"Nick Has an Exocet" (nickallain)
09/16/2020 at 01:39 • Filed to: None
7
11|
"Nick Has an Exocet" (nickallain)
09/16/2020 at 01:39 • Filed to: None | 7
| 11 |
Mazdaface and Domo edition.
Climate change is real and your politicians are ly ing to you.
Let’s get this out of the way: the climate is changing.
Why would I lead with that? Because what I’m about tell you is counter to what your politicians are saying, because they are dirtbags.
Politics, Environmental Activism (literal tree huggers), and NIMBYs
Snowball Effect
Forestry Management
Development of the Wildland-Urban-Interface (WUI)
Fire Break / Fire Road Maintenance
Invasive Species
Mid-century Electrical Infrastructure
Climate Change
Those are the leading causes for the major fires in the West. Roughly IN THAT ORDER.
To partially explain what’s been going on with these fires:
Before Americans showed up in the West, Native Americans took pretty good care of the land. They did controlled burns and didn’t introduce non-native plants. We actually kept up with the controlled burns until the neighbors complained. “Ew, it’s smokey!” but it only lasted a day or so. Natural fires burned, but never in cities so no big deal. But then people started to expand. They started moving into places that naturally burned.
So we adopted a strategy of putting out the fires. Seems good on paper. Imagine a game of Tetris where you get to stop the bricks from falling. The problem is, in Tetris, fresh lines of bricks still pile up from the bottom. Eventually, the moment a brick comes down when you unpause, it’s game over.
The amount of fuel that has built up is massive. More than 4x more fuel in some spots vs the 1950s/1960s. That causes a ladder effect. When a fire starts at ground level, it climbs the shrubs to smaller trees and the smaller trees to bigger trees. That allows the embers to fly farther and the fire to spread faster. Rather than frequent ground fires that eliminate the small trees and brushes from forming a ladder, we end up with these megafires.
This is a snowball effect. These megafires get the ground so hot that it sterilizes the soil. That’s not normal. The result is that species (like invasive ones) are able to proliferate. These proliferating tall grasses and shrubs quickly create even more fuel. You might think “hey, it burned here a few years ago, surely it couldn’t burn again” but you’d be wrong. The regrowth process is so screwed that places that burned in 2017/2018 are burning AGAIN this year.
Notice I haven’t touched climate change. That’s because I don’t have to. Sure, it might make it a little bit easier for an invasive species or a little bit more likely to get wind or lightning. But those effects are so small on this level that no one is even able to measure them.
If you’re wondering why politicians are blaming climate change, it’s because it’s the only thing on the list that doesn’t cost them money to blame. NIMBYs and Environmental groups contribute to their campaigns, forestry management costs state funds, changing the building codes state wide to reduce building on the WUI or make it hard would cost political capital (Newsome himself lives in a WUI development) , many fire roads have been converted to trails (costly to maintain and go backwards), invasive species are expensive to fight, and upgrading the infrastructure that caused most of the fires in 2017/2018 is expensive (infrastructure so ancient that they were found to be negligent) . Climate change however, is great for getting you re-elected and let’s you take pot shots at the president’s re-election campaign.
Do I have a problem with all of this? Depends on how you look at it. If the West keeps burning, my company will be in for continued success since we build AI that analyzes natural disasters like this. Do I want to be suckin’ in soot for the rest of my life? Nope. What do I think is going to happen? Lots more years like 2020. Newsom, Biden, and Harris have all completely stopped talking about any of the issues. The local news is more interested in a message about climate change.
One last thing: There was a story a few weeks ago about the death of an old blind man. His body was found charred on his property after the wildfire engulfed his house. All his neighbors said “he was such a great guy” yet not a single one of them checked in on him as they evacuated. This is perhaps one of the most difficult lessons to learn about California. If you came from the East Coast where you borrowed a cup of sugar, invited the neighbors over for dinner, or had clam-bakes and block parties, you would be shocked to realize that your west coast neighbors would rather get a TV appearance where they talk about how great you were than save you from becoming a human BBQ. I suppose it’s only natural that a narrative takes over that simply just get even more people killed.
415s30 W123TSXWaggoIIIIIIo ( •_•))°)
> Nick Has an Exocet
09/16/2020 at 02:08 |
|
Now make Usagi driving the Domo Z!!
Distraxi's idea of perfection is a Jagroen
> Nick Has an Exocet
09/16/2020 at 03:23 |
|
TL; DR: Take the advice of the country where even the trees are trying to kill you
TheRealBicycleBuck
> Nick Has an Exocet
09/16/2020 at 06:20 |
|
Yep. All this. It gets even more complicated in a place like Arkansas. Controlled burns are an accepted part of the forest management practices there, but Tyson complicated everything by putting chicken houses everywhere. What’s the big deal? Chickens are extremely sensitive to smoke. If the smoke plume from a controlled burn gets into a chicken house, it can result in the loss of hundreds of thousands of chickens. That’s millions of dollars of livestock.
At least the state had the good sense to absolve themselves of responsibility. How? We put together an analysis tool to predict the plume before the burn permit is issued and deny it if there’s anything sensitive within the zone of the plume. That includes chicken houses, schools, hospitals, etc.
SilentButNotReallyDeadly...killed by G/O Media
> Nick Has an Exocet
09/16/2020 at 06:24 |
|
I’ve seen similar arguments posited here in Oz over the years. And, whilst I’m not saying you’re wrong... it’s nowhere near as simplistic nor as politically polarised as you might imagine . Climate change though is a compounding factor on a couple of centuries worth of compromised decision making that we can’t walk back for decades or perhaps centuries, even if we start right away .
|
SilentButNotReallyDeadly...killed by G/O Media
> Distraxi's idea of perfection is a Jagroen
09/16/2020 at 06:30 |
|
The latest Royal Commission into Bushfires is going to result in something curious since we’ve realised that if the weather is right in the wrong sort of way...low fuel loads are not a limiting factor for a bushfire.
davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com
> Nick Has an Exocet
09/16/2020 at 09:48 |
|
The l ast paragraph... shit...
I though Biden’s “climate arsonist” line was pretty ridiculous, fwiw. As was Trump’s “it’s going to get cooler soon, just watch... I don’t think science knows, actually. (WHAT?!)
”
Very cool to learn that native tribes used controlled burns.
The Domo Z is the only solution to this design problem.
DipodomysDeserti
> Nick Has an Exocet
09/16/2020 at 09:58 |
|
Pretty much this. I teach an ecology class, and one of the hardest things about it is distilling out all the bullshit people think they know by viewing sick memes on Facebook.
There’s way too many people as well. I’d say that plays an even bigger role than climate change, and that’s a factor we actively fight against mitigating.
|
Nick Has an Exocet
> SilentButNotReallyDeadly...killed by G/O Media
09/16/2020 at 11:33 |
|
I’m not saying it’s simple (the company that I work for used AI to analyze wildfires) but trying to fix climate change to prevent these fires is asanine. It’s a worthy goal but there are 100 years worth of low hanging fruit, all of which will have a bigger impact. I’m not sure where you are but in the last 3 days, news outlets here have stopped reporting on anything except how Newsom, Biden, and Harris are blaming Trump’s non-acceptance of
climate as the cause for the fires. Newsom literally sat on a panel with all the experts who explained the points I raised only for Newsom to come away with “but climate change”. It's like we elected a 3 year old.
|
TheRealBicycleBuck
> DipodomysDeserti
09/16/2020 at 12:15 |
|
“There’s way too many people....”
That statement depends on how you view natural resources. If the status quo is the goal, then perhaps there are too many people. If the goal is to restore the “natural” condition, then we have to figure out which natural condition we are shooting for. We’ve been manipulating the environment for hundreds of thousands of years. Is the aim to go back to pre-human conditions? Or are we shooting for something in-between? How does that affect policy? Do we let nature re- balan ce by allowing wildfires to run their course or do we start using controlled burns to manage fuel loads? What about the other natural conditions we’ve manipulated? How does the natural condition play into our stormwater drainage policies? How do we change our water policies to provide drinking water and irrigate our farmland? Do we stop agriculture altogether? In terms of population control, how to we decide who gets to reproduce and who doesn’t? How do we go about controlling the population in the first place? Mass sterilization?
I’m not picking on you or looking to start an argument. These are questions that we debated all through college and grad school. They’re really hard to answer, especially when everyone realizes that achieving a more balanced system has to start with defining what that balance is and what sacrifices must be made to achieve it. Most people don’t have enough knowledge to recognize the ramifications of the policies they propose. I’m no expert, but I have enough experience to understand that it takes an army of experts in a variety of fields to really comprehend all of the fallout from the choices we make.
|
DipodomysDeserti
> TheRealBicycleBuck
09/16/2020 at 13:09 |
|
I don’t have any hope that most humans even want to find balance. I don’t think we have the means or the desire to restore anything close to a “natural” system at this point. Yes, humans have been altering the Earth (just like every other organism) for the last 300,000 plus years, but our relationship with the land has changed drastically, along with our population, over just the last 10k years. And as far as the vast majority of humans are concerned, that marks the beginning of our history.
|
TheRealBicycleBuck
> DipodomysDeserti
09/16/2020 at 13:56 |
|
Yeah, it’s always somebody else’s problem. This pandemic is an excellent example of self-centrism. People do what they have to do only when it directly benefits them or at least they think it does.
I wasn’t exposed to population growth rates and carrying capacities until I went to college. I looked at the current curriculum and see that ecology is now integrated into high school biology, but it certainly wasn’t emphasized when I was young. I suspect that most of Gen X didn’t get that message. If what I suspect is correct, my, and previous generations, weren’t really exposed to the science behind these ideas.