A firefighter searches for human remains in a trailer park destroyed in the Camp Fire last month
Posted on 12/27/2018 11:53:15 AM PST by ETL
In early November, gale-force winds whipped a brush fire into an inferno that nearly consumed the town of Paradise, California, and killed at least 86 people.
By the second morning, I could smell the fire from one foot outside my door in Berkeley, some 130 miles from the flames. Within a week, my eyes and throat stung even when I was indoors.
Air quality maps warned that the soot-filled air blanketing the Bay Area had reached “very unhealthy” levels. For days, nearly everyone wore masks as they walked their dogs, rode the train, and carried out errands. Most of those thin-paper respirators were of dubious value. Stores quickly ran out of the good ones—the “N-95s” that block 95% of fine particles—and sold out of air purifiers, too.
People traded tips about where they could be found, and rushed to stores rumored to have a new supply. Others packed up and drove hours away in search of a safe place to wait it out. By the time my masks arrived by mail, I was in Ohio, having decided to move up my Thanksgiving travel to escape the smoke.
Climate change doesn’t ignite wildfires, but it’s intensifying the hot, dry summer conditions that have helped fuel some of California’s deadliest and most destructive fires in recent years.
I’ve long understood that the dangers of global warming are real and rising. I’ve seen its power firsthand in the form of receding glaciers, dried lake beds, and Sierra tree stands taken down by bark beetles.
This is the first time, though, that I smelled and tasted it in my home.
Obviously, a sore throat and a flight change are trivial compared with the lives and homes lost in the Camp Fire. But after I spent a week living under a haze of smoke, it did resonate on a deeper level that we’re really going to let this happen.
Thousands if not millions of people are going to starve, drown, burn to death, or live out lives of misery because we’ve failed to pull together in the face of the ultimate tragedy of the commons. Many more will find themselves scrambling for basic survival goods and fretting over the prospect of more fires, more ferocious hurricanes, and summer days of blistering heat.
There’s no solving climate change any longer. There’s only living with it and doing everything in our power to limit the damage.
And seeing an entire community near one of the world’s richest regions all but wiped out, while retailers failed to meet critical public needs in the aftermath, left me with a dimmer view of our ability to grapple with the far greater challenges to come.
Sorry, no room in title space to add “Mega Puke Alert”. But then, was it really neccessary?
You didn’t taste climate change. Words have meanings, and you don’t know them.
What a load of horse $hit.
I’ll believe in Anthropogenic Climate Change when the kid next door walks on the moon!..............................He’s 2..............
...this moron should talk to Moonbeam about proper forestry. Remove some of the 129 million dead trees in California...
“Global warming. Is there anything it can’t do?”
/ Homer Simpson voice.
ABSOLUTELY! I have been saying that for years.
Because CA has never had a wildfire.
Excerpt:
In the middle of this crescent, directly opposite the anchoring ground, lie the mission and town of Santa Barbara, on a low, flat plain, but little above the level of the sea, covered with grass, though entirely without trees, and surrounded on three sides by an amphitheatre of mountains, which slant off to the distance of fifteen or twenty miles. The mission stands a little back of the town, and is a large building, or rather collection of buildings, in the center of which is a high tower, with a belfry of five bells; and the whole, being plastered, makes quite a show at a distance, and is the mark by which vessels come to anchor.Global Warming/Climate Change my azz!The town lies a little nearer to the beach- about half a mile from it- and is composed of one-story houses built of brown clay- some of them plastered- with red tiles on the roofs. I should judge that there were about an hundred of them; and in the midst of them stands the Presidio, or fort, built of the same materials, and apparently but little stronger. The town is certainly finely situated, with a bay in front, and an amphitheatre of hills behind. The only thing which diminishes its beauty is, that the hills have no large trees upon them, they having been all burnt by a great fire which swept them off about a dozen years before, and they had not yet grown up again. The fire was described to me by an inhabitant, as having been a very terrible and magnificent sight. The air of the whole valley was so heated that the people were obliged to leave the town and take up their quarters for several days upon the beach.
I have smelled Global Warming/climate change more than once.
Smells just like this:
and it steams in the morning air....
I walked outside and needed a jacket in Florida. I tasted global cooling this week. #science
The fact that Global Warming advocacy caused the fires in California is the true international nightmare. The refusal to manage the forests in a humane way that prevents these kinds of infernos is the true testament to cause.
No state in the U.S. was more committed and dedicated to preventing and mitigating the supposed ravages of “climate change.” It is completely prudent and necessary to blame this kind of essay writing as the cause of dozens of deaths in California. Like so many false eco-pessimist dogmas it has the potential to kill millions.
news flash: wildfires didn’t exist before 1990 or so.
ever.
anywhere on the planet.
not a single one.
HA HA HA HA HA HA
As if it could be "solved" in any sense of that word.
The arrogant stupidity of this idiot knows no bounds.
And ALL of the dead wood lefties in the democrap party.
If the “warmists” are correct and the climate is always getting hotter then we should be celebrating that ice ages are a thing of the past! Rejoice!
The Day You Tasted Piss Poor Forest Management
This nonsense comes from a publication called “Technology Review”?
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