“Donald Trump must treat this like the existential crisis that it is,” says Bernie. I agree, but the crisis isn’t what Bernie thinks.
Existential Crisis in Environmental and Climate Stupidity
Sanders is correct. We have an existential crisis. But the crisis is in environmental and climate stupidity, not climate change.
Even Mother Jones Understands
Mother Jones forecast this event in 2017, no less. Please consider A Century of Fire Suppression Is Why California Is in Flames.
For more than a century, people have been snuffing out fire across the West. As a result, forests, grasslands and shrub lands like those in the Bouverie reserve are overgrown. That means that, when fire escapes suppression, it’s more destructive. It kills more trees, torches more homes and sends far more carbon into the atmosphere, contributing to climate change.
“We have 100 years of fire suppression that has led to this huge accumulation of fuel loads, just dead and downed debris from trees and plant material in our forests, and in our woodlands,” says Sasha Berleman, a fire ecologist. “As a result of that, our forests and woodlands are not healthy, and we’re getting more catastrophic fire behavior than we would otherwise.”
When fire hits overgrown wildlands, it burns hotter and is much more likely to kill stands of trees and threaten property and people’s lives.
But it also unleashes the carbon held by trees, other plants and soil. Forests store enormous amounts of carbon—more than double the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere—and continuously soak up more, blunting the impact of all the greenhouse gases released by burning fossil fuels in power plants and cars. In recent decades, the size of fires, their intensity and the length of the fire season have all grown dramatically. The more destructive a fire, the more carbon it releases. In fact, largely because of fires, California’s forests emitted more carbon than they soaked up between 2001 and 2010, according to a 2015 analysis by National Park Service and UC Berkeley scientists.
The New York Times Too
Next, please consider These Changes Are Needed Amid Worsening Wildfires, a 2020 article in the New York Times.
Wildfires are ravaging the West — in California alone, five of the largest blazes on record have all struck in just the past four years — offering a deadly reminder that the nation is far behind in adopting policies widely known to protect lives and property, even though worsening fires have become a predictable consequence of climate change.
The worsening wildfire disasters mean the United States needs to drastically rethink its approach to managing fire in the decades ahead, experts warn. “The first step is to acknowledge that fire is inevitable, and we have to learn to live with it,” said David McWethy, a fire scientist at Montana State University.
For over a century, firefighting agencies have focused on extinguishing fires whenever they occur. That strategy has often proved counterproductive. Many landscapes evolved to burn periodically, and when fires are suppressed, vegetation builds up thickly in forests. So when fires do break out, they tend to be far more severe and destructive.
Scientists who study wildfires agree that allowing forests and grasslands to burn periodically — by, say, intentionally setting smaller fires under controlled conditions — can be a more effective way to clear out vegetation. In Ponderosa pine forests, for instance, low-level fire can nurture ecosystems and help prevent destructive large-scale fires from breaking out.
This already occurs in the Southeastern United States, where officials use prescribed fires to burn millions of acres each year. With rare exceptions, however, the practice remains infrequent in the West. California intentionally burned just 50,000 acres in 2017.
But the scale is daunting: One study found that the state would need to burn or treat 20 million acres to counteract the legacy of fire suppression. (Researchers have estimated that in prehistoric times, around 4 to 12 million acres in the state burned each year, but that has since dropped precipitously.)
Notes From X
- Official Leftist Translator @tony4mrht: What you call climate change others might call lack of preparation. California legislated over $7 billion for water storage in 2014 and NOTHING has been built.
- Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger: Climate change or no climate change, scientists say somewhere between 500,000 and 4M acres of forest land need to burn annually in California. Doing that requires moving beyond the pyrophobia, alarmism, and politicization that got us into this mess in the first place.
- “Climate dries the [wood] fuels out & extends the fire season BUT IT’S NOT THE CAUSE OF THE INTENSITY of the fires. The cause of that is fire suppression and the existing debt of wood fuel.” Malcolm North, US Forest Service
- Kyle Becker @kylenabecker: Link to a short video on climate change vs fire suppression as a cause.
- Eric Daugherty @EricLDaugh: Just before devastating wildfires broke out in the Los Angeles area, the Democratic LA Mayor – Karen Bass – SLASHED fire department funding by $17.6 million.
- Steve Guest @SteveGuest: Reality check. As Pacific Palisades burns, fighterfighters report hydrants running dry.
- Liz Churchill @liz_churchill10: The LA Mayor is in Africa…as she spent their tax dollars funding Fire Departments in Ukraine. There was no water to put out these fires…and California is next to an ocean. Californians had their home insurance cancelled PRIOR to these fires.
- Geiger Capital @Geiger_Capital: “This is like a third world country… there is no water coming out of the fire hydrants. LA Mayor Karen Bass is on a foreign trip to Ghana.” Click link for a video.
Lord of the Rings
911 Failure, Sparking Electrical Fires
California Residents are filming fallen electrical wires that are sparking against the trees. This resident and his neighbor have been trying to call 911. They have admitted that California has failed them.
No Water Coming out of Hydrants
Priority is DEI
We need to get our priorities straight.
Bernie Sanders is correct.
“Donald Trump must treat this like the existential crisis [of stupidity] that it is.”