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Forest Service officials close all California national forests

latimes.com

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Re: Forest Service officials close all California national forests

#221

Post by OneEyedRobot »

wrycoder wrote: post #110
amluto wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The California problems may well be more due to forest mismanagement and PG&E issues than global warming. But 0.14C/decade is not “minimal” in any useful sense — it’s severely problematic.

That’s 1.5 C per century. Where I sit, there was ice a mile thick 15,000 years ago. We are still coming out of the last ice age. Besides that, we have just come out of the so-called Little Ice Age, at the height of which people walked from Manhattan to Staten Island on the ice in New York Harbor. 1.5 C per century is inconsequential. Not only that, but I predict that humans will stop emitting CO2 in a few decades, in…

>Not only that, but I predict that humans will stop emitting CO2 in a few decades, in any case.

I expect that per capita greenhouse emissions will go down, they have in the US for quite some time.

Clean sheet mitigation results in a lot of ox goring. You probably need more nuke plants, less (or no) immigration from the third world to the first, replacement of coal with natgas, hammer on the Chinese, encourage birth control.

People are generally hard on the environment and there's too darn many of them. Environmental issues are typically used to achieve political/financial power.

Re: Forest Service officials close all California national forests

#223

Post by OneEyedRobot »

hellbannedguy wrote: post #113
dav wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moat won’t work as well as you probably think. A lot of the problem comes from the sky raining down embers on flammable roofs and such...

A moat is not a horrid idea. When Paradise was burning I was thinking if I lived in a fire prone envionment; I would have sprinklers on roof of my home. It would be a simple 1/2" copper pipe feeding a few sprinkler heads on the roof. Maybe a few mercury switches placed around the property, or remotely controlled through the phone line, wifi, or sat phone enabled? Nothing too elaborate. It wouldn't protect everyone. I…

While sprinklers are probably impractical as they require large storage or that you (and your neighbors) starve the mains, I'll bet that a person could design a fast-to-deploy thermal blanket system of some sort.

Re: Forest Service officials close all California national forests

#224

Post by OneEyedRobot »

benplumley wrote: post #173
Johnny555 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A small residential fire sprinkler head outputs around 15gpm of water. While keeping a roof wet is different than wetting down a room on fire, a roof is big and you need to be sure it stays wet, so let's say you want to keep it wet with 30gpm. And lets say you have to keep it wet for 24 hours until the fire danger passes. That's around 40,000 gallons of water. Where are you going to get that water? You can't count on…

Don't forget that most of the water you sprinkle onto the roof will collect in the gutters which can feed immediately back into the tank, so you only need enough water for a few cycles plus 24 hours of evaporation loss - still a decent amount of water, but a lot more like a large garden water-butt than an industrial tank.

Huh. That's clever and I've never seen it.

Probably not of much value as roofs are (or can be) relatively fireproof.

The issue is vents, decks, windows to some extent.

Re: Forest Service officials close all California national forests

#225

Post by OneEyedRobot »

anigbrowl wrote: post #199
hellbannedguy wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A moat is not a horrid idea. When Paradise was burning I was thinking if I lived in a fire prone envionment; I would have sprinklers on roof of my home. It would be a simple 1/2" copper pipe feeding a few sprinkler heads on the roof. Maybe a few mercury switches placed around the property, or remotely controlled through the phone line, wifi, or sat phone enabled? Nothing too elaborate. It wouldn't protect everyone. I…

While these are earnest and constructive suggestions that would work in some contexts, I'm not sure you're taking the drought conditions into account. The basic problem we have in California is that water levels are hitting historic lows while forests are bone dry and so are the winds that fan fires.

I also suspect that the change in the precipitation mix from snow to rain served to dry out a lot of these areas.

Re: Forest Service officials close all California national forests

#227

Post by koheripbal »

dbcurtis wrote: post #186
gorwell wrote: post #111

Can anyone explain this? "So early on, Newsom identified some key wildfire prevention projects, and that includes things like forest thinning and prescribed burns, and they were meant to protect some of the most vulnerable communities in California. And he claimed 90,000 acres were treated, but we found that's not true. The state's own data shows that, in reality, it was less than 12,000 acres, so just a fraction of…

I have one piece of anectdata. I own some property in the Sierra foothills, and a couple of years ago spent considerable time talking to the California Department Forestry (CDF) fire chief for the area about clearing a fire break through it. It was part of a huge project. We agreed on the path, had the legal paperwork signed... and then... COVID, and then, 100% of local crews were dispatched to fight last year's fire…

I imagine a burned area becomes a pretty good fire break.

So does this mean that less work will be needed (state-wide) when this fire season is over?

Re: Forest Service officials close all California national forests

#228

Post by thehappypm »

wrycoder wrote: post #70
thehappypm wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we need to stick with global warming. Overwhelmingly the direction is warming.

Except that the actual global atmospheric warming is minimal, 0.14 C/decade. [0] The actual problem is climate change in the western part of the United States, coupled with higher population density, poor forest management, and poor power line maintenance. [0] https://www.drroyspencer.com/2021/08/uah-global-temperature-...

I looked this up, thinking, there's no way that .15 C / decade is plausible, you're a wackjob. But there it is: https://www.co2.earth/global-warming-update

Global warming has only increased the Earth's temperature by 1 degree Celsius? That doesn't seem like a lot.

Re: Forest Service officials close all California national forests

#229

Post by coryfklein »

Is it just me or are the wildfires much much worse this decade than they were the previous two?

I live in Utah where all the smoke from the west-coast wildfires likes to come take up residence, and I can't recall more than a single summer before 2015 when wildfire smoke was pervasive outdoors. But in just the past few years it seems that a good 50-80% of the summer the air outside is completely unbearable due to smoke.

I can't be making this up, this must be a recent phenomenon. But my Google-fu is failing me in trying to find a chart that confirms my intuition. I'm curious: what changed, and when exactly did this new trend begin?

Re: Forest Service officials close all California national forests

#230

Post by ch4s3 »

dmckeon wrote: post #191
nradov wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

California also has government sponsored fire insurance for property owners that can't obtain commercial insurance. While this is good for individual property owners it's not really fair that taxpayers have to subsidize them. We're not allowing the free market to efficiently price in risks. https://www.cfpnet.com/

Subsidized, but not fully sponsored. I live about a mile outside the edge of the 2021 CZU fire, and our insurance costs about tripled, even with the CA FAIR plan. We’ve followed the CalFire “defensible space” guidelines and covered vents with fine screen, but improving survivability for that existing house from there would mean reroofing with metal or tile, removing or replacing all wooden decking, and covering T-111…

Yeah those retro-fits would be very expensive. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me that insurance companies paid to rebuild a lot of homes out of materials that aren't suitable for the homes' fire risk. Though, I don't have a ton of knowledge about this.
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