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The West’s Infernos Are Melting Our Sense of How Fire Works
- mulmen 6y agoMeta: can’t actually read this. There’s a half screen popover for... something, cookies maybe? Then a full screen popover to sign up for spam. I’m not willing to do work to read popsci. Does the Wired web team think they have done a good job? I understand the incentives but are they proud of what they have created?
- jniedrauer 6y agoUse firefox reader mode.
- pessimizer 6y agoWired's content is of a piece with their web architecture, so it's not worth griping about. Other websites are available.
- Noumenon72 6y agoI scrolled through the front part of the article seeing 3-4 lines at a time before I realized I could roll down the thing covering up the bottom (since it has a down caret instead of an X, I didn't see it as closable). I never did go back and read the part I missed.
- Roboprog 6y agoIt seems to crash or otherwise reload frequently as well, at least in Safari on my iPad. After a while I put it in reader mode, until it reloaded crapify mode again :-( Note to Wired staff: surely you can do something that would make people want to return to your site, rather than viewing it as a last resort?
- andrewflnr 6y agoHoly shit. But we know how to fix this, or at least mitigate it. Just do the controlled burns already.
- quixoticelixer- 6y agoThat will help but it won't fix it
- bigbubba 6y agoThere is no fixing it. California is made to burn, the last century or so was unusually wet but California is now returning to a more typical dry tinderbox climate. (And AGW will likely make it worse than ever before.) Californians will need to figure out how to live with the fires, or move. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_California#Paleoclimatological_evidence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_California#P...
- gruez 6y agoAre there other parts of the world with a "dry tinderbox climate"? What does it look like, and how are people there dealing with it?
- seph-reed 6y agoI don't think so. I'm pretty sure it's just a stage on the way to desertification. Most of Nevada would be an example of where CA is probably heading.
- bigbubba 6y agoYes, Australia and Siberia are also particularly prone to fires. Taiga biomes and Mediterranean climates in general are associated with wildfires. To be frank I don't really see how California could deal with it. The state's population ballooned during an unusually wet period; if California had not been so unusually wet during the later half of the 19th century into the 20th century, I doubt it would be so heavily populated today. Encouraging people to leave small towns and come to defensible cities is probably the most realistic 'solution.'
- Judgmentality 6y ago> This becomes especially pressing, says Westerling, when you consider that every future fire season in the American West is likely to be worse than the last, on average. “How do you adapt to that? It’s not just California,” he says. “It would be the whole West Coast and the Rockies and parts of Canada and Alaska all going off on a regular basis. So just the magnitude of managing fires over that geographical scale simultaneously is staggering, right down to the psychological impact of living with that.” So we're just at the tip of the iceberg, and experts (from a different part of the article) are saying the worst is at least 10 years away.
- renewiltord 6y agoSurprised there doesn't appear to be a wildlands firefighter reserves program where normal people are trained to firefighting skills and then have a refresher course for a week before sticking us in the flames.
- uniformlyrandom 6y agoCalifornia would rather use inmates as an almost-free resource to fight fires. Works even better than volunteer force. Only this time, the inmates were already released because of COVID-19.
- bsanr2 6y agoI hope it's not lost on people the fact that we essentially have a population of slaves bound to risk their lives protecting wealth and property they can't partake in and that probably shouldn't be situated, geographically, where it is in the first place. Also note that they're on work release, so it's unlikely that these people are particularly notorious criminals. They're (mostly) men who made mistakes and had their freedom stripped away profoundly for it. That's the state/region that birthed the Information Age and all its "progress."
- Roboprog 6y agoHopefully some will take that policy into account next Tuesday.
- seph-reed 6y agoColorado has had 3 of the top 4 biggest fires in its history this year. Two of them are 10 miles from merging. One went from ~1000 acres to 100,000 in a single day (ballpark). All of this during a time typically considered outside of fire season.
- opwieurposiu 6y agoYep. Our cabin, that we had just finished building, burned down in the Cameron Peak fire. Our neighbors lost their primary house. We were prepared to weather a ground fire, but this one was leaping crown-to-crown. We will rebuild with non-flammable materials.
- renewiltord 6y agoDo you get disaster relief when this happens? Or do you have to just pay massive premiums? Thinking about a cabin myself at some point and wondering what the economics look like.
- opwieurposiu 6y agoWe basically paid for the land and got a half-finished cabin shell for free. Spent two summers finishing it up real nice and then woosh! No insurance, I guess we lost about 20-40k of materials and tools that were there. The most painful part of fixing it was getting all the building permits sorted out. Oh well, the Buddha teaches us that all things are temporary. I did enjoy the weekends hammering away with friends and family. I am looking into shipping container construction now. Cabin 2.0 will solve all the design flaws we inherited from Cabin 1.0, and no doubt introduce new and exciting flaws!
- seph-reed 6y agoSorry to hear that. Did you get your irreplaceable's out? Decent coverage? Really hope it's not too much of set-back for y'all.
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- quantified 6y agoIt raises the question of how much of the current "fire climate" comes from the atmospheric climate and how much from accumulation of bad fuel management. I believe the scientific principles of human contribution to climate change are solidly established. But climate change is not the only problem we face.