfires aren't new to the west, but their scope and danger today is unlike anything firefighters have seen
  • Fires like these are becoming the norm, not the exception. That's because as the climate changes, our fires change."
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  • "While we're burning down and the glaciers are disappearing and the Arctic is melting and hurricanes ... moderators in the debate groups have ignored this issue totally," Inslee says. "Yes, it's a good thing that it was brought up, but it was very, very disillusioning that one of the candidates prevented a rational discussion of this because it deserves it big time."
  • The fires are under control now, but we have to understand we have been ravaged by what I would call not wildfires, but climate fires. These are climate fires, fundamentally, because the recent cataclysmic events we've suffered now in multiple years
  • When you talk to the firefighters, what they will tell you is that they're seeing fire behavior that they've never seen before. Not only are they more frequent, but the intensity of these fires — people have just never seen this in our state before. And these are not just forest fires. These are grass and brush and sagebrush fires. And the situation now is the heat and the aridity have dried out this fuel, so that they are like putting gasoline all over the state of Washington.
  • Some of the first victims [of climate change are] the farmers who had their fields devastated in the floods last year. This year, they got hit by the 100 mile-an-hour-plus [winds]. It knocked down all their corn.
  • The smoke from the forest fires have created a risk for a degradation of our grapes. We're having changes in the hydrological cycle where you don't have irrigation water.
  • So farmers are one of the first groups who were hardest hit, but they are also the group who can play such a pivotal role in reducing carbon, getting it out of our atmosphere because the soil can sequester carbon. We need to get carbon out of the atmosphere and into our topsoil and farmers play a very important role in that and can have a revenue stream so that we can pay farmers for a service of sequestering carbon to get it out of the atmosphere.
  • And that plus they have the ability to grow abundant biofuels, which they're doing today.
  • There is progress going on in the United States. We just need to make it national. That's No. 1.
  • No. 2, the technology, the rapidity of the technological progress is incredible.
  • And the third reason that we need to be optimistic is that it's just the only effective tool. I think maybe it was Churchill who said, "when you're going through hell, keep going." And that's what we need to do in this matter.
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Climate Change and California's Favorite Trees - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • Earlier this year, as wildfires tore through millions of acres of California, some of the most startling images were of the Golden State’s iconic trees burning, charred or reduced to ash.
  • They are California’s three plant species that attract crowds from around the world.
  • But 2020 was not a good year for the coast redwood, the Joshua tree or the giant sequoia. Already under long-term threat by the changing climate, the enormous wildfires took dramatic aim at the state’s most iconic trees.
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  • Gone are countless old-growth redwoods, thousands of ancient sequoias and an estimated 1.3 million Joshua trees (which, of course, are a yucca).
  • “They are literally irreplaceable — unless you have 2,000 years to wait.”
  • This struck me as something we had not seen before, and we hadn’t: More than a million Joshua trees, torched.
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Opinion | Everyone's Moving to Texas. Here's Why. - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • Texas’ climate risks. Houston will not do well on a warming planet — it is economically dependent on the oil and gas industry and is threatened by hurricanes and a surge in sea levels. But other big cities, including Dallas and Fort Worth, face more moderate risks, especially compared to many cities in California. Yes, Texas is very hot and likely to get hotter; but if a lot of other American cities also begin to get very hot, Texas cities might not feel as overheated by comparison. In addition to the risk of heat stress, Texas also faces the possibility of water shortages, but that will be true across much of the West, including California’s population centers.
  • What Texans will not have to worry about as much are wildfires, the scourge of so much of California, and the attendant air pollution, though experts predict increases in wildfires in Texas. It’s true that Texas’ less extreme fire risk is related to something precious about California that Texas lacks — abundant trees and mountains in major metro areas, or really any of California’s striking natural beauty. But nobody said living through climate change would be pretty.
  • You might argue that it’s too speculative to take into account something as broad and complex as climate change when deciding where to live. And more important, there’s no real escape from a long-term planetary disaster — even if you move to some place with lovely weather, your life is bound to be altered in significant ways as habitability shifts elsewhere on the globe.
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  • living through California’s tinderbox years has convinced me to keep an eye on climate dangers; while forecasts on climate risk are inexact, making some effort to anticipate its danger when deciding where to live feels more responsible than ignoring it. And when people in California are paying a million dollars above asking price for homes in areas of high and increasing wildfire risk, isn’t that something like ignoring it?
  • There is a concept in behavioral economics known as a “Minsky moment,” which describes when a bull market suddenly wises up to its own unsustainability, causing a collapse in prices.
  • Jesse Keenan, an associate professor at the Tulane University School of Architecture who studies how climate change affects housing markets, told me that a Minsky moment could be coming for high-priced homes in at-risk coastal cities. As home lenders, insurance companies and other players in the real estate business begin to better understand their exposure to climate risks, they may raise premiums or force disclosure requirements that could lower home values.
  • At the moment, buying a home in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, looks like a safe investment. But lately I have begun to obsess about the uncertainty built into the changing weather. What if three fire seasons from now proves to be one fire season too many — and, in a blink, the housing market into which we’ve invested so much of our future implodes? “In a way, climate change could begin to look like a foreclosure crisis,” Keenan told me.
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New Measure of Climate's Toll: Disasters Are Now Common Across US - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • a report released on Wednesday uses a different measure: Which parts of the country have suffered the greatest number of federally declared disasters?
  • That designation is reserved for disasters so severe, they overwhelm the ability of state and local officials to respond. The report finds that disasters like these have become alarmingly common.
  • From 2011 to the end of last year, 90 percent of U.S. counties have experienced a flood, hurricane, wildfire or other calamity serious enough to receive a federal disaster declaration, according to the report, and more than 700 counties suffered five or more such disasters.
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  • During that same period, 29 states had, on average, at least one federally declared disaster a year somewhere within their borders. Five states have experienced at least 20 disasters since 2011.
  • The numbers exclude disaster declarations related to the coronavirus pandemic.
  • “Climate change is here,”
  • “Every single taxpayer is paying for climate change.”
  • By focusing on federally declared disasters, the report is able to equalize those differences, offering something close to a true accounting of which places are most exposed to climate shocks they cannot cope with on their own.
  • At the top of that list are five counties that have each experienced, on average, more than a disaster a year since 2011. Those counties are concentrated in two areas: Southern Louisiana (where counties are called parishes) and eastern Kentucky.
  • Louisiana outpaces the rest of the United States in another regard. Over the past decade, the state has received more federal disaster money per capita — $1,736 for each resident — than anywhere else in the nation, the report found. Only New York State comes close, at $1,348.
  • Since 2011, California has received 25 federal disaster declarations, including for wildfires in 2017 and 2018 that resulted in $2.5 billion in federal money to rebuild public infrastructure. Mississippi and Oklahoma have each suffered 22 disasters. Iowa has had 21, mostly for severe storms and flooding
  • Not every type of disaster is associated with climate change. For example, it’s unclear whether there is a link between rising temperatures and earthquakes. But scientists have become increasingly convinced that a warming world is contributing to worsening floods, hurricanes, wildfires and other extreme weather events.
  • The data also shows the areas least exposed to unmanageable climate shocks, at least so far. States in the Midwest, including Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Michigan, are among those with the smallest number of federal disaster declarations, with an average of roughly one disaster every two years.
  • At the bottom of the list is Nevada, which has had just three federal disaster declarations since 2011. Next door, Arizona has had just six. Yet, Nevada and Arizona ranked highest for heat-related deaths from 2018 to 2021, according to the report
  • “Heat has the highest mortality of all climate impacts, but their disaster declarations were so low,” Ms. Chester said. The reason: Federal disaster declarations focus on property damage more than direct human consequences like illness, injury or death.
  • “By better understanding risk,” she said, “we can more effectively take action together to accelerate resilience and adaptation in our nation’s most at-risk and disadvantaged communities.”
  • To pay for that new spending, Rebuild by Design proposes, states should impose a 2 percent surcharge on insurance premiums.
  • Using an insurance surtax to pay for disasters is a strategy that is already in use, in a sense. As the report notes, Florida levies surcharges on private insurance policies to make up for shortfalls in its state-run insurance program — something that’s likely to happen in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian.
  • Rebuild by Design suggests reversing the chronology. Rather than taxing insurance payments to pay for disaster recovery, a state would come up with additional funds before a storm, then use that money to better prepare communities before a disaster strikes, perhaps making it unnecessary for the federal government to declare a disaster at all.
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"It Spreads Like Wildfire": The Coronavirus Comes to New York's Prisons | The New Yorker - 0 views

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  • The coronavirus has now found its way into New York’s prison system. On Sunday, the state’s Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, or D.O.C.C.S., confirmed that two prisoners at Wende Correctional Facility had tested positive for COVID-19.
  • “It is absolutely impossible to practice social distancing in prison,” Laron Rogers, who is serving twenty-five years to life at Sing Sing, wrote to me on Wednesday,
  • Rogers learned about the positive test from his peers, not the prison administration.
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  • Ten days ago, D.O.C.C.S. closed all its prisons to visitors—with the exception of non-contact legal visits—and issued each prisoner five postage stamps, two electronic messages, and one free phone call per week.
  • It’s nearly impossible to provide infection control in these settings,”
  • “If you wanted to set up a situation that would promote rapid transmission of a respiratory virus, you would say prison: it’s close quarters, unsanitary, individuals in frequent contact.”
  • “All programs have been cancelled except the Soap Shop,”
  • Earlier this month, about a week after New York reported its first case of COVID-19, and when stores were beginning to run out of toilet paper and hand sanitizer, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that incarcerated workers had begun producing a state-branded hand sanitizer, called NYS Clean.
  • The soap shop is part of Corcraft, a state entity that pays workers between sixteen and sixty-five cents per hour,
  • When I asked D.O.C.C.S. about preparations for the coronavirus, a spokesperson told me that every facility has an emergency control plan, and that state prisons were used to dealing with infectious diseases,
  • On Friday, I summarized my reporting for Gregg Gonsalves, the epidemiologist, and asked him whether he considered the prison system’s preparations sufficient. “You have a gaping wound and you’re giving a Band-Aid,” he replied. Although the U.S. as a whole may be able to flatten the curve of the outbreak through social distancing, Gonsalves said, he expected to see in prisons, jails, and immigration detention centers a largely “uncontrolled, unflattened curve,”
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