The day I tasted climate change: Every one of us will have moment when global warming gets personal

TechnologyReview.com ^ | Dec 21, 2018 | James Temple

[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.

[ETL]

That is, depending on who’s doing the eating. The one-world global governance Left would probably think it tastes like chicken, being a major means for them to grab more control over people’s lives.

[Mathews]

Stopped reading at, “My home in Berkeley.”

[Nifster]

California fires weren’t caused by climate change

[fruser1]

It got personal for me in the 70s when the eco nazis forced car manufacturers to come up with emission control systems.

[thepoodlebites]

>This is the first time, though, that I smelled and tasted it in my home. What you smelled and tasted was extreme incompetence by California forest management officials, corrupt zoning laws that allowed communities to be built in high risk areas and emotional/subjective assessments from willing participants in the anthropogenic global warming alarmist false narrative. Science is not emotional, science is not based on a subjective personal anecdote. The science of climate change is based on observational evidence and trend analysis over extended time periods, decades, centuries, thousands of years, etc. In the U.S. over the last 100 years, the trend (frequency, intensity) in droughts, floods, snowfall, hurricanes and tornadoes is not significantly different from zero. The frequency and intensity of wildfires in California is down significantly from 50, 100 and 200 years ago, with a slight increase over the past 20 years attributed directly to poor fire management (reduced controlled burns) endorsed by the "hands-of" environmental community. Looking back 2,000 years, comparing the Roman warming period and the Medieval warming period with today, the Modern warming period is not exceptional. The current Holocene interglacial period began 20,000 years ago. 8,000-6,000 years ago, during the Holocene optimum, global sea levels rose 10 meters, temperatures were warming than today for 2,000 years but the Greenland ice sheet never melted. Global temperatures have increased about 1˚C per century since coming out of the Little Ice Age ~1800. Sea level rise has been a steady eight inches per century (no acceleration). Computer forecasts of 3˚C global temperature rise by 2100 are based on highly speculative assumptions concerning climate sensitivity to CO2 doubling, minimual impact from solar forcing (negative and positive) and a poor understanding of the role of natural internal variability and ocean oscillations, not to mention the high uncertainty in such long-range predictions. But the uninformed will continue to make unfounded claims based on emotions, propagating the false narrative of human caused climate change (arrogant presumption that humans are somehow more important than natural design), misrepresenting the facts and the science, reducing the dynamic complexity of climate change to 4 molecules of CO2 in 10,000 molecules of air, politics masquerading as science. -Frank

[metmom]

It had nothing to do with alleged climate change and everything to do with inept forest management.

[HotHunt]

".... Every one of us will have moment when global warming gets personal...."

I even experienced it today when I went outside to cut some lumber for a project in my shorts and short sleeve t-shirt.

It was so hot, I was sweating by the time I got back in the house.

Who woulda' thunk? It's wintertime!

[Sicon]

“I could smell the fire from one foot outside my door in Berkeley...”

And I literally stopped reading right there.

[Alas Babylon!]

So there has never been hot, dry summers with strong winds and wild fires in November in California before?

Never, ever?

All this is phenomena of the past couple of decades?

[ColdOne]

Good post! I agree!

[ThunderSleeps]

...they wanted to spray particulates into the atmosphere to dim the sun...

Didn't these same (or same ilk) environmentalists recently climb all over VW for gaming their engine management computers and basically doing exactly this? SMH...

[Fightin Whitey]

Same thing happened with the Great Earthquake of 1906.

Too much sun and you could smell the erf boiling over!!

[LYDIAONTARIO]

Gosh, author realizes we cannot change the weather?! Maybe it will occur to climate change crazies, that only God is in control of the earth, and they will learn to pray?!

[a fool in paradise]

>>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.

Cut out the dead wood.
Deport the illegal aliens.
Fire the arsonist rangers who’ve deliberately set fires in the past.

[a fool in paradise]

don’t some “endangered” species make their homes in dead wood so such firetraps are kept to endanger other species?

Marxism seeks to make everyone equally miserable.

[Intolerant in NJ]

I’m tasting stupidity - stop trying to save the little slimy snails and cuddly critters by refusing to haul out dead timber and maintain adequate cleared spaces and you’ll stop burning your fellow human beings to death.....

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks ETL.

Partisan Media Shills update.

[Grimmy]

What the idiot tasted was decades of dumba**ery in ecotarded forest mismangement.

[EdnaMode]

Call algore!

[Rebelbase]

Because CA has never had a drought.