The Climate thread

[YChang 3430]

2 hours ago, MC Fresh Breath said:

This is never popular on a Texas board, and I'm not going to argue it.  But if you feel helpless about it all, maybe personal change is the one thing you can control.  Reduce your meat consumption, folks.  Not telling you to go vegan.  But maybe try a meatless Monday or two, and go from there.  Maybe in the long run it makes no difference.  But maybe in your life it helps you feel like you're actually doing something to help.  

Gone vegetarian for meals Monday through Friday since the start of the Covid shut down last year. Def can’t go vegan so I still eat dairy and eggs. But otherwise, it’s become a pretty easy habit now. Like you said, it’s good for yourself and your own ability to make a difference. 

[atomheartbevo 89396]

3 hours ago, Biff Tannen said:

This is one of the more underrated ways to help and the amount of water, land, and yes, methane that is used and created purely for livestock is astonishing.  There were never meant to be this many cows, chickens, and pigs on this planet.

2 hours ago, Gap03 said:

For that matter, I'm pretty sure there were never meant to be this humans on this planet ...

 

['stache 21744]

We'll just all move north over the next 100 years. I might prefer Canada at this point anyway.

[Post Oak 20182]

44 minutes ago, 'stache said:

We'll just all move north over the next 100 years. I might prefer Canada at this point anyway.

I've been thinking about Maine or Michigan

[cactusflinthead 27594]

 

[Biff Tannen 45491]

4 hours ago, cactusflinthead said:

 

A year after the fact, but still relevant. 

[WhatTheBuck 28703]

18 hours ago, MC Fresh Breath said:

This is never popular on a Texas board, and I'm not going to argue it.  But if you feel helpless about it all, maybe personal change is the one thing you can control.  Reduce your meat consumption, folks.  Not telling you to go vegan.  But maybe try a meatless Monday or two, and go from there.  Maybe in the long run it makes no difference.  But maybe in your life it helps you feel like you're actually doing something to help.  

That’s a problem. But more importantly we need to rush to stop using fossil fuels as a source of energy. That will be even less popular on a Texas board. But we needed to get on that decades ago. Fuck Reagan for taking Carter’s solar panels off of the White House. Fuck George H.W. Bush for forging a partnership with the Saudis to replace Iran as our energy partner in the Middle East after the Iranian revolution. And fuck everyone who ignored the science over the past 30+ years for the sake of profit starting with Exxon. They are to the global warming denial machine what CO2 is to greenhouse gases. Wtf do I care if someone in the O&G industry goes broke while someone in the green, renewable energy industry gets rich? The world would be better off in the latter case.

[landman 559]

10 minutes ago, WhatTheBuck said:

That’s a problem. But more importantly we need to rush to stop using fossil fuels as a source of energy. That will be even less popular on a Texas board. But we needed to get on that decades ago. Fuck Reagan for taking Carter’s solar panels off of the White House. Fuck George H.W. Bush for forging a partnership with the Saudis to replace Iran as our energy partner in the Middle East after the Iranian revolution. And fuck everyone who ignored the science over the past 30+ years for the sake of profit starting with Exxon. They are to the global warming denial machine what CO2 is to greenhouse gases. Wtf do I care if someone in the O&G industry goes broke while someone in the green, renewable energy industry gets rich? The world would be better off in the latter case.

What about natural gas?  Plenty of it, and significantly reduced emissions.

[WhatTheBuck 28703]

8 minutes ago, landman said:

What about natural gas?  Plenty of it, and significantly reduced emissions.

Less bad doesn’t mean good. Don’t buy into the industry propaganda. 

[drt 637]

Our kids are going to be dumbfounded that we burned fossil fuels instead of saving them to make plastics and other products we can't get elsewhere easily.  

[Biff Tannen 45491]

1 hour ago, landman said:

What about natural gas?  Plenty of it, and significantly reduced emissions.

 

1 hour ago, WhatTheBuck said:

Less bad doesn’t mean good. Don’t buy into the industry propaganda. 

I think landman is right in terms of using LNG as a bridge to cleaner options.  The ultimate answer is a mix of sources with coal/oil/gasoline being phased out ASAP.  

[elfenix 34169]

Quote

Modern climate science is old enough for many of its early predictions to be checked against evidence—the overall global warming trend; specific patterns like nighttime warming exceeding daytime warming; or the cooling of the stratosphere. Even with all that new evidence, the estimated amount of warming you get for a given amount of greenhouse gas emissions hasn’t really changed since 1979.

The flip side to this is also true. Those who have opposed climate science’s conclusions—they’re a broad menagerie, including scientists in different fields, politics-obsessed bloggers, and think-tank employees—have also been squawking long enough for predictions to be tested. Despite their alternate-reality insistence that climate science never predicted anything, these contrarians don't spend much time showing off their own predictions’ track record.

The reason for that is that the track record is very, very bad. Like the cringeworthy poetry you wrote in high school, they probably hope that everyone will just forget about it.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/08/a-look-back-at-very-bad-predictions-of-global-cooling/

[WhatTheBuck 28703]

On 8/10/2021 at 9:59 AM, drt said:

Our kids are going to be dumbfounded that we burned fossil fuels instead of saving them to make plastics and other products we can't get elsewhere easily.  

As if plastics are a good thing. I think maybe the most important use of oil is to make fertilizer to help feed an overpopulated world. And even that I don’t think is really a good thing. If we weren’t using it as an energy source then we could do that much more cheaply. But even that isn’t sustainable. It will eventually run out. Not in our lifetimes. Not in our children’s lifetimes. Not in our grandchildren’s lifetimes. But eventually it will. Natural resources that take hundreds of thousands, millions of years to develop, that we burn through as fast as we can in hundreds of years, will eventually run out and can’t be replaced.

I think we have a responsibility to future generations and we’ve been shirking our duties for decades. I don’t have the answers but I know the problems and we refuse to address them. Eventually we’ll have no use for fossil fuels, by choice or by force, and future generations will wonder how we could’ve acted so irresponsibly when we had every reason to know better and they’ll curse our names. 

[WhatTheBuck 28703]

On 8/10/2021 at 10:09 AM, Biff Tannen said:

 

I think landman is right in terms of using LNG as a bridge to cleaner options.  The ultimate answer is a mix of sources with coal/oil/gasoline being phased out ASAP.  

The problem is that nobody is saying that. Coal is really, really dirty and natural gas isn’t quite half as clean as coal. But the message being sent by the industry is that natural gas is clean so there’s nothing to worry about. How many coal power plants have been replaced by natural gas power plants? I mean, I get it, the least worst option is better than the rest of the bad fossil fuel options but it doesn’t change the fact that we are so far behind on addressing the problem and the people selling the message about how (relatively) clean natural gas is are still more focused on profit than actually fixing the problem. 

[Nice Guy Eddie 13406]

I think the ship has sailed in terms of eliminating a large percent of fossil fuels for energy. It's not going to disappear immediately and there will always be some of it for the foreseeable future. Wind power seems unstoppable in many areas. What we really need is solar to grow especially as battery technology continues to improve.

I don't see how cars won't be majority electric by 2035. There still will be use cases for gas and diesel but not for short trips.

[WhatTheBuck 28703]

All fossil fuels are solar power. We have a source of unlimited energy just 93 million miles away. If we could just figure out a way to harness it efficiently. Imagine if we would’ve spent the last 4 decades focused on trying. 

[Biff Tannen 45491]

41 minutes ago, WhatTheBuck said:

All fossil fuels are solar power. We have a source of unlimited energy just 93 million miles away. If we could just figure out a way to harness it efficiently. Imagine if we would’ve spent the last 4 decades focused on trying. 

Solar has become vastly more efficient, and cheaper, than it ever has been.  Perhaps it could be better, but compared to even 10 years ago it's way better.  I installed solar for a very brief time, but what that made me realize was how many wasted opportunities we have.  Next time you fly or are even in a tall building, just look at ALL the roof space around.  It's mindblowing.  Put solar on even 50% of that space and feed it into the grid and we are sitting in a much different position.

[Brisketexan 104537]

On 8/10/2021 at 7:32 AM, landman said:

What about natural gas?  Plenty of it, and significantly reduced emissions.

Yes.

On 8/10/2021 at 7:41 AM, WhatTheBuck said:

Less bad doesn’t mean good. Don’t buy into the industry propaganda. 

Yes, but.....

On 8/10/2021 at 9:09 AM, Biff Tannen said:

 

I think landman is right in terms of using LNG as a bridge to cleaner options.  The ultimate answer is a mix of sources with coal/oil/gasoline being phased out ASAP.  

^^^^^ This.  We have energy needs right now, and for the immediate future, that have to be met with a consumable resource.  NG is our best bet for that bridge.

7 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

Solar has become vastly more efficient, and cheaper, than it ever has been.  Perhaps it could be better, but compared to even 10 years ago it's way better.  I installed solar for a very brief time, but what that made me realize was how many wasted opportunities we have.  Next time you fly or are even in a tall building, just look at ALL the roof space around.  It's mindblowing.  Put solar on even 50% of that space and feed it into the grid and we are sitting in a much different position.

All good.  But the kabillion dollar question remains storage.  If we could turn "power generation companies" into "battery companies" that charge us for the privilege of storing energy on their batteries, then delivering it to us when we need it, then we could have a clean energy system that is compatible with a functioning capitalist economy.  And yes, there is SOME effort on this angle.....but the effort opposing clean energy is 100X stronger.

[WhatTheBuck 28703]

21 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

Solar has become vastly more efficient, and cheaper, than it ever has been.  Perhaps it could be better, but compared to even 10 years ago it's way better.  I installed solar for a very brief time, but what that made me realize was how many wasted opportunities we have.  Next time you fly or are even in a tall building, just look at ALL the roof space around.  It's mindblowing.  Put solar on even 50% of that space and feed it into the grid and we are sitting in a much different position.

I don’t know if solar panels alone will ever be the solution. Maybe. We need advances in battery technology to go along with it. But our climate is powered by the sun so wind power is also indirectly powered by the sun. So is geothermal as the earth is affected by the gravitational forces of the sun which pull and tug on it and cause stress on our planet’s molten core. I’ve seen proposals that we might use satellites to collect solar energy and beam it down to earth. That sounds like the stuff of science fiction but perhaps it might be possible in the future. We could probably figure it out if we would just try. But there’s a decent chance we won’t try until it’s too late.

[Pato del Muerto 52336]

38 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

Yes.

Yes, but.....

^^^^^ This.  We have energy needs right now, and for the immediate future, that have to be met with a consumable resource.  NG is our best bet for that bridge.

All good.  But the kabillion dollar question remains storage.  If we could turn "power generation companies" into "battery companies" that charge us for the privilege of storing energy on their batteries, then delivering it to us when we need it, then we could have a clean energy system that is compatible with a functioning capitalist economy.  And yes, there is SOME effort on this angle.....but the effort opposing clean energy is 100X stronger.

How do we store energy now?  How much more would it cost to do panels plus capacity vs just panels?  Localize it.  Micro grids. Power company pivots to installation and maintenance. 

[Dahobbs 17420]

Note the top right corner. 

[Biff Tannen 45491]

17 minutes ago, Pato del Muerto said:

How do we store energy now?  How much more would it cost to do panels plus capacity vs just panels?  Localize it.  Micro grids. Power company pivots to installation and maintenance. 

This.  And battery technology is growing by leaps and bounds, namely due, in my opinion, to Tesla stepping up and forcing the issue.  UT also has a big part in the advancement (thank you Dr. Goodenough).  

 

 

Quote

At the ripe age of 98, Dr. John Goodenough, professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin (UT) and inventor of the lithium-ion battery, is looking towards future energy storage solutions through a newly launched partnership with Energy Exploration Technologies (EnergyX). Earlier this year, Goodenough, along with several members of his lab at UT, started working with EnergyX, a young energy technology company founded by entrepreneur Teague Egan and with labs near Silicon Valley, in an effort to radically rethink the approach to energy storage.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nobel-prize-winning-inventor-of-the-lithium-ion-battery-has-his-eyes-set-on-the-next-big-breakthrough-in-energy-storage-301132645.html

[Pato del Muerto 52336]

48 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

Note the top right corner. 

Why should I believe Exxon?  They are ebbil!

[elfenix 34169]

microstorage/grids are actually pretty difficult to implement - the grid is basically 1 way. 

discussion about 15 minutes in: https://www.marketplace.org/shows/make-me-smart-with-kai-and-molly/our-power-grid-is-buckling-under-the-weight-of-climate-change/

[Biff Tannen 45491]

1 hour ago, elfenix said:

microstorage/grids are actually pretty difficult to implement - the grid is basically 1 way. 

discussion about 15 minutes in: https://www.marketplace.org/shows/make-me-smart-with-kai-and-molly/our-power-grid-is-buckling-under-the-weight-of-climate-change/

Interesting.  From what I recall in my training days, that was never looked upon as an impediment.  I wonder why you couldn't just have a wire from the panels (or the inverter I guess) feed the electrons into the main wire on the grid going the same direction?  An onramp, if you will, as opposed to reversing everything from your home.  

[Anastasis 23390]

Petro dollar is the basis of our economic hegemony.  Until we deal with that we are never letting the world divorce itself from a fossil fuel based world economy. Dealing with that is the  real rub and why things aren't going to meaningfully change.  But hey print a few more trillions, it's just all play money. Until it isn't. 

Edited August 12, 2021 by Anastasis

[elfenix 34169]

July was the hottest month on record:

By Kasha Patel

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/08/13/july-2021-hottest-record-month/

[elfenix 34169]

just another day in siberia:

 

 

[Lurch 5921]

I recall seeing that Russia potentially benefits from higher temperatures (current Siberia fires notwithstanding)

[bolverk 29394]

First-ever water shortage on the Colorado River will bring cuts for Arizona farmers

The federal government on Monday declared a first-ever water shortage on the Colorado River, announcing mandatory cutbacks next year that will bring major challenges for Arizona farmers and reduce the water allotments of Nevada and Mexico.

The declaration of a shortage by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has been anticipated for months and was triggered by the spiraling decline of Lake Mead, which stores water used by Arizona, Nevada, California and Mexico.

The reservoir near Las Vegas has fallen to its lowest levels since Hoover Dam was built in the 1930s and is continuing to drop after years of chronic overuse and drought intensified by climate change. It now stands at just 35% of full capacity.

 

[High Plains Drifter 10970]

 

Farmers will switch to ground water for a few years/decades until the ground water runs out.

 

My worry is that the fountains at the Bellagio and the Pirate show on the Strip will have to be curtailed.

[DigglerontheHoof 21044]

[Bateshorn 9897]

On 8/10/2021 at 8:32 AM, landman said:

What about natural gas?  Plenty of it, and significantly reduced emissions.

Mmmmm…kinda depends on how well you are capturing the leaked gas at the well head and pipeline. Methane has 25 times the heat trapping potential of CO2.  If you are sloppy with your leakage, it’s no better than coal from a global warming perspective.

[hookem2010 2597]

Definitely nothing wrong with one of the few swing votes in the Senate having a vested interest in not decreasing fossil fuel consumption. JFC...
https://www.vice.com/amp/en/article/z3x8bw/joe-manchin-senator-millions-coal-grant-town-west-virginia?__twitter_impression=true

[Bullneck 18983]

Posting the article since it's probably behind the NYTimes paywall.  The replies were brutal, though civil.  

Quote

By Margaret Renkl

Ms. Renkl is a contributing Opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South.

NASHVILLE — By now you’ve probably seen photos of the apocalyptic flooding in Middle Tennessee’s Dickson, Hickman, Houston and Humphreys Counties on Aug. 21, though it’s understandable if you scrolled right on past without really looking. There’s a déjà vu quality to such images. Cars lifted by some unstoppable force and returned to earth cattywampus. Houses at odds with their foundations, or just gone. Holes where roads used to be. The debris field of a bombing.

At least 20 people died in Middle Tennessee, and entire communities were wrecked beyond all recognition. If you let yourself think about the survivors, the pictures will break your heart.

“These are people we know. These are people’s families that we know,” Sheriff Chris Davis of Humphreys County told WPLN’s Damon Mitchell. “These are people that we grew up with.” The places that were nearly flattened by the flooding are small towns, or close-knit communities that can’t rightly be called towns, and nearly every family there is broken by loss. Many people lost everything they own.

If the pictures break your heart, it’s the stories that will kill you. The teenagers who went outside to take pictures and then watched as one of their own was carried away by a wall of water that came out of nowhere. The father trying to hold on to infant twins, or the mother trying to hold on to her toddler, powerless when the muddy water claimed them anyway. People frantically trying to help their neighbors, too many of them losing their lives in the process.

 

Middle Tennessee is covered in forests and fields and laced with creeks and rivers whose names are made from poetry: Trace Creek, Tumbling Creek, Piney River. Southern states are among the most vulnerable to climate change and — owing to our habit of electing climate change deniers to public office — among the least prepared to weather its ravages. But thanks to its location and biome, Middle Tennessee is better positioned to weather a changing climate than most other places in the South. If it isn’t entirely insulated from the consequences of a warming climate, so far it has mostly been able to tolerate them.

 

Climate Fwd  A new administration, an ongoing climate emergency — and a ton of news. Our newsletter will help you stay on top of it. Get it sent to your inbox.

Then 17 inches of rain fell in a matter of hours, smashing the daily rainfall record and turning bucolic crawdad creeks into tsunamis. Before the rain began to fall, a flash flood watch mentioned the possibility of four to six inches of rain. Not 17.

The flooding in Middle Tennessee has not yet been explicitly linked to climate change — such studies take time — but the general pattern is already clear. In much of the United States, the kinds of rain events once called “hundred-year floods” are happening within months of each other.

President Biden has approved a disaster declaration for Humphreys County, freeing up federal funds for rebuilding. There are several ways for people who live outside the affected communities to help, as well — contributing to the fund set up by the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee, donating money or needed items through the American Red Cross or the Community Resource Center, or giving directly to people in need via the many, many GoFundMe campaigns.

But even before any of these forms of assistance were in place, community members were already helping their neighbors survive. Churches converted gyms and Sunday school classrooms into shelters. People turned their front yards into de facto donation hubs. Local restaurants are cooking donated food and offering meals for free.

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This is the flip side of that confounding Southern insistence on “freedom” that you keep hearing about. It’s the thing that rural people do best: They tend to their own. If they have two of something, they give one to somebody else. If they have one of something, they break it into two and give half away.

And that’s why the hatred that inevitably erupts on social media, or in the comment sections of news reports, is so galling. It’s a constant refrain whenever something terrible happens in the South: a clamor of voices telling us we deserve to suffer because we don’t believe in climate change, because we are too stupid to vote for leaders who do. Such vitriol is never directed at the victims of climate disasters in other regions of the country.

The point is that people are suffering. And if their leaders and pundits insist that climate change is a hoax? If their own lives have never given them any reason to question that pronouncement? If even now they are skeptical of outsiders coming in to tell them that this kind of tragedy will keep happening, and happen more often? The answer is not to tell them that they deserve the terrible things that happened to them.

Instead of engaging in what a progressive, small-town friend of mine calls “misplaced schadenfreude,” we need to learn to talk about climate change in a new way, one that isn’t so politically charged. And we can start, as climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe notes, by making it personal.

That means starting with shared values. “The most important thing to do,” Dr. Hayhoe says in her TED Talk, is “to start from the heart.” We can’t start with data, she says, and we sure can’t start with accusations. We can start with what we share: “Are we both parents? Do we live in the same community? Do we enjoy the same outdoor activities: hiking, biking, fishing, even hunting? Do we care about the economy or national security?”

Some Republican leaders are beginning to recognize that climate change is not a phenomenon they can deny forever, but most elected leaders here can still avoid the subject because doing so is not yet a political liability. Tennessee’s governor, Bill Lee, professes not to know how climate change affects rainfall events like the one his state has just endured. “Why that occurs, I don’t know the answer to that,” Mr. Lee said at a news conference. “I would guess there are those that do, but I’m not qualified to answer that. I don’t know what caused it.”

Clearly, the conversations cannot begin soon enough.

You’ll forget you ever heard of Humphreys County, Tenn., long before the people of Humphreys County have recovered and rebuilt. Already new images of devastation are coming in from Louisiana, but even the most harrowing of those photos won’t capture the true destruction and pain that Hurricane Ida is bringing as it moves through the state and beyond.

These tragedies will be front-page news again and again and again as the earth continues to warm, and a great many of them will have datelines from rural communities in the South that you’ve never heard of — tiny places where people are hurting but still working hard to help one another survive. They will not need your judgment. What they will need is your compassion.

 

[Bullneck 18983]

Quote

Shaun

Virginia3h ago

Times Pick

I've been working on climate change communications for over a decade. I've tested negative for sympathy at this point. We all must take climate action now and we all must get #vaccinated to defeat #Covid-19. We simply don't have the time to go to everyone, 1 on 1, to try to connect with them on issues that require collective action. The only solutions are massive world wide legislation and action for both the #ClimateCrisis and #covid19.

 

[Bullneck 18983]

Quote

Gkatny

Near NYC3h ago

Times Pick

Caring and sharing with people you know is not unique to small-town America or the South, and the reaction of the NE and West Coast isn’t entirely schadenfreude. Politicians from the South try to minimize or even block aid for Puerto Rico, the Tri-State, California for flooding, earthquakes, fires and the first wave of the pandemic, even relief for 9/11 first responders. And the South continues to block efforts to slow climate change, and even to end the pandemic. Southern politicians have made plenty of political hay off the misfortunes of other regions, and the lives destroyed by that gamesmanship are no less valuable. Every time this region “owns the libs,” real people loose their homes or their lives. And then when the region suffers the consequences of its choices, it comes begging and there are admonitions about human compassion and not playing politics. But the whole nation is suffering the consequences of this mean political game. Show me that aid and compassion can softened the Southern heart, because Southern behavior is endangering us all.

 

[Buzzrock 14870]

 
Farmers will switch to ground water for a few years/decades until the ground water runs out.
 
My worry is that the fountains at the Bellagio and the Pirate show on the Strip will have to be curtailed.

Fill them with vodka Red Bull

[High Plains Drifter 10970]

 

Oh, the poor south, getting picked on by the mean old liberals/scientists/everybody else. Boo fucking hoo.

California is a fucking cinder. Southwest is drier than granny's titties. Miami beach floods every time there is a full moon. My well went dry two years ago. 40 year old trees in my yard are dying of drought. Some areas of Puerto Rico didn't get electricity back for seven fucking months after Maria.

We are as a species have been fucking around since the industrial revolution. Now comes the finding out.

Scientists warned this shit was going to happen 40 fucking years ago. Deny Deny Deny, then ask for sympathy and compassion. Yeah, fuck that.

Tell me something Tennessee, what do your current US senators say about Biden's recent spending proposal that is designed to lessen greenhouse gases? Yeah, well you can fuck right off then. I have no sympathy, empathy, or fucks left to give. I'm saving it for the people of the socialist dictatorship named California who at the very least, tried to limit car emissions and are implementing greener building codes. You fucking science-denying hayseeds can fuck right off and wallow in your freedom, lack of electricity, and muddy houses.

I'm going to enjoy my schadenfreude to the fullest, over ice, with splash of lime.

 

[hookem2010 2597]

This is a fun thread.

[hookem2010 2597]

It's going to be great when the entire American west is desert and savanna.

[Beantown Express 2.0 6552]

25 minutes ago, hookem2010 said:

This is a fun thread.

They just need more rakes.

[Biff Tannen 45491]

There seriously has to be a solution there though.  Controlled burns throughout the year?  24/7?  I really don't know and am looking into a second career in forestry because this shit is infuriating.  

[gmr548 16482]

Trump was clearly just being a moron with zero grasp of the concept but it’s true that federal forest management has been, uh, not great bob, for decades. Him trying to pin it on the state of CA was phenomenally dumb as the federal government controls a significant majority of the public lands.

Better forest management, including prescribed burns, would help. CA only did like 11,000 acres of prescribed burns last year, a small fraction of the figure needed. I am sure the other factors in play that I don’t grasp either.

All that said, climate is obviously the driving factor. It’s hotter, dryer, and more prone to burning out west than it has been, and we’re largely not doing anything to mitigate or even simply adapt. To some extent we’re past the point of no return.

[hookem2010 2597]

I jumped ship from medicine and am working in parks now, with an ultimate goal of natural resources management. Do you think you will ever do the Pacific Crest Hike you were planning for 2020(?), or is that out of the cards now? Here's another fun link, since I'm such a ray of sunshine today.

https://www.npr.org/2021/08/31/1032822337/every-national-forest-in-california-is-closing-because-of-wildfire-risk?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_medium=social

[Biff Tannen 45491]

Just now, hookem2010 said:

I jumped ship from medicine and am working in parks now, with an ultimate goal of natural resources management. Do you think you will ever do the Pacific Crest Hike you were planning for 2020(?), or is that out of the cards now? Here's another fun link, since I'm such a ray of sunshine today.

https://www.npr.org/2021/08/31/1032822337/every-national-forest-in-california-is-closing-because-of-wildfire-risk?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_medium=social

Yeah, I've been following.  PCT is still on my radar.  Looking at 2023.  I want to get it in before it all burns to the fucking ground.  Southbounders have to skip 600 miles of trail this year now.

What do you do in parks?  DM me if more appropriate.

[High Plains Drifter 10970]

2 hours ago, Biff Tannen said:

There seriously has to be a solution there though.  Controlled burns throughout the year?  24/7?  I really don't know and am looking into a second career in forestry because this shit is infuriating.  

 

brah, better change that to desertry, because there ain't gonna be no more forests. They are going to burn until they are all gone. The entire American west will look like west Texas in our lifetimes. IF we are lucky, there might be some small remnants that hang on for a few decades at the highest elevations.

Its not on the news much over here, but this is also happening in the forests of Asia, Europe, and Australia.

Controlled burns, better management, will only delay the inevitable by a few years.

 

[High Plains Drifter 10970]

1 hour ago, gmr548 said:

Trump was clearly just being a moron with zero grasp of the concept but it’s true that federal forest management has been, uh, not great bob, for decades.

 

I remember 30 years ago hiking through a section of national forest in Washington that had been clear cut a few years before and replanted. The trees were all exactly 6 ft high, and so close together you couldn't squeeze between them. Even my dumb ass 25 yr old self knew that shit was unsustainable, and that those trees were doomed to fires, beetle infestations, drought, or whatever.

[Foosters 17725]

Hope the US finds somewhere else to grow the nation's food because CA won't be able to continue to do so for long. 

[High Plains Drifter 10970]

20 minutes ago, Foosters said:

Hope the US finds somewhere else to grow the nation's food because CA won't be able to continue to do so for long. 

 

That's another thing that makes me want to punch somebody in the face. "Oh well, if the cornbelt and wheatbelt gets too hot to grow food, we can just plant those crops farther north."

No dumbass, in a lot of cases, the soil farther north is not conducive for industrial farming. The corn and wheat belts are (were) in the Goldilocks spot for soil, rain, temp, whatever. Not anymore.