California is on fire

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plodder
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Re: California is on fire

Post by plodder » Sat Sep 26, 2020 4:54 pm

Come on, Boaf, we’re seeing the beginnings of the problem, but it’s not inevitable that they’ll be uninhabitable. Cheer up mate, and watch Mad Max, or maybe read some old Judge Dredds. Munce probably tasted just fine.

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Re: California is on fire

Post by Bird on a Fire » Sat Sep 26, 2020 9:15 pm

I know humans are remarkably adaptable, but I still reckon "routinely on fire" probably qualifies as uninhabitable. Though maybe, as with people who continue living on floodplains, crumbling cliff edges or certain bits of the coast, they'll continue living there anyway and hopefully can be rescued in time.

The climate models do suggest that various places people currently live are likely to spend months being too hot to go outside. I guess they've all got AC though, right.
We have the right to a clean, healthy, sustainable environment.

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Bird on a Fire
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Re: California is on fire

Post by Bird on a Fire » Sat Sep 26, 2020 9:20 pm

The rewilding of the Lincolnshire coast is very cool to see, though, and various other wetland creation projects. It's going to be a hoot when they start doing realignment round urban areas though, turning parks and playing fields into saltmarshes.

Next we should rewild national parks, shooting estates, and unprofitable farming areas (taking advantage of their failure after Brexit when the subsidies run out), with especial emphasis on the uplands. It's time for joined-up thinking and ambition.
We have the right to a clean, healthy, sustainable environment.

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Re: California is on fire

Post by Millennie Al » Sun Sep 27, 2020 3:36 am

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Fri Sep 25, 2020 3:02 pm
Yes, I think we're seeing the beginnings of parts of the world becoming basically uninhabitable.
A significant part of the world is already uninhabitable - Antarctica.

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Re: California is on fire

Post by Squeak » Sun Sep 27, 2020 10:09 pm

Millennie Al wrote:
Sun Sep 27, 2020 3:36 am
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Fri Sep 25, 2020 3:02 pm
Yes, I think we're seeing the beginnings of parts of the world becoming basically uninhabitable.
A significant part of the world is already uninhabitable - Antarctica.
Is not. I've lived there and I'm still alive.

Admittedly, there aren't any multi-generational families living there (though there are a number of local-born Antarcticans from the Antarctic Peninsula. And also admittedly, there aren't any self-sustaining colonies there, but then, if you're going to make being self-sufficient a criterion for habitability, that excludes a lot of places where humans live.

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Grumble
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Re: California is on fire

Post by Grumble » Sun Sep 27, 2020 10:36 pm

Squeak wrote:
Sun Sep 27, 2020 10:09 pm
Millennie Al wrote:
Sun Sep 27, 2020 3:36 am
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Fri Sep 25, 2020 3:02 pm
Yes, I think we're seeing the beginnings of parts of the world becoming basically uninhabitable.
A significant part of the world is already uninhabitable - Antarctica.
Is not. I've lived there and I'm still alive.

Admittedly, there aren't any multi-generational families living there (though there are a number of local-born Antarcticans from the Antarctic Peninsula. And also admittedly, there aren't any self-sustaining colonies there, but then, if you're going to make being self-sufficient a criterion for habitability, that excludes a lot of places where humans live.
Antarctica is where we should try dry-running a Martian colony.
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Re: California is on fire

Post by AMS » Sun Sep 27, 2020 10:47 pm

"Self-sufficiency" of a human settlement is also a function of population as well as local climate and geography. London is not self sufficient in food, but has a climate that would allow enough food production within its borders for maybe a few thousand. Self-sufficiency in Antartica would probably involve eating the penguins. That's not the issue with places that keep burning - from the residents' perspective, it's more that anything you build gets destroyed every couple of years so it becomes cripplingly expensive to maintain the standard of life people want.

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Bird on a Fire
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Re: California is on fire

Post by Bird on a Fire » Sun Sep 27, 2020 11:14 pm

There also comes a point where it's not worth risking firefighters' lives fighting flames in hopeless places.
We have the right to a clean, healthy, sustainable environment.

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Re: California is on fire

Post by plodder » Mon Sep 28, 2020 7:18 am

dp
Last edited by plodder on Mon Sep 28, 2020 7:20 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: California is on fire

Post by plodder » Mon Sep 28, 2020 7:20 am

yeah but you cut the trees down a bit. the “natural” world is already intensively managed. it’ll be more of that.

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Re: California is on fire

Post by Little waster » Mon Sep 28, 2020 8:22 am

Grumble wrote:
Sun Sep 27, 2020 10:36 pm

Antarctica is where we should try dry-running a Martian colony.
Australia is where we are dry-running a Venusian colony ... during a Tyranid invasion.
This place is not a place of honor, no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here, nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us.
This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

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Grumble
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Re: California is on fire

Post by Grumble » Mon Sep 28, 2020 8:40 am

Little waster wrote:
Mon Sep 28, 2020 8:22 am
Grumble wrote:
Sun Sep 27, 2020 10:36 pm

Antarctica is where we should try dry-running a Martian colony.
Australia is where we are dry-running a Venusian colony ... during a Tyranid invasion.
I don’t get it
where once I used to scintillate
now I sin till ten past three

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Little waster
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Re: California is on fire

Post by Little waster » Mon Sep 28, 2020 9:02 am

Grumble wrote:
Mon Sep 28, 2020 8:40 am
Little waster wrote:
Mon Sep 28, 2020 8:22 am
Grumble wrote:
Sun Sep 27, 2020 10:36 pm

Antarctica is where we should try dry-running a Martian colony.
Australia is where we are dry-running a Venusian colony ... during a Tyranid invasion.
I don’t get it
One's an inhospitable hell-scape in which every living thing is trying to render you down into your base molecules in the most horrific way possible ...


... while the other is Venus being attacked by a relentless horde of HR Gigeresque weebly-greeblys.
This place is not a place of honor, no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here, nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us.
This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

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Bird on a Fire
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Re: California is on fire

Post by Bird on a Fire » Mon Sep 28, 2020 1:38 pm

plodder wrote:
Mon Sep 28, 2020 7:20 am
yeah but you cut the trees down a bit. the “natural” world is already intensively managed. it’ll be more of that.
It's simply untrue that these fires are occurring in areas the are "already intensively managed". Even limiting the discussion to California, a lot of the build-up of dead trees from drought and bark-beetle infestation are in totally unmanaged areas:
“All of us on the paper were suggesting that if you are going to try to reduce that mass fire problem in the future, you really need to start putting prescribed fire into these stands to start whittling away at those bigger fuels,” said Forest Service research ecologist Malcolm North, one of Stephens’ eight co-authors.

While thinning — cutting down the dead timber and hauling it away — can play a role, especially around mountain communities, North said a majority of the beetle-killed stands are in wilderness or in areas that are too remote and too steep to be logged.
https://www.latimes.com/environment/sto ... rra-nevada

Note that the US, in common with most countries (but unlike the UK - possibly the source of your confusion?) doesn't allow logging in National Parks or Wilderness areas. Logging is allowed in National Forests, but it's quite strictly regulated and I still don't think those areas would count as "intensively managed". The suggestion in the article above is to start funding controlled burn programs to deal with the backlog (no pun intended) of dead trees. Obviously this will be an ongoing issue as droughts become commoner in the region, as water shortage directly kills trees and makes them more vulnerable to the (native) bark beetle.

The Amazon, Pantanal, Siberia etc. certainly aren't intensively managed either. I'm not sure what kind of management typically takes places in Australia's Eucalyptus forests, although I know that a decent wodge of it is in conservation areas which tend to be largely unmanaged.

So, if you are seriously proposing that we start thinning/firebreaking vast areas of the world's forests we're going to need a lot of extra lumberjacks. Probably won't be great news for forest biodiversity or carbon sequestration either. It really might be cheaper just to move people.
We have the right to a clean, healthy, sustainable environment.

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Re: California is on fire

Post by Squeak » Mon Sep 28, 2020 1:52 pm

Australia's euc forests are managed in very highly variable ways, from regularly burnt and logged, through to entirely unmanaged. In my past life as a journalist, I reported on a coolish burn that "accidentally" burnt something like 50k hectares and the local firies were grateful that an area that was too expensive to deliberately burn had been dealt with for a few years. They just stood by and let it go.

National parks get safety work done, but it's horribly underfunded. State forests get logged, then burnt, and get slightly better funded management all round. Private land gets whatever the owners are interested in doing. And other crown land gets, well, who knows what.

There aren't enough people, money, and cool dryish days to do anything like intensive management of Australia's forests. And there's a nasty kicker that if you did burn as often as the people who worry about human property would like you to, you'll likely cause a vegetation switch to increasingly flammable species, which would make things even worse over time. (A bit like starvation diets flick your body into storing fat.)

In this year's fires, there were not insignificant chunks of Gondwanan rainforest that got burnt. Your don't get rainforest until you keep fire out of an area for at least half a millennium. Those areas are very valuable and are left well alone. No logging, no burning, no raking.

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Re: California is on fire

Post by dyqik » Mon Sep 28, 2020 3:04 pm

The woods near me aren't managed much, except to clear trails when trees fall across them, and the odd bit of killing of invasive trees like Norway maples. They are nearly all secondary forest, less than 150 years old, from when agriculture moved westward across the expanding US.

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