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.
What can be gratuitously affirmed can be gratuitously denied. I deny all of this.
Look more like he tasted stupid, environmentalist inspired forest management policies to me.
Yes... poor forest management means climate change.
Got it.
Not only that, it's more specifically MIT Technology Review, ... yes that MIT.
Color me cantankerous, but I stopped reading right there.
Know how I know James Temple has no science education?
By the nonsensical things he says?
Maybe he should load his pockets with stones and walk into the ocean. No smoke in there.
Climate change kind of taste like chicken.
Is that bupkis?
Power lines on untrimmed trees will start fires and fires will rage in forests that are not thinned in a part of the country that is prone to ferocious wildfires. If humans live in these lands, there is a good chance that they will die in a forest fire but I am not as smart as a typical liberal or bureaucrat.
In a ritzy town in MA, Concord or Carlisle, the town banned the sale of bottled water at retail outlets.
So for emergencies, whatsa' family to do? MA does get both hurricanes and nor'easters.
I’m tasting climate change too. We are on the patio in t-shirts. So?
The climate has gotten warmer around here in my lifetime. Again, I ask, so?
Who the [jiminy crickets] are we to stop the planet’s temperatures and climates? We couldn’t even stop the split of Gondwanaland, prevent any earthquakes, or plug any volcanos. Why don’t we stop living in houses or pay taxes to prevent future earthquakes? If not driving cars lowers the earth’s Core temp, imagine how stopping all construction and living in the trees will immediately cause all volcanic activity to cease. Same logic.
Because CA has never had a wildfire.
We didn’t cause that.
It will be "Global Cooling" by then. Or it may have cycled through "Global Cooling", and be back to "Warming".
But whatever the name, there will be gloom and doom, death and destruction. Politicians and associated hangers-on need a boogeyman to scare people with, so that their access to money and power continues....
Personally, I think that people 100-200 years from now will look at what we currently believe (We CAN control the weather! There ARE 57 genders! Etc.) and chuckle. Much as we do about "Bloodletting as a Medical Science", or the tonics pushed by Snake-Oil salesmen.
My $0.02?
"Climate Change" doesn't scare me. It changes, we adapt. Been like that for millennia. We're still here, as is Da Erf.
Nope, what scares me is some idiot trying to "fix" things, and managing to *REALLY* screw it all up. Like the latest from (Harvard? IIRC) where they wanted to spray particulates into the atmosphere to dim the sun.
Terrifying. But there's enough hysteria, and enough stupid/mis-informed people so that someone with money could try.
On the contrary. You’d have to drown it in ketchup to cover up the bad taste.
Shop in the next town over, where the local politicians are more sensible. Costco/Walmart will gladly sell to you.
I think that Amazon ships bottles of H20, too.
:-) No sense in letting a few idiots' virtue signaling make your life difficult.
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