Middle Earth Journal: Wildfires

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

California Fire Storm

Who or what is to blame for the horrendous wild fires in California?

I suggested something else to blame yesterday, too many people. In reality it's too many people with little or no planning for the inevitable wild fires. A wild fire of this intensity is not unprecedented and in fact should be expected. In an area where planning for the inevitable earthquake is the norm there has been little or no consideration given to wild fires. Most areas did ban cedar shake roofs several years ago but that's about it. Lew Rockwell was probably the most wrong. What was and is needed is more government intervention. Developments and communities could be designed and built in ways that would minimize fire danger. If the infrastructure can be designed to survive earthquakes they can be designed to minimize the damage from wild fires. And that brings us to another problem. The rain will eventually come and there will be landslides and mud flows. The impact of these could be minimized as well.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

It's more than the climate stupid!

I was waiting for someone to tie the California wildfires to global warming and I wasn't disappointed - Eugene Robinson did it in the post this morning. And while he was at it he threw in the water emergency in Atlanta.
Forecast: Heavy Weather

"I've seen fire, and I've seen rain," James Taylor sang sweetly, back when I was in college and both of us had more hair.

If Taylor were writing that song today, given that much of the country is experiencing severe drought, he might want to rethink the "rain" part. "Fire" would still resonate with listeners, though -- especially out in Malibu, where some of the nation's most picturesque and expensive real estate is in flames.

Atlanta is so parched that it's running out of water. The canyons of Southern California are ablaze. Here in Washington, temperatures have been climbing into the 80s -- in late October. Can all this be blamed on that "inconvenient truth" that Nobel laureate Al Gore keeps warning us about? Is climate change -- often imprecisely called "global warming" -- loosing plagues upon the land?

No. Not exactly. Maybe. Probably not. Could be. Nobody knows. You can pretty much take your pick, since it's not possible to link any specific meteorological event -- the strength of the fire-fanning Santa Ana winds in Southern California this year, for example, or the rainfall deficit in the Southeast, or an unusually balmy fall in the Northeast -- with climatological changes that take place over decades or centuries and span the globe.

The weird weather does tend to concentrate the mind, though. Even George W. Bush acknowledges the scientific consensus that climate change is real. Most people, even conservatives, now have no problem taking the next step and acknowledging that human activity -- the burning of fossil fuels and the release of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- is causing climate change, or at least accelerating it.

Beyond those fundamentals, though, are a couple of even more inconvenient truths that few seem ready to come to terms with.

Mr Robinson does not address the really inconvenient truth - there are too many people living in the wrong places.

I doubt that the drought in the SE US is unprecedented. What is unprecedented is a metropolitan area with over five million people. That population can be supported in the good times but not in the bad. This is not the first "bad" time and won't be the last.

While it may have been accelerated by CO₂ emissions climate change is natural - drought and Santa Anna winds are natural but millions of people are not. The fires were probably started by human activity and wouldn't be a problem were it not for billions of dollars worth of real estate.

Yes, climate change is real and human activity may be impacting it but it's more than CO₂ emissions. It's too many people trying to maintain an unsustainable life style.