It's Hot Ouside!

No, not here in Canada.  In Australia.  (Although folks in Toronto might be excused for thinking 8 is a tad warm for a winter day.)

It has been so hot in Australia that the Bureau of Meteorology added new colours and mew maximums  to their predictions.


54 degrees Celsius is HOT!  So Australians are waking up to the alarming possibilities inherent in climate change, right?  Well, not the acting opposition leader.

"Australia's climate, it's changing, it's changeable. We have hot times, we have cold times...
 'The reality is that it's utterly simplistic to suggest that we have these fires                              because  of climate change.'' acting Opposition Leader Warren Truss says.  
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/national/climate-change-link-to-heat-fires-utterly-simplistic-says-warren-truss/story-fndo317g-1226550415035

Never mind the facts!  Or the government's Climate Commission!

No deaths have been reported from the bushfires, which have flared during extreme summer temperatures, but the unprecedented heatwave has prompted the government’s Climate Commission to issue a new report on the weather event.
It says that climate change has contributed to making the extreme heat conditions — in which record-breaking temperatures in parts of the country have topped 45ºC — and bushfires worse.
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2013/01/13/2003552448

Meanwhile, some questions from Global Risks 2013: Eighth Edition.  http://reports.weforum.org/global-risks-2013/

1.  How will we reconcile climate change mitigation and adaptation with the desire for prosperity given current demographic trends?

2.  How can like-minded municipalities, companies and communites drive forward a new set of climate-smart approaches that avoid cognitive biases?

What are the answers?

Get Used to Wildfires

Ontario:
http://www.northernlife.ca/news/localNews/2012/05/22-forest-fire-season-sudbury.aspx
It's not even the first day of summer yet, and already the number of fires in 2012 compared to last year has more than doubled, according to the Ministry of Natural Resources.


American Southwest:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/20/us-usa-wildfires-idUSBRE84J00K20120520


"An Arizona wildfire whipped up by winds and dry conditions threatened to trigger more evacuations on Sunday, just as firefighters were nearly done battling the biggest of four blazes in the state.
Fires in Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado have forced the evacuation of several small towns and torched more than 65 square miles (168 square km) of forest, brush and grass in the U.S. Southwest."

Mexico:
http://wildfiretoday.com/2012/05/17/fire-in-mexico-may-cross-border-us-crews-responding/

"UPDATE at 9:59 p.m. PDT, May 17, 2012
After CAL FIRE said the spread had been stopped in the afternoon, strong winds caused the fire to escape containment and at about 7 p.m. PDT the US Forest Service sent seven engines, a water tender, and misc. staff to the fire. At 8 p.m. CAL FIRE said the fire on the U.S. side of the border had grown to 100 acres and was10% contained."

California:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/08/us/08fire.html?_r=1&ref=californiawildfires

A wildfire on the hills near this oceanside city was only 10 percent contained on Thursday, and firefighters struggled to pen in the flames, which had destroyed 75 houses since they began on Tuesday.

We better get used to wildfires we cannot control.

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Thomson+fire+next+time+Slave+Lake+disaster+harbinger+things+come/6620204/story.html



"Slave Lake is not a one-off. We're going to see more communities at risk in the future, whether it's Quebec or Ontario or Manitoba or BC," says Mike Flannigan, a professor with the Department of Renewable Resources at the University of Alberta. "We've seen the fires in Kamloops and Kelowna back in 2003 and now 2011 in Slave Lake."  Those fires moved with a speed and intensity that caught firefighters off guard and proved impossible to contain. They were cousins to the so-called "mega-fires" that tore through Australia in 2009 and Russia in 2010, devastating huge regions and killing or injuring hundreds of people.

The trends of climate change are disturbingly consistent: the atmosphere is warming, the climate is changing and we are largely responsible though our burning of fossil fuels. Scientists say as the climate warms we'll experience more extreme weather events, leading not only to droughts and forest fires but to floods. Fire and flood are two of the apparent oxymoronic scourges related to climate change; Slave Lake was the unfortunate victim of both last year.

"This is only going to continue," says Flannigan. "I would argue that it's one of the first early signs that climate change is happening.""

Perhaps someone should inform the Right Honorable Stephen Harper.

The March of Folly

What happens when ideology trumps science - and common sense?  Armageddon, apparently.

An update from the Texas Forest Service yesterday, Sept. 7, 2011.

"Yesterday Texas Forest Service responded to 19 new fires for 1,490 acres, including new large fires in Red River and Rusk counties. In the past seven days Texas Forest Service has responded to 172 fires for 135,051 acres."  http://tfsweb.tamu.edu/main/article.aspx?id=12888

Oooooh.  Scary stuff.  And look at their drought index:  Texas is dryer than clothes hung out to dry on a windy summer day.



No wonder fires are  burning and have been burning for a long time. 

"Wildfires are burning across central Texas right now, the product of an historic drought and high winds from Tropical Storm Lee. An estimated 3.6 million acres have been scorched since November, with the flames approaching the city limits of Austin; damage is expected to exceed $5 billion. In the macro-sense, this is climate change-caused problem, with Texas' climate set to become dryer and dryer over the ensuing decades, making extended droughts the new norm."

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/09/drought-worsened-rick-perry-slashed-fire-fighting-spending

Please note that's November  of 2010 !!!!  These Texas fires are not merely nature gone mad:  humans have contributed to the outbreak.  How?  That's where belief systems came in ....

"Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a GOP presidential candidate, scoffs at the notion of human-induced climate change, even suggesting recently on the campaign trail that scientists are manipulating data to make money. He also has declared a weather-related state of emergency every month since December. Meanwhile, Texas' state climatologist has warned that his fellow citizens should get used to this climate of extremes."

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/may/22/nation/la-na-drought-texas-20110522

Not only does Mr Perry scoff at the reality of climate change while Texas dries out around him, and refuse to discuss action on climate change, he has slashed firefighters' budgets.
"The state of Texas has been battling wildfires for almost a year now. The wildfire season began in November last year, and Gov. Rick Perry and cash-strapped state lawmakers took a stance against raising taxes and against putting their hands too deeply into the states rainy day fund. So in order to save some money, Perry and GOP allies slashed funding for the agency responsible for fighting wildfires ‑ in the midst of a historic wildfire season that's seen more than 2 million acres burned by fire. The Texas Forest Service is slapped with about $34 million in budget cuts over a two-year period, which is roughly a third of the agency's total budget."
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/210134/20110907/texas-wildfires-2011rick-perry-cut-firefighters-budget-texas-forest-service.htm


Why on earth slash government budgets for essential services when one could raise taxes?  Belief systems - less government good - taxes bad.


Perhaps someone should hand Mr Perry a copy of The March of Folly by Bbarbara Tuchman. 

Wildfires 2010

I cannot see past the house across the street - no trees - no mountains - no river - just a wall of grey smoke.   Even the dog sneezes when she spends time outdoors as the air quality is very poor.   I think I'll take another anti-histamine while I consider the fact that most of our summers may be like this one - hot , smoky, and miserable. 

An article in Scientific American states

fires are not just a result of a changing climate, they're also contributing to the overall warming trend much more than imagined, the authors report. As vegetation burns, it releases stored-up carbon into the atmosphere, speeding global warming and thereby exacerbating conditions that may generate a greater incidence of wildfires in the coming years. But across the globe, fires have been getting larger and stronger. "We are witnessing an increasing instance of these megafires," says Thomas Swetnam, director of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fires-fuel-climate-change

In other words, wildfires are partly a result of climate change - and accelerate climate change at the same time.   BC is particlarly vulnerable to this feedback loop due to all the pine beetle killed trees.   A wonderful prospect......

Scarier Than I First Thought

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/europe/2010/08/20108520215744896.html

No details about the munitions involved were disclosed but the armed forces have said that a naval logistics base near Moscow had been destroyed by the ongoing inferno.  Russian media reported as many as 200 planes may have been destroyed at the naval air base....In Sarov, firefighters have focused on beating flames back from the top-secret Russian Federal Nuclear Research Centre.  A Sarov news website on Thursday cited local officials as saying a wall of fire had been broken down into several smaller blazes.   The officials said the closest blaze was still several kilometres from the research facilities and as a precaution all hazardous materials had been evacuated.

Wow - an even even scarier scenario than was apparent at first reading the news.