This is your country. This is your country ignoring climate change. It’s not a pretty picture.
As of this morning there are nine (9) wildfires burning in and around San Diego. With the current drought c0nditions and high temperatures expected this summer across the Western United States, this is only the beginning of what may become one of the worst wildfire seasons in our history. Then again, one could say that almost every year. From Scientific American’s article today, “Wildfires Come Hard and Fast to Southern California”:
SAN DIEGO—Parts of San Diego County resembled an inferno yesterday as nine fires roared along the edges of suburbs and through the countryside. In the afternoon, thick, black smoke spiraled into the air above San Marcos, 40 miles northeast of San Diego International Airport, while firefighters battled a spate of new flare-ups in the chaparral-covered hillsides below.
The fires have forced tens of thousands to evacuate, including personnel from the shuttered San Onofre nuclear power plant and Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton.
I imagine that when the Pentagon commissioned their study regarding the threat climate change poses to our national security, they didn’t go to great lengths to examine the possibility that military bases and nuclear power plants would be endangered by wildfires this month. I mean who could have anticipated ….
California is in the grip of a historic drought with all regions of the state classified as either severe, extreme or exceptional by the U.S. Drought Monitor. With snowpack and reservoir levels perilously low and higher temperatures ahead, many worry that the recent burns may be just a taste of what the summer has in store.
“It’s frightening,” said Peter Meade, 57, looking out the window of his Carlsbad home at a wall of gray smoke blanketing the skyline near the Pacific Ocean. The weather this spring has been ripe for fires, with hot, dry weather, he said. That’s atypical for the coastal region, where this time of year is usually dubbed “May gray” for its overcast skies.
Temperatures aren’t the only thing to arrive ahead of schedule this year. Santa Ana winds from the west—sometimes called “devil winds” for their heat and unpredictability—were responsible for much of the fires’ spread earlier this week. To see such winds in mid-May is highly unusual, said San Diego Board of Supervisors Chairwoman Diane Jacob, speaking alongside Gore yesterday.
“I’ve lived [in San Diego County] my entire life, and I’ve never experienced the kinds of winds we’re having right now in May,” she said.
Actually, there have been a bunch of scientists running around with their hair on fire (so to speak) warning of the threat drought and wildfires pose to our country. Just last year, climate researchers published a study that predicts wildfires in parts of the western United States will likely double by the year 2050.
The researchers behind [the] study are predicting more smoke pollution — even in communities far from the forest’s edge — as more fires burn because of rising temperatures.
The guilty party behind the new forest fire patterns is climate change, the researchers said. Higher average temperatures will result in more wildfires by 2050, especially in August, they found. […]
Overall, the typical four-month fire season will gain three weeks by 2050, the researchers report. And the probability of large fires could double or even triple. The findings were published in the October issue of the journal Atmospheric Environment.
The guilty party behind the new forest fire patterns is climate change, the researchers said. Higher average temperatures will result in more wildfires by 2050, especially in August, they found.
The Eastern Rocky Mountains and Great Plains regions will see their area burned during August nearly double. Also in August, the Rocky Mountain forest acreage torched by fire will quadruple, and the Pacific Northwest will increase by 65 percent, the study suggests.
Frankly, I expect, like many predictions made by climate scientists, based on current computer models and research, that they are erring on the side of being too conservative. Yet, we continue to have political stalemate, or maybe I should call it stagnation, on addressing the issue of climate change. Despite the growing wealth of evidence that the planet’s oceans and atmosphere are warming dramatically, and despite the continuing signs that the consequences from such warming predicted by climate scientists (massive precipitation events, floods, droughts, ocean acidification, species extinction,stronger and more deadly storms, and sea level rise to name but a few), our politicians persist in either denying climate change, or claiming it has nothing to to with human activity. Even the ones who acknowledge the reality of climate change rarely make it a priority in their public speeches. Of course, they have millions of reasons to ignore this threat, thanks to billionaires like the Koch Brothers.
To kick off the New Year, Koch Industries published on January 1, 2010, a piece titled “Blowing Smoke” in its Discovery Newsletter. “We are often told our planet will be devastated unless we immediately make drastic reductions in man-made greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions,” the piece contends. Then it levels the bogus charge: ” Rather than encouraging open and honest scientific enquiry and debate about the issue, climate extremists are trying to shout down any and all dissenters.”
Koch Industries goes well beyond its Web site to advance the views and interests of its owners. According to OpenSecrets.org, Koch Industries dramatically increased its lobbying in the decade leading to the 2008 election, from $200,000 in 1998 to over $20 million in 2008, making it the 8th largest spender on lobbying in the country. In 2009, it contributed another $12.5 million, with major legislative targets including the energy and climate change legislation before the Congress — and legislators who support the Koch brothers’ views on the legislation. To see how the Koch brothers are supporting specific members of Congress, see Follow the Oil Money’s page on Koch Industries’ campaign contributions.
At the same time, the Koch brothers have undermined climate science and policy through their foundations, the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, the David H. Koch Charitable Foundation and the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation. According to the report Axis of Ideology: Conservative Foundations and Public Policy, from the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (Executive Summary here [PDF] ), “most of their contributions go to support organizations and groups advancing libertarian theory, privatization, entrepreneurship and free enterprise.” As the Center for Public Integrity said in its 2004 brief, Koch’s Low Profile Belies Political Power: Private Oil Company Does Both Business and Politics With the Shades Drawn: “Although it is both a top campaign contributor and spends millions on direct lobbying, Koch’s chief political influence tool is a web of interconnected, right-wing think tanks and advocacy groups funded by foundations controlled and supported by the two Koch brothers.”
Of course, that is from 2010. Recent disclosures reveal that the Koch Brothers and their foundations spent at least $1.7 Billion on lobbying efforts and for political campaigns in 2012 alone. And of course, our media, particularly our televised media continues to treat the issue of climate change as a political controversy rather than a threat to our civilization. When they cover it at all that is.
Media Figures And Republicans Dominated Sunday Show Coverage Of Climate Change. On the rare occasions when Sunday shows focused on climate change, they were still unlikely to talk to scientists. Of those guests who did appear on the Sunday shows to talk about global warming, 43 percent were media figures and another 29 percent were politicians. Among the politicians who came onto the Sunday shows to inform the public about climate change, three-quarters of them were Republican.
How inconvenient for the reality-based community. And deliberate, in my opinion.
Meanwhile, that awful federal government is doing its best to warn people of the danger of wildfires this year.
May
Above normal fire potential will be over much of California, southern Arizona, and southwestern New Mexico. Must (sic) of southern Alaska will have above normal
fire potential. […]June
Above normal fire potential will expand to include northern California, Nevada, and much
of Oregon. Most of Alaska will continue to see above normal significant fire potential.July through August
Above normal fire potential will remain in most of California, northern Nevada, and central Oregon. Above normal fire potential will expand into eastern Oregon,
southwestern Idaho, and the Great Lakes region.
Alas, that same government will be committing fewer resources to fight those fires, thanks to the sequester, our grand budget bargain, that has been far from a bargain for most Americans.
Part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) fights fires within the 155 national forests and 20 national grasslands it administers — some 193 million acres. In 2009, the USFS employed nearly 35,000 people, including 10,050 firefighters.
By 2013, budget cuts and the budget sequester led to Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell announcing that the agency would be hiring 500 fewer firefighters and 50 fewer engine crews for the fire season. The agency has been struggling with budget issues the past few years as well because of longer fire seasons, more wildfires and acres burned, and decreased federal funding for fire suppression. As fire spending passed $1 billion for the year in early August, the Forest Service announced it was nearly out of money and needed to divert $600 million from other parts of its budget to fund suppression activities. Western state lawmakers have been working with the USFS to gain more funding from Congress and the Office of Budget and Management for future fire seasons, to little effect or certainty.
Ain’t that just grand?