CA Gov. Newsom On Wildfire Devastation: Impact Of Climate Change Cannot Be Denied

allnurses Guide · Sep 12, 2020

Four people arrested for INTENTIONALLY starting blazes on West Coast as wildfires ravage the region

FOUR people have now been arrested on the West Coast for deliberately starting blazes as wildfires rage.

Cops detained two men in Washington, man in Oregon and woman in California as the desperate battle to contain the fires continues.

Oregon Live reports Michael Jarrod Bakkela, 41, has been arrested on two counts of arson, 15 counts of criminal mischief and 14 counts of reckless endangerment. The fire Bakkela started is considered to be one of the origins of the Almeda fire and the two quickly merged, said Oregon State Fire Marshal’s office spokesman Rich Tyler. Photos show the towns of Phoenix and Talent reduced to ashes after the Almeda fire tore through. It has killed two people, destroyed a thousand homes and laid waste to 5700 acres...

… The California Highway Patrol said 37-year-old Anita Esquivel was arrested after being accused of intentionally starting fires and is being held in Monterey County Jail. The Monterey County District Attorney's Office said she has no connection with antifa, contrary to rumors circulating online about that the group had been involved in starting fires…

… Trooper Ryan Burke, Washington State Patrol District 1 Public Information Officer for Pierce and Thurston counties said that two men have been arrested for arson. He tweeted that a 36-year-old Puyallup resident was caught on State Route 167 at Meridian for setting a fire on Wednesday and is now in jail.

On Thursday another pedestrian was spotted lighting a match in the grass at State Route 512 and State Route 7. The incident was observed by a citizen who called 911 and after a short chase on foot the person is in custody…

… The FBI has released a statement addressing social media conspiracies that “extremists” were starting the fires after being inundated with claims. “With our state and local partners, the FBI has investigated several such reports and found them to be untrue," the agency said in a statement. "Conspiracy theories and misinformation take valuable resources away local fire and police agencies working around the clock to bring these fires under control.”…

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/12651838/four-arrested-intentionally-starting-blazes-wildfires/

toomuchbaloney · Sep 12, 2020

Meanwhile, little of Alaska burned this year because loss of sea ice provided us with an unusually humid and rainy Summer...comparatively speaking. Climate change must be part of our political discussion because it is increasingly an uncomfortable and costly part of our daily lives.

Those who think climate change mitigation is too expensive are getting a wake up call.

Daisy4RN · Sep 12, 2020

The Democrats in Calif are in part responsible for at least the extent of the fires r/t their botched regulations and lack of deforestation for the last 40 years or so.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/30/its-not-climate-change-to-blame-for-californias-fires-and-blackouts-its-democrats

allnurses Guide · Sep 12, 2020

Does Climate Change Cause Wildfire Disasters?

Climate change worsens some fires, but we make choices creating fire disasters.

Human-caused climate change is almost certainly worsening the fires. The fire disasters emerge from other choices including, but far beyond, climate change. Higher air temperatures, longer periods with less precipitation, and higher evaporation rates lead to drier ecosystems. These ignite more easily, burning faster and with higher intensity. Human-caused climate change is a major influence and has also been impeding post-fire ecosystem recovery, because environmental conditions are different than what the plants are used to. Lightning patterns might be fluctuating, but working out climate change’s local impacts on lightning strikes is not straightforward...

... Fires are a typical and needed ecosystem process. From Australia to California, many species need low-intensity, periodic fires to survive and thrive...

... Now, we are changing the climate rapidly which affects wildfire and bushfire characteristics. Nature cannot keep up with this rate of change. Animals are devastated, in Australia ranging from cute koalas to scary spiders, while ecosystems take much longer to regenerate.

All this, though, is about the fire and nature. Fire disasters hurt humans through deaths, injuries, disruption, and property loss. Why do we let this happen when we know that fires inevitably occur, even if becoming worse?

Long, bitter experiences with previous fires, and especially fire disasters killing hundreds, show the impossibility of suppressing or fighting all wildfires. Nor should we wish to, because an absence of fire forever would undermine ecosystems. Knowing all this, we nonetheless encroach into burnable wilderness, building in places which have often burned in the past and which must burn in the future...

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/disaster-choice/202009/does-climate-change-cause-wildfire-disasters

allnurses Guide · Sep 12, 2020

In recent years, the spectacle of burning landscapes and ash-smeared skies has attained a harrowing familiarity for Californians, with fires torching chaparral shrublands in Southern California, coastal redwoods in the San Francisco Bay Area, and mountain forests in the Sierra Nevada. A confluence of factors has wrought a perennial menace, including overgrown forests and grasslands, climate change and drought, aging utility grids, and increased development in wildlands.

To better understand the recurring crisis, the Monitor spoke with a trio of wildfire researchers. They discussed the merits and drawbacks of various approaches – prescribed fire, thinning, natural burning – to reduce the dead trees and other fuels that feed wildfires; prevention strategies that federal, state, and private land managers should enact; and potential long-range solutions for limiting wildfire destruction...

... Q: Beyond widely accepted reasons for wildfires growing in size, severity, and frequency, why hasn’t California made more progress in slowing the trend?

Ms. Quinn-Davidson: Our fire management and our land management haven’t kept pace with the scientific understanding we have of fire in California. There’s this fear of active land management – prescribed burning, thinning – that sometimes gets in the way of us making good choices. If we’re not protecting the resources we care about and we’re not taking action, then we will continue to lose them to big fires.

Mr. Stewart: Many of the fires around the greater Bay Area are in areas that didn’t burn 30 years ago because they were cattle ranches. They had cattle on them, and that helped reduce fuels. Now those areas have turned into parks or 5- and 10-acre residential lots. So much development has been about what’s aesthetically pleasing, so we’ve ended up with a landscape that, during hot and dry seasons, there’s a lot more fuel and it becomes a much riskier situation.

Ms. Witter: One thing that’s underappreciated is how much fires are driven – and this is true nationwide – by human ignitions and human activity. Lightning-driven ignitions [that cause widespread destruction] are much more uncommon. There has been very little serious attention paid to prevention of fires caused and sustained by human activity...

Q: The federal government owns more than half of California’s 33 million acres of forest land and has been less aggressive about fuel reduction. Is that contributing to the state’s problems?

Mr. Stewart: There are national parks in California – Yosemite and Sequoia – that have had stable fire management practices since the ’60s. They still have big wildfires, but they reintroduced prescribed fire over time and brought some resilience back to their forests. They’ve made the landscape more of a mosaic so there isn’t continuous fuel in every direction. The [U.S.] Forest Service and federal wilderness areas have not achieved that...

https://news.Yahoo.com/wildfire-prevention-look-three-experts-192900261.html

allnurses Guide · Sep 12, 2020

Newsom Says Trump Is Helping To Combat California Wildfires Despite President’s Attacks On State

Newsom said Trump will sign off on five FEMA grants related to combatting the fires, adding that “there is not one phone call I have made to the president where he hasn't quickly responded. In almost every instance, he's responded favorably when it comes to addressing the emergency needs in this state.”...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelsandler/2020/08/21/newsom-says-trump-is-helping-to-combat-california-wildfires-despite-presidents-attacks-on-state/#5f32b22847bc

Home Health Columnist / Guide · Sep 13, 2020

It hurts to see these Californiia + other states fires on TV news.

Herring, are you in a safe area--sure hope so along with all our California AN members.

allnurses Guide · Sep 13, 2020

We are safe here. Northern California has it worse. Even here in Los Angeles, hundreds of miles from the destruction we still have smoke.

I've doubled my monthly donation to the regional food bank. The Red Cross and Salvation Army, and our local fire fighters will get some extra too. Hundreds of thousands have lost everything.

https://supportlacountyfire.org/

Home Health Columnist / Guide · Sep 14, 2020

CNN photos: Wildfires Burning in the West

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/14/us/gallery/western-wildfires-2020/index.html

Nevada Rally: Trump's blaming poor 'forest management' for wildfires --will see what he says after visiting California Monday

At a rally in Minden, Nev., on Sept. 12, President Trump said wildfires in California, Oregon and Washington state were "dangerous" and "rapidly spreading." He pleaded with listeners to "remember the words - very simple - 'forest management.'"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/on-west-coast-fires-trump-asserts-need-for-forest-management/2020/09/13/17d540ea-095c-42fb-a5f3-b52edf2bc322_video.html

MunoRN, RN · Sep 14, 2020

On 9/12/2020 at 1:54 PM, Daisy4RN said:

The Democrats in Calif are in part responsible for at least the extent of the fires r/t their botched regulations and lack of deforestation for the last 40 years or so.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/30/its-not-climate-change-to-blame-for-californias-fires-and-blackouts-its-democrats

Not sure how you got that from the article. Not even The Federalist tried to make the sort of silly argument that the problem with forests is that they're full of trees. It did however sheepishly admit that it's not really the lack of logging that contributes to higher fire risk, it's the thick brush that takes over after an area is logged that both increases the ability of a fire to spread and makes it harder to stop. Fire breaks are relatively easy to create in a forest of trees, and nearly impossible to make in the brush that exists after an area is logged.

I would agree though that part of the problem is "botched regulations", specifically that PG&E has been under-regulated, not over-regulated. PG&E is an investor-owned for-profit utility, which can be a good thing when it has to exist within market forces and their profit motive is based on providing a good product and service. They've been hesitant to perform the necessary line and equipment maintenance because they thought it unlikely that costs of failing to do that maintenance (fires) would cut into their bottom line. For this system to work, the costs of failing to do the job competently should be directly tied to their decision making. For reason this is a common Republican (not conservative) view, that a "free market" is solely driven by what benefits corporations, even though the market as a whole consists of corporations, consumers, small business, etc. In a true "free market", everyone who is part of the market has the ability to influence the market.

I would agree that Climate change is not the only factor, but there's little doubt it's an aggravating factor. Changes in weather patterns and seasonal variations are directly observable, and have clearly changed beyond just normal underlying variations, and these changes have created conditions far more conducive to wildfires.

macawake, MSN · Sep 14, 2020

On 9/12/2020 at 10:54 PM, Daisy4RN said:

The Democrats in Calif are in part responsible for at least the extent of the fires r/t their botched regulations and lack of deforestation for the last 40 years or so.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/30/its-not-climate-change-to-blame-for-californias-fires-and-blackouts-its-democrats

The west coast is currently battling multiple devastating fires. Many people are losing their homes. Some are dying. Why did you feel the need to introduce partisan politics into this thread? Must everything be Democrats vs Republicans? Sometimes I really despair...

Deforestation isn’t a good thing. Not enough deforestation isn’t a problem this planet we call home is facing. The opposite is true.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/08/amazon-fires-cause-deforestation-graphic-map/

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/08/theres-no-doubt-brazils-fires-are-caused-deforestation-scientists-say

I included the next link for no particular reason other than being a fan of RationalWiki ?

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Global_warming