It seems clear that the Western US is going to burn until the fuel is gone in enough places that megafires can't develop easily. It's like ecological herd immunity.
Most affected states are still in the reactive firefighting mode rather than thinking how to get ahead of the curve by removing a century of fuel accumulated from determined fire suppression. There's no question rising temperatures make things worse, but really the bill is just coming due sooner.
CA gov Gavin Newsome's news conference is a good sample of what's currently wrong with our approach. It's what he doesn't say that's interesting.
It's not just fire suppression. We've got a trifecta of drought, bark beetle infestation and fire suppression (aka, tree density).[0] It's the killer combo.
This needs more upvotes. I agree that our fire management hasn't been great, but there is more to it than that. Climate change is driving both more fuel and deeper droughts, and making better conditions for bark beetles. There isn't a single answer to this.
Still, fire suppression is the 800 pound gorilla. We're not just seeing fires in the conifer-dominated Sierra. It's also in the savannah and scrub zones as well. These all burned regular in prehistoric times.
ideologues are able to turn any event into evidence for their perspective. I'm not a climate change denier, I just agree with you that the real issue is humankind's fire suppression.
There are a bunch of things that could be done, but no one is happy to support it. Selective logging, brush clearing, not putting multi-million dollar homes in the forest. etc.
"Selective logging" usually means removing the big, healthy, valuable trees and not the brush and dead wood that provide the fuel, but are not worth the effort to clear financially. It's expensive to do it well.
Correct, but these kinds of forests will often have their deadwood trees removed as a form of spacing to allow either more quality trees or growth room for existing trees.
It was 20 years less of neglect. Not sure when we have stop doing controlled burns in the name of keeping air quality good. It was more than 20 years ago.
More fuel and warmer/drier. Snowpack for example has moved up 1000' or more since the 1990s in the middle Sierra Nevada, which means less moisture in the summer.
I would think the closer analogy to a pandemic would be that it calms down when it kills nearly everyone. But, I suppose that is herd immunity in some sense.
The photos in the article are not enhanced for dramatic effect. This is really how it looks like in person.
Hopefully this will finally hit some people hard and we'll reverse the decades of urban sprawl and environmental mismanagement. In all likelihood, it will be forgotten as soon as the blue sky returns.
I've been capturing pictures through the window that are half indoors, half outdoors. This makes the color correction algorithm stop trying to get rid of the orange.
If you use a camera app like Halide, then you can manually turn off the Automatica white balance correction that assumes that this scene lighting is impossible.
Strong blade runner vibes going on today. It's so odd to see people going about their day as if normal when there is nothing normal about today. Was outside near Lake Merritt and there are people jogging and having coffee. Pure dystopia.
Why should they not being doing that? Would you prefer they just freak out? At least in SF, the marine layer is keeping the smoke above where people are so it's not unsafe to be out.
Redmond, WA didn't have orange skies (hazy and smokey, but not orange), but with air quality in the "unhealthy whether you're 'sensitive' or not" range and a thin layer of ash on the car, I decided to skip the morning run yesterday. According to TFA, it didn't smell smokey in SF, so perhaps that's why folks were out?
Based on NOAA satellites, the smoke and fires seem to end in Oregon
No, your view window ends in Oregon. I don't know how one is supposed to determine anything about what's going on in Washington state from that link. Here's a more useful link for the doubtful:
Saw something similar to this in the Inland Empire during the camp fires up at Big Bear. I remember attending a Civil War reenactment at the time and it was raining ash and the smoke was so thick you couldn't see the sun. It was so surreal.
we had a milder version of this kind of pollution in LA for the past few days, although today seems almost back to normal. over the weekend, the orange haziness of the sky was pretty noticeable.
Sun is blocked, and thus the temperature on Peninsula which was predicted to be in 90ies (naturally given no NW wind) yesterday and today is 65F currently at the noon. Basically a nuclear winter preview - the amount of wood burned in the last month near Bay Area (say 20 ton x 800K acres) is like several large nukes. Daily - 20 ton x 10K+ acres - is like a smaller one.
Sacramento and Newsome won't be doing anything at all to reduce wildfires, just like Brown before him. No controlled burns. No dead tree removal. No fire breaks. Nothing.
Corvallis, OR, is one of the worst places right now. Orange skies and ash everywhere. It's working its way indoors and I can see black deposits collecting in my sink.
Most affected states are still in the reactive firefighting mode rather than thinking how to get ahead of the curve by removing a century of fuel accumulated from determined fire suppression. There's no question rising temperatures make things worse, but really the bill is just coming due sooner.
CA gov Gavin Newsome's news conference is a good sample of what's currently wrong with our approach. It's what he doesn't say that's interesting.
[1] https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/09/08/...