California (again)

[ALF]

RealKayAdams wrote :

 

 

"Trump has made several specific comments recently on the California wildfires that demand immediate correction. He keeps blaming liberal politicians and radical environmentalists within the state for forest mismanagement, but about 55% of California’s forests are federal land and about 40% are private, with only about 5% the responsibility of the state. "

 

Do state regs apply to fed and private forest land ?

 

 

 

 

[SoCal Deek]

California’s wild fires are NOT the result of it being hot outside!  Trees don’t suddenly succumb to spontaneous combustion for goodness sake!!!

[SoCal Deek]

1 minute ago, BeerLeagueHockey said:

 

 

How cool is that?!! 
For those not familiar with the details, of the two Southern California wildfires one was caused by a gender reveal party gone wrong (believe it or not) and the other was started by poorly managed Edison power lines...again. Neither had anything to do with Climate Change! 

[Chef Jim]

34 minutes ago, SoCal Deek said:

California’s wild fires are NOT the result of it being hot outside!  Trees don’t suddenly succumb to spontaneous combustion for goodness sake!!!

It getS hot here every year.  The Santa Ana winds blow here every year.  As a matter of fact it’s relatively recent that homeowners are required to clear brush from around their homes.  We used to get a notification from the Oakland FD that they inspected our property and if we needed to do any trimming.  So what’s changed? 🤔

[SoCal Deek]

10 minutes ago, Chef Jim said:

It getS hot here every year.  The Santa Ana winds blow here every year.  As a matter of fact it’s relatively recent that homeowners are required to clear brush from around their homes.  We used to get a notification from the Oakland FD that they inspected our property and if we needed to do any trimming.  So what’s changed? 🤔

What changed this last year was that we had a late, wet spring. It looked like Ireland around the hills of SoCal....green everywhere.  That created the large dry underlayment for the fires to feed off of this summer. Oddly enough it’s the rain that played a major role in our robust fire season. 

[Wacka]

And lightning is man-made or Trump's fault?

[B-Man]

19 minutes ago, Wacka said:

And lightning is man-made or Trump's fault?

 

 

EVERYTHING is Trump's fault.

 

 

[3rdnlng]

16 hours ago, RealKayAdams said:

 

Hi 3rdnlng, yes this is a very important topic that I should review in some depth. My summarized thoughts on the California wildfires topic are that the political right seems overly focused on forest management, the political left seems appropriately focused on climate management, the far right for some reason is fixated on Antifa arsonist management, and I wish everyone would spend a lot more time discussing suburban development management.

 

Have decades of negligent forest management played a role in this year’s wildfires? Absolutely, but only to some extent. Clearing dead wood, implementing controlled burns, creating strategic break lines in forests, trimming branches around electric power lines, and allowing natural fires to run their course during prior decades would have all mitigated the overall crisis in many locations. But in terms of both cost and manpower, it is highly impractical (33 million acres of forest in the state, about 10% of which has currently burned this season) to think these efforts alone could have reduced the wildfire spread and minimized the wildfire risk to levels that Californians would have found tolerable.

 

Climate change, whether man-made or natural, is undoubtedly the root cause of the abnormally strong wildfires this year. California’s measurable drought seasons have lengthened and become drier, warmer, and windier over the years. Statewide vapour-pressure deficits this summer were at all-time highs. August was also the hottest month on record in California. Changes like these have enabled bark beetles to proliferate in larger regions and in additional ways compared to the recent past. So many more tree deaths from the greater desiccation and from the increased bark beetle damage have created a lot more flammable dry wood than was previously found within the forests just decades ago. To be clear, the dramatically increased wildfire activity in California, Washington, and Oregon is not conclusive proof one way or the other of MAN-MADE global climate change. However, the severity of these regional fires and droughts (5 of 10 worst fires ever recorded in California are happening right now), the speed at which these regional changes are happening, and similarly observed wildfire strengthening in other parts of the world like Russia and Australia are all perfectly in line with anthropogenic climate change predictions made in the late 80’s (most prominent: James Hansen Senate testimony in June 1988).

 

Trump has made several specific comments recently on the California wildfires that demand immediate correction. He keeps blaming liberal politicians and radical environmentalists within the state for forest mismanagement, but about 55% of California’s forests are federal land and about 40% are private, with only about 5% the responsibility of the state. Trump has also pointed out that Texas and parts of Europe have managed to avoid such crazy wildfires, thus proving definitively in his mind that it’s a unique California forest management issue and not a MMGW one. The problem with his logic here is that…well…Texas and Europe inherently have different climates than California, they have very different forest habitat compositions, and this does nothing whatsoever to disprove man-made global warming since no one has ever argued that its effects get applied evenly throughout the planet. Furthermore, I believe Trump referenced an infamous graph from the USDA Forest Service which showed that total annual U.S. burned forest acreage during the 1930’s was multiple times higher than today. The biggest problem with that graph is that the data didn’t distinguish forest wildfires from grassland/range fires or incendiary (i.e., known to be deliberately planned) fires prior to the 1960’s. I really don’t know what else to say to MMGW skeptics since there is never going to be a “smoking gun” piece of evidence in support of (or against) this scientific subfield. This isn’t like proving the law of gravity. At some later point in time, the accumulating evidence of its veracity (or falsehood) will have to outweigh the urge to prove the other political side wrong.

 

I won’t get into any of the Antifa arson allegations. Even if we had definitive proof of them starting so many of these fires, it’s kinda irrelevant to the topic. We’re not discussing the INSTIGATION of the wildfires (be it lightning or human-related activity), but rather the SPREAD of these conflagrations.

 

I assume that I already lost most of the PPP audience with these previous paragraphs, but now here is where I start to lose everyone! The more fundamental problem is unrestrained suburban development, along with its corollary of inadequate urban planning and the much broader corollary of unrestrained capitalism within the context of rapid population growth. My general problems with sprawling suburbia are the amount of habitat destruction they wreak, in terms of total space, as well as the incredible space-inefficient strain they put on our energy grid and on our fossil fuel demands. I would like to see a constructive dialogue on how to make concentrated urban living more palatable, but…yeah…that’s not gonna happen in the year 2020 with the pandemic and the rioting. So let’s return to the specific topic of California. Mother Nature appears to be insisting that this many people shouldn’t be living there. As if this wasn’t apparent enough during the time of Mulholland’s water wars, it’s especially apparent now that suburban boundaries are intruding deeply inland and encroaching into shrublands, pine forests, and all types of forestry ready to burn naturally during California’s lengthy dry seasons.

 

I could go scorched earth (pun intended) on the environmental consequences of laissez-faire capitalism tonight, but I won’t…I’ll only mention that environmental issues (including housing development zones) are way too important and complex for their currently insufficient regulation/oversight and probably shouldn’t be left up to purely democratically elected politicians, either. So at the national level, that is why I’d like to break up the executive branch into smaller branches via the (admittedly difficult) constitutional amendment process. I’d leave some of the 15 executive departments exclusively for the President (Defense, Homeland Security, Justice, Veterans Affairs), but I’d like to siphon off some of the other executive departments’ responsibilities for a fourth “environment branch” (parts of the Interior, Agriculture, Transportation, Energy, HUD, HHS) as well as for a fifth “economics branch” (parts of the Treasury, Commerce, Labor, Education, and maybe even State to pair with the Federal Reserve). For these environment and economics branches, right now I’m thinking primarily along the lines of a panel of tsars a la the Supreme Court, but with term limits. My aforementioned solution would also apply at the state level, of course, under the same federalist system that the three familiar branches currently enjoy. Any disagreements here? No? Wow, really?! Good! Remember: the best solution doesn’t have to be a perfect one or even a good one, but the least crappy one.

 

In addition to the West Coast wildfires topic, the links in your post allude to a bunch of other environmental topics that I covered in the Global Warming Hoax thread (pages 324-334 from April through July). So I won’t be redundant on these positions: man-made climate change is real, solar renewables are good, wind renewables are overrated, fracking is very bad, fossil fuel subsidies should be removed, fossil fuel-motivated American interventionist foreign policy is terrible, many irrational environmentalists push counterproductive bureaucratic regulations, and most Democratic politicians like Pelosi and Newsom and Obama are major climate change hypocrites.

 

The one exception that I don’t think I ever covered is the urban heat island effect on weather stations. For those unfamiliar with the concept, this is the warming effect on weather station instrumentation from the absorbed/re-emitted heat of nearby concrete, asphalt, and bricks. There have been numerous studies of this effect, the most comprehensive being the famous NASA GISS paper published in 2001 which should be easy to find online. Included in it are cross-analyses of temperature data over a 30-year period, using station data both from recently industrialized areas and from still isolated ones. The measured urban heat island effect turns out to be pretty small and practically negligible when seen in full temperature plots. The measured effect is consistent for weather stations throughout the world, including some of the most rapidly industrialized places in China. The specific technique used to isolate and account for these discrepancies in the data is also described in (painful) detail in the paper. One of your three posted internet links references a challenge to this landmark paper from known MMGW skeptic, Anthony Watts, at his “Watts Up With That” website. Watts cherry-picks isolated regional data anomalies here to disprove a global trend, but unfortunately for him, the anomalies he cites at certain U.S. weather stations were debunked years ago as signal processing quirks from diurnal temperature range variations. Climate change skeptics still fixated on the urban heat island issue need to explain the observed temperature changes in the most remote weather stations of the Northern Hemisphere (Russia, Greenland, Canada, Alaska) where the global warming effect is most pronounced. They also need to explain all of the ocean warming data…

We used to hear that becoming energy independent was impossible because it would take us 10 years to do so. Today the USA is energy independent because we not only set out to do so but were fortunate to discover and utilize fracking. Fracking has been a Godsend to our country and possibly the world. You are dead set against it but praise renewables that have made very little difference in reducing carbon emissions. In your own words you claim that solutions don't have to be perfect but the least crappy one. Here is an article from Slate that is 8 years old. I searched using the words fracking, reduction and carbon emissions. I quit perusing the different articles after 3 pages but chose one from a notoriously liberal source. 

 

https://slate.com/technology/2012/09/thanks-to-fracking-u-s-carbon-emissions-are-at-the-lowest-levels-in-20-years.html

 

It is my understanding that we here import much of our lumber. I could imagine a government/private industry partnership that would allow logging on federal/state lands along with simultaneously cleaning, thinning our forests and creating fire breaks. Returning to paper bags instead of disposable plastic bags might be a solution for some of the deadfall along with standing timber. We need to daily bitchslap faux environmentalists that protest against trimming tree branches around electrical lines while whole communities burn down. 

 

Our energy independence, along with our ability to export energy products places us in a position to dictate outcomes around the world. The Middle East has given us trouble and blackmailed us for decades because they had the oil. Russia, clearly not our friend, relies on oil and natural gas for their main income. We can use our energy independence to shape outcomes around the world. While many may dislike hearing this and I don't find it a perfect solution to the world's problems I see it as the "least crappy one". 

 

As far as California goes it is an overpopulated irrigated desert without enough water to support its residents. Their efforts would be better spent looking for solutions such as desalination plants rather than bullet trains. The problem though is that they have given away their ability to actually make bold decisions because of their deep seated government pension deficits. They are the perfect example of failed liberal policies. 

Edited September 28, 2020 by 3rdnlng

[Joe Miner]

13 hours ago, Alaska Darin said:

Nope.

 

 

"ALL of this catastrophizing around Climate Change is just a huge DISTRACTION.  Did climate change happen between last year and this year?"  - Actual accredited person, not some wordy internet liberal assclown.

Socialism is her goal.

 

Climate change is the vehicle that will take her there.

 

She will take some time, prostrate herself at the alter of climate change and come back to give you a new sermon that will end with the one true goal of socialism to save us all.

[Deranged Rhino]

 

[Buffalo_Gal]

 

 

 

[SoCal Deek]

Here’s the long and short of it: California is a mess because of one party rule.
 

This is what happens when there’s no check and balance on the state legislature. (The same would be true on the right by the way, but I personally believe it would have less dire consequences.)

[Doc]

1 hour ago, SlimShady'sSpaceForce said:

Barry and Joe? 

 

Nice dodge Doc

“Dodge”?  LOL!  
 

Oh, the hypocrisy!

[Buffalo_Gal]

7 minutes ago, SoCal Deek said:

Here’s the long and short of it: California is a mess because of one party rule.
 

This is what happens when there’s no check and balance on the state legislature. (The same would be true on the right by the way, but I personally believe it would have less dire consequences.)

We saw it immediately in NYS when the Republicans lost the state senate. Even if the state senate Rs were RINOs, they still kept a check on the crazy. As soon as that tiny check was removed things got insane here. When Cuomo had to tell them to rethink some of their far-left agenda (gee, wonder why people are moving out in record numbers?) you knew the state legislator Ds were off the rails.

 

[Orlando Buffalo]

2 hours ago, SoCal Deek said:

Here’s the long and short of it: California is a mess because of one party rule.
 

This is what happens when there’s no check and balance on the state legislature. (The same would be true on the right by the way, but I personally believe it would have less dire consequences.)

Deek Idaho, Dakota's, Wyoming are all as Red as Cali is Blue but they have almost no issues. The problem is too much blue.

[Buffalo_Gal]

Disney is laying off 28,000 employees as pandemic hammers its theme parks
 

Disney is laying off 28,000 people in the United States as the coronavirus pandemic hammers its parks and resorts business.
 

The cuts will affect the Disney's Parks, Experiences and Products unit. The company said 67% of the employees laid off will be part-time workers.

Disney's parks and resorts division has more than 100,000 US employees.
 

</snip>
 

D'Amaro also placed partial blame on the state of California for its "unwillingness to lift restrictions that would allow Disneyland to reopen." Disneyland and California Adventure, the company's flagship resorts in California, have been closed since March.
 

</snip>

From the Orlando article (Florida is fully open, not sure how many tourists they are getting):
 

</snip>
 

Disney did not provide a breakdown about how many employees are losing their jobs at Disney World and Disneyland. No notice of mass layoffs had been filed with the state of Florida, according to online records.
 

</snip>

 

[B-Man]

Disney Will Lay off 28,000 Employees as California Governor Refuses to Provide Reopening Guidelines

 

 

 

[B-Man]

 

 

Why I’m Leaving California.

When my family moved to North Hollywood, I was 11. We lived in a safe, clean suburb. Yes, Los Angeles had serious crime and homelessness problems, but those were problems relegated to pockets of the city—problems that, with good governance, we thought could eventually be healed. Instead, the government allowed those problems to metastasize.

 

As of 2011, Los Angeles County counted less than 40,000 homeless; as of 2020, that number had skyrocketed to 66,000. Suburban areas have become the sites of homeless encampments. Nearly every city underpass hosts a tent city; the city, in its kindness, has put out port-a-potties to reduce the possibility of COVID-19 spread.

 

Police are forbidden in most cases from either moving transients or even moving their garbage. Nearly every public space in Los Angeles has become a repository for open waste, needles, and trash. The most beautiful areas of Los Angeles, from Santa Monica beach to my suburb, have become wrecks.

 

My children have personally witnessed drug use, public urination, and public nudity. Looters were allowed free reign in the middle of the city during the Black Lives Matter riots; Rodeo Drive was closed at 1 p.m., and citizens were curfewed at 6 p.m.

 

To combat these trends, local and state governments have gamed the statistics, reclassifying offenses and letting prisoners go free.

 

Meanwhile, the police have become targets for public ire. In July, the city of Los Angeles slashed police funding, cutting the force to its lowest levels in over a decade.

 

 

 

Decay is a choice.

 

 

 

 

[Alaska Darin]

4 minutes ago, B-Man said:

 

Decay is a choice.

The last Republican Mayor of LA left office in 2001.  Democrats own all of this.  ALL OF IT.

[Buffalo_Gal]