Hey HotCoffee, Hope your day went well.

I have been looking at the possible causes of the CA fires and the electrical infrastructure seems to pop up often as the cause.

I wonder how much could have been buried with the $80,000,000,000 peed away on the choo-choo train to nowhere.

Gotta love governor Moonbeam.

Hmm makes me wonder if something is brewing.

John | Redwood City Personal Trainer

Good Morning DianeR,

Al Gore turned out to be a total fraud.

I won't be home today....I'll try to check in tonight.

Enjoy another beautiful day!

Now all latest movies, TV shows for free on Android devices using Cinema APK. Get it from https://cinemafreeapk.com/

Join CODEPINK on our exciting trip to Eastern Cuba! With Raúl Castro stepping down and Miguel Diaz-Canel the new president, now is an exciting time to travel to Cuba with CODEPINK and call for diplomacy and friendship between the Cuban and United States people search.

meanwhile....

https://home.solari.com/geoengineering-the-space-fence-and-the-advent-of-transhumanism/

Coalage3 which brings to mind a question, why did everyone call Barack Obama a black man?

What a crock of BS. Democrats/liberals/progressives don't believe in science. And that includes the science of alleged climate change. I find it very strange that dems don't believe in science/biology/mother nature when it comes to transgender issues. They don't believe in GMO foods even though science has overwhelmingly shown them to be safe and nutritious. Dems only profess to believe in "science" when it suits a political agenda...otherwise not so much. If you want the public to accept climate change, then you should also want the public to accept the gender and sex you are born with since science and biology decided that for you. Right?

DianeR,

Glad to share the Dogs! Such loyal, loving critters!!

This Shows The HUGE Difference Between Barack Obama's DHS, Which Targeted Survivalists As Potential Terrorists, And President Trump's DHS, Which Is Urging Americans To BECOME Preppers!- November Declared National Critical Infrastructure Security And Resilience Month

http://allnewspipeline.com/DHS_National_Critical_Infrastructure_November.php

While Dems tear down the country and hate on their brothers and sisters...everyone else should prepare for what that could bring. I don't think Thom is going to help you.

Ignorance is contagious on the far-right fringe.

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Vox - "First Person" - Updated Nov 12, 2018, 11:10am EST - (fair use)

"I'm a woman who fought wildfires for 7 years. Climate change is absolutely making them worse.

Warmer climate is creating the perfect conditions for long wildfire seasons in the West."

By Anastasia Selby:

2018’s wildfires are already proving to be more destructive than last year’s. The Camp Fire near Chico, California has already claimed at least 29 lives, destroyed more than 6,400 structures, and burned more than 111,000 acres since it began last Thursday. It is now the deadliest and most destructive fire in California’s history. Meanwhile, the Woolsey Fire continues to ravage Los Angeles County, burning 85,500 acres. This essay, published during last year’s brutal fire season, tackles many of the same issues as this year’s season.

The mundane days all run together. But those days when I was genuinely unsure if I would make it to the end of my shift intact are the ones that stand out.

I remember fighting a fire on the Angeles National Forest in 2002. Our crew flew onto a ridge in a helicopter. The rotor wash, or wind created by the helicopter blades, flung orange embers into the unburned vegetation — the “green.” Immediately, it started burning.

We jumped out of the helicopter, ran underneath the fire, and started digging. The goal was to quickly create a line free of any vegetation that could burn, called a fireline, which we used to stop fires from growing. Digging fireline is grueling; I often lost myself in the sound of chainsaws and rhythm of my tool hitting the dirt and ignored my physical pain.

Some of us had to run deep into the green and find embers or put out new small fires before they began burning out of control. There were full minutes when I thought, This may be it. We may not make it.

I worked as a wildland firefighter for seven years in the 2000s. And so I’ve been watching the smoky footage on my computer of the fires burning across the West this last month with great unease. Take the La Tuna Fire, which ignited on September 1. It was one of the largest fires Los Angeles has ever seen and burned more than 7,000 acres before it was contained. And it’s the kind of fire that is increasingly common in the age of climate change.

Wildland firefighters are especially attuned to how climate change puts us all at greater risk for destructive fires. We understand how higher temperatures and long-term drought are the perfect conditions for ignition. To us, there’s little controversy that it’s happening, although not everyone believes it’s human caused. I do, and, along with others in the field, I wonder when those in power will take the steps needed to address climate change.

Climate change and wildfires are a vicious cycle of worsening conditions

Wildfires currently burning in Northern California have destroyed thousands of acres and homes and resulted in the deaths of 11 people. Counties including Napa and Sonoma have been declared a state of emergency.

It’s been a brutal wildfire season. Last month’s La Tuna Fire in Los Angeles was, I’m sure, one of those fires that seemed uncontainable. In a speech, Ralph Terrazas, the LAFD fire chief, said, “We can handle everything. We have to. We don’t have an option.” He sounded exhausted and less hopeful than his words.

Southern California’s fire season usually lasts into late September and October when hot, strong winds called the Santa Ana blow through the region. I witnessed this. Fires often started on roadsides, ignited by discarded cigarette butts or even a spark from a motorcycle. The La Tuna Fire didn't’t bode well for this year’s California fire season, and we’re seeing those effects.

Last month, I spoke with my friend Jesse Moreng, an ex-hotshot — or wildland firefighter — who now works as a multi-mission aircraft manager, mapping fires for the firefighters on the ground. When I asked Jesse if he thought this fire season was more severe than most, he said yes, “just in terms of how many places are burning at once.”

The US Fire Service and the Department of the Interior in September reportedspending more than $2.1 billion on fires this year so far, which is what they spent for the entire fire season in 2015, one of the most devastating fire seasons since 1960. What strikes me most about the report is the predicted length the 2017 fire season. Some predicted containment dates are well into late autumn. Many of these large fires are under 5 percent contained, with no rain or helpful weather in sight. That’s going to take a lot of resources to stop or contain.

As some fires continue to get worse, air quality will suffer, and more often, there may be loss of property and loss of life due to the increasing number of people who live in wooded areas. Most importantly, large fires emit greenhouse gases, which have been proven to accelerate climate change and burn trees, which are crucial for oxygenating the air. This will inevitably affect the quality of life of most people living in the United States. This isn't just happening here, but around the world.

As Puerto Rico, Texas, the Caribbean, and Florida continue to recover from hurricanes Maria, Harvey, and Irma, there seems to be an Armageddon-esque dread floating around on the internet. The Tubbs and Atlas fires are carving a path of destruction through Northern California, and 33 active fires burn throughout the state. It will only get worse as the effects of climate change continue.

Climate change will continue to affect fire behavior. According to an article published in PNAS, data from western North America confirms that human-caused climate change will lead to widespread and more frequent fires. This is because the continual warming trend sets up conditions for a longer burning season — climate change means higher temperatures and more erratic precipitation, which leads to drier fuels ripe for burning.

It’s not hopeless. Although the wildfire news makes it feel as if the end of the world is upon us, it isn't. Not yet. The USFS motto is “Caring for the land and serving people.” But how can we enforce that when the current administration denies climate change altogether? To keep our forests and air healthy, we must be actively educating ourselves and voting for people who will be stewards of the land.

The grueling work of fighting fires

When I was 19, I dropped out of college, and a friend suggested I apply at a nearby fire contracting agency in Eugene, Oregon. We were on a fire within two weeks, and I loved the job. It was intense and exhausting, but I loved the camaraderie I had with my fellow crew members.

For four years, I worked on three different hotshot crews. Hotshots are on the front lines — a crew consists of 18 to 22 members, the bulk of whom are seasonal federal employees and the rest permanent government employees.

It’s intensely physical work. The fire season typically lasts May through October, and in a busy season, a crew will log more than 1,000 hours of overtime. On “rolls,” a crew leaves home base for two to three weeks at a time, depending on the fire situation nationally, and will only come home for a couple of days before being called out again. Every few years, some crews have a slow season, resulting in less pay. Each hotshot gets paid differently due to experience, but most are paid $13 to $17 an hour, plus overtime and hazard pay.

Wildland firefighters are also often looked down upon by city fire departments. We aren’t considered “real” firefighters, and seasonals don’t get benefits such as health insurance or retirement that structural firefighters enjoy. A permanent position is not guaranteed and can be hard to find.

In 2002, my crew was called to the Biscuit Fire, historically one of the largest fires in Oregon. It clocked in at more than 500,000 acres, or 781 square miles. We spent most of our time fighting the Biscuit Fire using a method called “burning,” using drip torches to burn fuels along old logging roads and new dozer lines. We hoped that when the larger fire reached the burned fuels, it would stop, because there was no more fuel to burn. We spent three weeks fighting the Biscuit Fire. Eventually, it crossed the border into California. The fire would not be contained fully for another five months.

Burning, which also can be done using flares or dropping napalm balls from helicopters, is just one method of fighting fire. Another method is fireline, which is when a fire crew or dozer creates a fuel break by removing all vegetation along the edge of the fire so it can burn no further. There’s also the “slurry line” method, where planes and/or helicopters drop fire retardant in a line across the vegetation to slow the burn.

For any of these methods to work, the elements have to be cooperative. Often they aren’t, and firefighters spend weeks implementing these tactics repeatedly, starting over each time they fail. We could only do so much.

Big fires are often unwilling to be contained. One day, while on the Bitterroot Complex, which burned more than 350,000 acres, we were feeling around for embers hiding in roots and stumps when it began to snow. My boss told me stories about how, when the snowy season came, embers would hide for the entire winter underground, only to pop up in the spring and reignite.

Even if we thought we’d have a hard time getting hold of the fire, we worked hard. After the initial frenzy of a new fire, our shifts were pretty regular: 16 hours on the fireline every day. We woke around 5 am and refilled our water, ate, and sharpened our tools in the dark, using the yellow circle of our headlamps. Throughout the day we’d lag and then become reenergized; we’d pour Emergen-C into our mouths, eat crystallized coffee, make tea with the water in our water bottles, which was almost always hot.

Sometimes I hated the job; I’d dream of going to a restaurant and eating a steak, taking a shower — something we rarely did while in the field — sleeping in my bed. I wished, sometimes, that I could go swimming in a lake or do other summer activities I often missed out on during fire season. But firefighting was what I knew how to do, so I stayed. I loved working in the woods, where I didn't’t have to be part of what I called “real civilization.”

There’s a part of me that misses my days of firefighting. But when I see the ongoing fires in California, Oregon, and Montana, I think about just how intense it was, and how much worse it’s getting every year. There will always be men and women at the forefront of these fires, doing whatever they can to contain the devastating impacts of nature. The politicians in charge of climate change policies need to make these hotshots’ jobs a little easier.

Anastasia Selby grew up in Washington state and spent most of her 20s fighting forest fires. She is now an MFA candidate in fiction at Syracuse University and looks forward to graduation in 2018, when she can head out West again. Find her on Twitter @AnastasiaSelby.

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/9/14/16301876/camp-fire-woolsey-fire-california-wildfires-2018

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Union of Concerned Scientists

"Is Global Warming Fueling Increased Wildfire Risks?

The effects of global warming on temperature, precipitation levels, and soil moisture are turning many of our forests into kindling during wildfire season."

As the climate warms, moisture and precipitation levels are changing, with wet areas becoming wetter and dry areas becoming drier.

Higher spring and summer temperatures and earlier spring snowmelt typicallycause soils to be drier for longer, increasing the likelihood of drought and a longer wildfire season, particularly in the western United States.

These hot, dry conditions also increase the likelihood that wildfires will be more intense and long-burning once they are started by lightning strikes or human error.

The costs of wildfires, in terms of risks to human life and health, property damage, and state and federal dollars, are devastating, and they are only likely to increase unless we better address the risks of wildfires and reduce our activities that lead to further climate change.

Wildfires are already on the rise

Wildfires in the western United States have been increasing in frequency and duration since the mid-1980s. Between 1986 and 2003, wildfires occurred nearly four times as often, burned more than six times the land area, and lasted almost five times as long when compared to the period between 1970 and 1986.

Natural cycles, human activities like land-use change and fire exclusion, and human-caused climate change can all influence the likelihood of wildfires. Many of the areas that have seen increased wildfire activity, like Yosemite National Park and the Northern Rockies, are protected from or relatively unaffected by human land-use change, suggesting that climate change is a major factor driving the increase in wildfires in these places.

Precipitation patterns, global warming, and wildfires

Though the current trend of increasing severe wildfire frequency in parts of the US is projected to continue as the climate warms, droughts and wildfires are not equally likely to occur every year.

Natural, cyclical weather occurrences such as El Niño events also affect the likelihood of wildfires by affecting levels of precipitation and moisture and lead to year-by-year variability in the potential for drought and wildfires regionally.

Nonetheless, because temperatures and precipitation levels are projected to alter further over the course of the 21st century, the overall potential for wildfires in the western United States is projected to increase.

As the world warms, we can expect more wildfires

US wildfire seasons—especially those in years with higher wildfire potential—are projected to lengthen, with the Southwest’s season of fire potential lengthening from seven months to all year long. Additionally, the likelihood that individual wildfires become severe is expected to increase.

Researchers project that moist, forested areas are the most likely to face greater threats from wildfires as conditions in those areas become drier and hotter.

Surprisingly, some dry grasslands may be less at risk of catching fire because the intense aridity is likely to prevent these grasses from growing at all, leaving these areas so barren that they are likely to lack the fodder for wildfires to start and spread.

A conflagration of costs

The economic costs of wildfires can be crippling. Data on total US property damage from wildfires are hard to come by, but the costs are estimated to be on the level of hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

In addition to property damage, wildfires cost states and the federal government millions in fire-suppression management. The US Forest Service’s yearly fire-suppression costs have exceeded $1 billion for 13 of the 18 years between 2000 and 2017. In 2015, these costs exceeded $2 billion, and in 2017 they totaled almost $3 billion. The risk to property owners is particularly acute in areas at the “wildland-urban interface.” In California alone, this area includes more than 5 million homes in coastal southern California, the Bay Area, and northeast of Sacramento.

The environmental and health costs of wildfires are also considerable. Not only do wildfires threaten lives directly, but they have the potential to increase local air pollution, exacerbating lung diseases and causing breathing difficulties even in healthy individuals.

Additionally, a counterintuitive aspect of mountain forest wildfires is their ability to increase flash flood risk. The loss of vegetation from wildfires and the inability of burned soil to absorb moisture can cause flash floods in lower-lying areas when rains do come in the days and months following fires, especially to the semi-arid Southwest.

Wildfire safety and prevention

Greenhouse-gas emissions from human activities are raising global temperatures and changing the climate, leading to a likely rise in wildfire severity and frequency.

But it is not too late to act. What we do now has the power to influence the frequency and severity of these fires and their effects on us.

By engaging in fire safety efforts—creating buffer zones between human habitation and susceptible forests, and meeting home and city fire-safety standards—we can help reduce our current risks, and by taking steps to reduce our impact on the climate, we can help to keep our forests, our homes, and our health safe.

Learn more

• Global Warming FAQ
• Climate Change and Your Health
• The Health Effects of Hotter Days and Nights

https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/science-and-impacts/impacts/global-warming-and-wildfire.html

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"Global Warming and California Wildfires"

California Climate Choices - A Fact Sheet of the Union of Concerned Scientists:

Wildfires are a major environmental hazard that have historically cost California more than $800 million each year and contribute to “bad air days” throughout the state. The more global warming pollution that is emitted into the atmosphere, the more wildfires we can expect to see in California.

More Wildfires Expected

If average statewide temperatures rise to the medium warming range (5.5 to 8°F), the risk of large wildfires in California is expected to increase about 20 percent by mid-century and 50 percent by the end of the century. This is almost twice the wildfire increase expected if temperatures are kept within the lower warming range.

Along with temperature, wildfires are determined by a variety of factors, including precipitation. Because of this, future wildfire risk throughout the state will not be uniform. For example, a hotter, drier climate could increase the flammability of vegetation in northern California and promote up to a 90 percent increase in large wildfires by the end of the century. A hotter, wetter climate would also lead to an increase in wildfires in northern California, but to a S O U R C E S California Department of Finance. 2004. Population Projections by Race/Ethnicity for California and Its Counties 2000–2050, Sacramento, California. May. Westerling, A., and B. Bryant. 2006. Change and wildfires around California: Fire modeling and loss modeling. California Climate Change Center report. Online at www.energy.ca.gov/2005publications/ CEC-500-2005-190/CEC-500-2005-190-SF.pdf. Wu, J., A. Winer, and R. Delfino. “Exposure Assessment of Particulate Matter Air Pollution Before, During, and After the 2003 Southern California Wildfires.” Accepted for publication in Atmospheric Environment, January 2006. Global Warming and California Wildfires lesser extent—about a 40 percent increase by century’s end.

More “Bad Air Days” Wildfire smoke produces small soot particles, which can cause or aggravate cardiovascular and respiratory illness and lead to premature death. For example, the wildfires that burned nearly three-quarters of a million acres in southern California in 2003 caused particulate matter (soot) to increase four to five times above normal levels throughout the southern part of the state. Five million people were exposed to dangerous levels of air pollution for at least two days during the fires, and nearly two million were exposed for five days in a row.

Wildfire Costs Expected to Increase If global warming emissions continue unabated and temperatures rise into the higher warming range, property damage costs from California wildfires could increase as much as 30 percent toward the end of the century. This estimate is conservative because it assumes population and land-use patterns are held constant at 2000 levels, even though the state’s population is expected to grow from 36 million today to more than 55 million by 2050. Furthermore, other fire-related costs such as fire prevention and suppression, health effects of fire-related pollution, flooding, mudslides, altered recreation opportunities, and loss of timber were not included.

Because most global warming emissions remain in the atmosphere for decades or centuries, the choices we make today greatly influence the climate our children and grandchildren inherit. We have the technology to increase energy efficiency and significantly reduce emissions from energy and land use. We must act now to avoid the dangerous consequences of global warming and help ensure a high quality of life for future generations.

S O U R C E S

California Department of Finance. 2004. Population Projections by Race/Ethnicity for California and Its Counties 2000–2050, Sacramento, California. May. Westerling, A., and B. Bryant. 2006. Change and wildfires around California: Fire modeling and loss modeling. California Climate Change Center report. Online at www.energy.ca.gov/2005publications/ CEC-500-2005-190/CEC-500-2005-190-SF.pdf.

Wu, J., A. Winer, and R. Delfino. “Exposure Assessment of Particulate Matter Air Pollution Before, During, and After the 2003 Southern California Wildfires.” Accepted for publication in Atmospheric Environment, January 2006

https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/legacy/assets/documents/global_warming/ucs-ca-wildfires-1.pdf

coalage3,

Hard to believe Jerry Brown when I saw with my own eyes the power pole with a 10 inch flame coming out the top surronded by trees on my own property last winter...thankfully it was raining when it happened. The fire dept stayed with it until the power co. showed up.

Jerry doesn't want you to know how bad the rural infrastructure is...think back to Oriville Dam. Why blame himself when he can charge us for cap and trade instead? Power company is known for its corruption, as well as paying themselves and shareholders monies that should have been invested in hardening the grid, and charging customers for their failures.

Chico...next door to Paradise is a college town. Paradise is mostly retired elderly. Others are decendents of the gold miners of days gone by.

Where I am is, mostly decendents of the loggers that cut the trees that built San Francisco. There are stumps on my land 10 ft. wide. Many here have become ranchers of organic grass fed beef with a few sheep , no pigs that I have seen. We also have hippies from the 60's that came to grow MMJ.

Put the dang power lines under ground.

So, now with at least 250,000 people homeless from fire added to the homeless from last years fires, and the povery stricken and drug addicted homeless. we have 11,000 or so from South of the Border headed to San Deigo....just great! To top it off it's the people from South of the border Jerry Bown will take care of. You won't see Jerry in Paradise helping the elderly get food stamps free housing and legal assistance.

All that being said it's awesome in the country...:)