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 onesthe N-95s that block 95% of fine particlesand 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 doesnt ignite wildfires, but its intensifying the hot, dry summer conditions that have helped fuel some of Californias deadliest and most destructive fires in recent years.
Ive long understood that the dangers of global warming are real and rising. Ive 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 were 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 weve 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.
Theres no solving climate change any longer. Theres only living with it and doing everything in our power to limit the damage.
And seeing an entire community near one of the worlds 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.
That's a shame, bullshit can't taste very good. OTOH, libs are constantly feeding the rest of us a crap sandwich, so maybe it's good you get to experience it for yourself.
I live about 15 miles north of a glacier in the Sierra and have not seen any form of receding. Must be a glacier near Berkeley :sarc>
Ping.
“...Ill believe in Anthropogenic Climate Change when...”
...when at least one of the dozens of “models” can be initialized with the 1950 climate and produce the 1960 climate and continue through 2000.
Currently they’re 0 for dozens.
Global warming. Is there anything it cant do?
/ Homer Simpson voice.
You mean to say it’s as powerful as BEER???
“I truly hate non-thinkers!!”
Well, yeah. That’s just a no-brainer.
Good Point.
If it cannot predict the past that is known, then it’s useless to predict the future which is unknown..................
Global warming will get personal for me when some rich leftist sells me their beachfront property for dirt cheap.
BS. It isn't "climate change" making these recent fires worse - it is {expletive}-poor environmental management policies. So-called environmentalists push short-sighted, ill-conceived, poorly-researched policies and positions. So-called "leaders" are ill-informed and egotistical enough to sign up for them, proclaiming all the good they are doing for the environment...
Mankind knows virtually nothing about how to manage the environment. We simply do not understand all the interactions even on the relatively small scale of a few forests, let alone on a continental scale or global scale. This is one of the reasons I thank {Diety} every day that we lack the technology to try to control or manage the climate - we are demonstrably terrible at it at every scale above your average golf course. We would no-doubt kill ourselves in short order if we had the means to "manage" the climate on a global scale.
We didn’t have gale-force winds before Al Gore ‘discovered’ global warming. No hurricanes either.
Berserk..Berkeley moron.
Good, now we can stop funding all GW research and solutions. We will adapt or die. My guess is that self-sufficient people will thrive and dependent people will cower in fear and wait for death from GW to come.
Recall that for Californians, “Global” is the southern half of the state, about 100 miles inland to the coast.
And during the fires, yes it warmed.
But this guy couldn’t breathe right ? I’d say it’s time to hit the road for a while.
Because there has never been a wildfire in California before now
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