Friday 29th of March 2024

the californification of the imbecile in charge...

trumpery

Trump’s Misleading Claims About California’s Fire ‘Mismanagement’


On Twitter, the president claimed that the state’s wildfire woes are a result of poor forest management. The truth is more complicated.


As Californians were fleeing the huge wildfires that have left both ends of the state ablaze, President Trump took to Twitter over the weekend, blaming the infernos on forest management and threatening to withhold federal payments from the state.

His statements, which drew outrage from local leaders and firefighters, oversimplified the causes of California’s wildfires.

 


 

From Trump@the realdork...

 

There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor. Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!

 

 

This is misleading.

Mr. Trump is suggesting that forest management played a role, but California’s current wildfires aren’t forest fires.


“These fires aren’t even in forests,” said Max Moritz, a wildfire specialist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Rather, the Camp and Woolsey fires, which are ripping through Northern and Southern California, began in areas known as the wildland-urban interface: places where communities are close to undeveloped areas, making it easier for fire to move from forests or grasslands into neighborhoods.

[Why does California have so many wildfires? There are four key ingredients.]

A 2015 report by the United States Department of Agriculture found that between 2000 and 2010 (the last year for which data was available), the number of people moving into the urban-wildland interface had increased by 5 percent. According to the report, 44 million houses, equivalent to one in every three houses in the country, are in the wildland-urban interface. The highest concentrations are in Florida, Texas and, yes, California.

It is true that California wildfires are getting larger and that most of the state’s largest wildfires have happened this century. The Mendocino Complex Fire, earlier this year, was the biggest California fire on record, as measured by acres burned. The Camp Fire is already the most destructive in state history, having razed more than 6,000 homes.


The fires aren’t just getting bigger; they’re becoming more unpredictable, too. They are often burning hot through the night (when they used to cool), racing faster up hillsides and torching neighborhoods that were once relatively safe.


Researchers are attributing at least part of the difference to climate change, because in a warming world vegetation dries out faster and burns more easily.

And the most “deadly and costly” fires happen at the wildland-urban interface, because they damage houses, towns and lives. The Camp Fire has already matched the deadliest fire in state history, killing at least 29 people, and the death toll may rise.

“We have vulnerable housing stock already out there on the landscape. These are structures that were often built to building codes from earlier decades and they’re not as fire resistant as they could be,” Dr. Moritz said. “This issue of where and how we built our homes has left us very exposed to home losses and fatalities like these.”

 

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/us/politics/fact-check-trump-california-fire-tweet.html?

 

the worst ever...

LOS ANGELES — As emergency workers picked through fire-ravaged communities in Northern California on Monday, they recovered 13 more bodies, turning the largest wildfire in the state’s history into its deadliest as well.


Forty-four people have died since three wildfires broke out late last week. And countless other residents narrowly escaped with their lives, their close calls never to be forgotten.


Allyn Pierce was trapped by a wall of fire as he tried to flee the flames coming closer and closer to his truck. Chris Gonzalez counted the ever-narrowing escape routes from his home as the highlands around him erupted into flames. Rebecca Hackett was engulfed by a red-orange hellscape as she sped toward safety in her car.


“I was like, ‘I think I’m done,’” said Mr. Pierce, a registered nurse who was trapped in traffic in Paradise, Calif., where most of the community was burned. “I just kept thinking, ‘I’m going to die in melting plastic.’”

 

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/us/wildfires-california-escape.html?

educating junior with rubbish...

Each morning at Camp Constitution’s summer camp, the kids and parents go off to classes while staff members do a room inspection.

“What we look for is not just cleanliness, but a patriotic and Godly theme,” says camp director Hal Shurtleff in a video of the 2016 camp.

“We are looking for creativity — are they learning what we are teaching them?”

And what are they being taught? Conspiracy theories about the United Nations (UN) and how climate change is a hoax, and they've drafted in two of the world's most notorious climate science denialists to do the job.

The rooms — named after “places of refuge in the old testament” — are covered with U.S. nationalistic garlands and flags. A “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) hat is perched on a wooden bunk post.

Children take quotes they’ve learned from classes, and turn them into posters. One encourages the United Nations to keep out.

Another lists “buzzwords” including CO2, climate change, environmental justice, and endangered species.

“You hear these buzzwords and you know the bad guys are behind the scenes,” says a commentating Shurtleff.

Shurtleff is a former regional director of the John Birch Society — the UN-hating, right-wing conservative group known for, among other things, pushing a conspiracy that the UN’s promotion of environmental sustainability was in fact a sinister plot to install a world government.

But as well as learning about the evils of sensible resource use, the kids at this summer’s Camp Constitution attended classes by climate science deniers Lord Christopher Monckton and Dr. Willie Soon.

 

Read more:

https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/11/13/christian-vacation-camp-climate-sc...

weather, climate change and population shifts...

US President Donald Trump has arrived in California to survey the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in the state's history.

The Camp Fire, in northern California, has killed at least 71 people.

More than 1,000 people are reported to be missing, although officials say that figure could fluctuate.

Speaking in the town of Paradise, Mr Trump described the scene as "sad to see" and revisited his disputed claim poor forest management was to blame.

"We do have to do management maintenance and we'll be working also with environmental groups, I think everyone's seen the light," he said.

"I don't think we'll have this again to this extent," he added.

Experts have pointed to the weather, climate change and population shifts as bigger causes of the wildfires.

 

Read more:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46248510

moths in your wallet..

Climate refers to how the atmosphere acts over a long period of time, while weather describes what’s happening on a much shorter time scale. The climate can be thought of, in a way, as the sum of long periods of weather.

Or, to use an analogy Mr. Trump might appreciate, weather is how much money you have in your pocket today, whereas climate is your net worth. A billionaire who has forgotten his wallet one day is not poor, anymore than a poor person who lands a windfall of several hundred dollars is suddenly rich. What matters is what happens over the long term.

Even on a day when it is colder than average where you live, the world as a whole is frequently warmer than average, which you can see for yourself on these daily maps from the University of Maine.

Here is an example from a period of unusually frigid weather in December 2017, when parts of the United States were 15 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit colder than average, but the world as a whole was about 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the 1979-2000 average:

gw


 

 

While climate scientists expect that the world could warm, on average, roughly two to seven degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century — depending on how quickly greenhouse-gas emissions rise — they don’t expect that to mean the end of winter altogether. Record low temperatures will still occur; they’ll just become rarer over time.

One 2009 study found that the United States saw roughly as many record highs as record lows in the 1950s, but by the 2000s there were twice as many record highs as record lows. Severe cold snaps were still happening, but they were becoming less common.

Some recent cold spells have been caused by a dreaded weather system called the polar vortex. There’s growing evidence to suggest that the polar vortex is appearing outside the Arctic more frequently, because of changes in the jet stream that are attributed to the warming atmosphere. These changes help frigid air escape from the Arctic and swoop southward.

Politicians have tried to use cold snaps to prove a point before. Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, brought a snowball to the Senate floor in February 2015 as evidence that the Earth was not warming.

Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly denied the science of climate change, has recognized the threats where some of his properties are involved. His golf resort in Ireland intends to build two sea walls and cited the risks of global warming in one of its applications for the construction.

Mr. Trump has made a habit of airing his climate skepticism on Twitter, posting comments on “climate change” or “global warming” more than 100 times since 2011. Before his presidency, he called climate change a hoax and claimed the idea was perpetuated by the Chinese.

In 2018, he backed off that claim, saying: “I don’t think there’s a hoax. I do think there’s probably a difference. But I don’t know that it’s man-made.”

The United States government and hundreds of scientific organizations agree that human activities are primarily responsible for global warming.

 

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/climate/winter-cold-weather.html?

 

 

 

Read from top.