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Governor New Scum and Other democRATs Turned Cali Into a Tinderbox
Started by Anonymous, September 12, 2020, 07:52:49 PM
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#6
The California governor is an arsonist and a murderer.
The fires were not premeditated.. But, he does not want to accept that he bears responsibility for his state burning.
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#9
Former President Bill Clinton's land management rules and other liberal policies paved the way for future debilitating wildfires, fire expert Bob Zybach told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Zybach warned of potential disastrous wildfires shortly after Clinton signed a slate of rules in the mid-1990s that drastically reduced logging and road creation on federal lands.
Zybach's comments come as California, Oregon, and parts of Washington deal with catastrophic wildfires that have killed 26 people and destroyed buildings.
Former President Bill Clinton made a significant change to federal land management nearly 30 years ago that created the conditions necessary for massive wildfires to consume portions of the West Coast, according to one fire expert who predicted the problem years ago.
Shortly before leaving office in 2001, Clinton limited the ability of the United States Forest Service to thin out a dense thicket of foliage and downed trees on federal land to bring the West into a pristine state, Bob Zybach, an experienced forester with a PhD in environmental science, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. The former president's decision created a ticking time bomb, Zybach argues.
"If you don't start managing these forests, then they are going to start burning up. Thirty years later, they are still ignoring it," said Zybach, who spent more than 20 years as a reforestation contractor. He was referring to warnings he made years ago, telling officials that warding off prescribed burns in Oregon and California creates kindling fuelling fires.
Such rules make it more difficult to deploy prescribed burns, which are controlled burns designed to cull all of the underbrush in forests to lessen the chance of massive fires, Zybach noted. Years of keeping these areas in their natural state result in dead trees and dried organic material settling on the forest floor, turning such material into matchsticks soaked in jet fuel during dry seasons, he said.
The move was part of the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP), a resolution adopted by Clinton in 1994 to protect forests from being over-logged.
Ten years before Clinton's rule, the Fish and Wildlife Service placed the northern spotted owl on the Endangered Species Act, forcing the Forest Service to adopt a new policy that resulted in a greater reduction in timber harvests. The amount of timber removed from federal lands plummeted, according to data accumulated in 2015 by the Reason Foundation.
An average of 10.3 billion feet of timber was removed each year from Forest Service land between 1960 and 1990, the data show. Those numbers dropped between 1991 and 2000 and continued dropping — an average of only 2.1 billion feet of timber was removed from the land between 2000 and 2013, according to the data. That's an 80% decline.
"They've gone and left hundreds of thousands of acres of burnt timber, a fire bomb waiting to happen, standing in place because the black back woodpecker prefers that habitat," Zybach said. "It's great for lawyers, but it's bad for people who breathe air or work in the woods."
"The prescribed burns are an ancient form of management for keeping the fuels down so these events don't happen," Zybach added, referring to Native American Indians who used controlled burns to ward away pests and prevent wildfires from licking their homes.
The Clinton administration's plan to turn forests in the West into pristine land free of human interference risked fueling "wildfires reminiscent of the Tillamook burn, the 1910 fires and the Yellowstone fire," Zybach, who is based in Oregon, told Evergreen magazine in 1994, when the NWFP came into effect.
Western Oregon had one major fire above 10,000 acres between 1952 and 1987, reports show. The Silver Complex Fire of 1987 snapped that streak after torching more than 100,000 acres in the Kalmiopsis Wilderness area, killing rare plants and trees the federal government sought to protect from human activities.
Fire Experts Agree: Prescribed Burns Are Critical
Overzealous fire suppression across California are helping to build up wildland fuels, which contribute to wildfires, according to Tim Ingalsbee, a fire ecologist who began a career in the 1980s as a wildland firefighter. The solution is "to get good fire on the ground and whittle down some of that fuel load," he told ProPublica in August.
"It's just ... well ... it's horrible. Horrible to see this happening when the science is so clear and has been clear for years. I suffer from Cassandra syndrome," Ingalsbee said, referring to the Cassandra Syndrome, a Greek metaphor people use when they believe their valid warnings are not heeded.
"Every year I warn people: Disaster's coming. We got to change. And no one listens. And then it happens."
Other experts have made similar arguments in the past.
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#10
Overgrown grasslands, forests, and woodlands contributed to California wildfires in 2017, Sasha Berleman, a fire ecologist, told High Country News that year. "I'm more certain than ever that there's a lot we can do between now and the next time this happens to make it so that the negative consequences to people are nowhere near as dramatic," she said.
The devastating fires that ran through California's wine country in October of 2017 killed 42 people and destroyed nearly 7,000 buildings, High Country News noted.
The solution might be easier said than done. Nearly 20 million acres in California, or an area about the size of Maine, will need to experience controlled burns to limit catastrophic wildfires, a January study from Nature Sustainability found.
Former President Barack Obama suggested in a tweet Thursday that California's wildfires are a result of climate change.
"The fires across the West Coast are just the latest examples of the very real ways our changing climate is changing our communities," Obama wrote in a tweet that included pictures showing how soot and ash from the wildfires are turning San Francisco's sky bright orange.
Obama isn't the only prominent Democrat tying the fires to global warming.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, published a tweet Saturday that read: "The proof of the urgency of the climate crisis is literally in the air around us." Schumer included a link to a Sept. 10 article from CBS blaming climate change for the fires.
Zybach is not convinced. "The lack of active land management is almost 100 percent the cause," he told the DCNF, noting that climate change has almost nothing to do with fire kindling gathering across the forest floors. Other researchers share his skepticism.
"Global warming may contribute slightly, but the key factors are mismanaged forests, years of fire suppression, increased population, people living where they should not, invasive flammable species, and the fact that California has always had fire," University of Washington climate scientist Cliff Mass told TheDCNF in 2018.
Mass's critique came as Mendocino Complex Fire was spreading across California on its way to becoming the largest wildfire in the state, engulfing more than 283,000 acres.
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Authorities arrested two people in connection to fires in Washington state, identifying one as Jeffrey Alan Acord, who is accused of starting a fire along Highway 167. Officials said that he live-streamed himself setting the blaze and apparently reported himself to police.
Witnesses told KIRO7 that Acord allegedly was seen walking on the highway with a lighter and cardboard. The outlet reported that he is a regular at Black Lives Matter and anti-police rallies in Seattle.
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By Lorne Gunter of Sun News Media
Time to talk about the real causes of all these fires — people, not climate change
On Sept. 4, a small forest fire was spotted near the base of Alberta's Blackrock Mountain, not far from Devil's Head peak, just north of the resort town of Canmore.
Initially, it burned only about 10 acres.
Then the winds whipped up and by Sept. 7, the blaze had consumed about 1,600 acres. Flames were so intense the bottoms of clouds that hung just over the peak glowed red even in the middle of the afternoon.
Thankfully, this has a been a largely inactive year for wildfires in Alberta.
The Devil's Head fire has been by far the largest.
So what was the cause? Drought brought on by global warming caused by emissions from Alberta's oil and gas industry?
Climate change caused by all those pickups Albertans drive? (The province accounts for more than a quarter of all half-ton sales in the entire country.)
Nope. Backcountry hikers failed to extinguish their campfire which ignited the forest after they hiked away.
Devin Dreeshen, Alberta's minister of agriculture and forestry, said over the weekend that "last year, 71 per cent of wildfires were caused by humans and were entirely preventable."
Not climate change. Humans.
As more and more of us take to the hills (and mountains, forests, streams and slopes) for recreation, we spark more fires.
Is it possible that increased dryness perhaps caused by global warming has made these new playgrounds quicker to combust? Perhaps.
But it has been kindling-dry in the woods in previous generations, too.
The difference now is the number of us kitting up with all sorts of hiking and camping equipment and heading out to commune with nature — perhaps without a full understanding of how to behave responsibly in the great outdoors.
It's the same in California and Oregon, two states that are currently suffering record or near-record fire seasons.
Yet for all the global warming hand-wringing (California's lefty Gov. Gavin Newsom said, "We are living in the middle of a climate crisis"), many of the biggest, most-destructive fires are human-caused (and I don't mean man-made global warming).
Plus, the fact that one-quarter of Oregonians and perhaps 10 per cent of Californians are under evacuation standby orders has as much to do with the rapid expansion of residential neighbourhoods into fire zones as it does with any potential climate crisis.
The El Dorado fire east of Los Angeles, for instance, was human-caused.
One of the largest wildfires in California, as of Tuesday the El Dorado had consumed nearly 20,000 acres, forced the evacuation of 3,500 homes and kept 1,300 firefighters occupied around the clock.
It was caused when some fireworks set off at a gender-reveal party in an L.A. suburb ignited a grassy slope that leads up to the San Bernardino National Forest.
Oregon's huge Almeda fire was started by a man burning brush on his property (despite a fire ban) and setting off a wildfire that has killed four people, forced 80,000 from their homes and destroyed 5,700 acres.
Something to think about before jumping on the global-warming panic wagon.
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