While controlled burns are the prescription, the political risk is too high in the sense that if a controlled burn breaks containment heads will roll. It doesn't help that even during controlled burns that don't escape, localities will complain about the smoke to their local reps who put the kibash on controlled burns.
The past five years, California has averaged well over 1 million acres burned a year.
Even in the decade before that, 250K burned acres would be considered a light year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_wildfires#A...
I’m so thankful this year was mostly smoke free, but last year was a dystopian nightmare for like 3 or 4 months, it ended all outdoor activity for most of the summer and fall. Out of desperation, I resorted to riding my bike a few times wearing a ventilator mask, but wow was that uncomfortable. I’m really not looking forward to worse, but of course I know you’re probably right. With the size & scale of these fires I keep wondering how everything flammable hasn’t burned already in the last five or six years?
Get a 3M half face painter's mask, some of the new-style P100 filters (white with a pink hashing over it, not the older style full pink ones), and you'll be a lot happier. Not only do they filter far better, they're much more comfortable to wear for sustained outdoor work. You'll still sweat some, but they won't disintegrate, and I find them not at all annoying like the paper ones I've used in the past. I use mine for just about everything in the summer - even mowing and firebreak cutting are far improved with the filters.
I’m shedding a tear about my/our future where this is really widespread out of necessity - just being outside might call for daily mask use. You guys are convincing me to go pick up the highest quality reusable mask I can now!
Neil Stephenson's latest includes the concepts of "Earthsuits," with filtration and refrigeration and such, used to go outside when wet bulb is too high to survive unaided (and to be more comfortable in general in the heat). They seem a more and more useful concept...
Sweat is always the main problem after you tighten the bands enough that you're not leaking air on the sides.
And if you're getting irritants in your eyes, you may want to go to a full face mask; zee goggles don't do much except against falling nails, dirt, etc.
Yeah I think I probably was having just a touch of eye stinging from the smoke. Now I’m really curious what it would be like to ride a bike with a full face like https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/p/c/ppe/respiratory-protection/r... Maybe the sweat issue would be easier to tolerate if it’s around the outside of my face? :shrug:
What a delightful turn of phrase!
https://crosscut.com/politics/2021/04/inside-washingtons-328...
Unfortunately, it seems that forest management funding is a political issue, so there is a good chance these funds will dry up depending on the outcome of the midterms.
So more technology and resource management (diversion) or relocate the population to naturally sustainable areas.
Thats the whole history of humanity has been figuring out a way to make a locality more hospitable to human beings using technology. What you say on the surface sounds reasonable but really is just a veneer of neo-ludtisim over a malthusian mindset. Humanity has changed the environment, we will do so again and again to improve the quality of life we experience.
Who predicted that we'd all be dead and the collapse would come hundreds of years ago, and said letting the Irish potato famine kill them off was natural, requisite and just. Yet, here we are still defying the Malthusian imperative, just like when everyone said the world was going to end when the Gulf states controlled all the oil, then we figured out how to make shale oil work, or before that when we invented the iron plow, or a dozen other things that have shown Malthus wrong time and time again. Meanwhile the people protesting scarcity and the need to reduce the consumption of resources have consistently been behind the greatest man made famines in history.
We figured out things before we will figure it out again, I have faith in the ability of humanity to innovate, to adapt and to overcome.
sure, I will take that veneer and counter -- there is such a thing as balance in dynamic systems. Tragedies of excess are being played out now, seventy years after a "boom times for all" expansion by any means necessary. Before 1970, outrageously excessive pollutors in many areas of the USA were given slap on the wrist oversight, calling the outraged greens things like "neo-luddites" ..
If you think you can combat climate change with "brush clearing and controlled burns" you are mistaken.
Turns out that fire is hard to manage...
Apparently the people have spoken...teacher pay, water management, brush clearing? These are less important than the "war" with Rick DeSantis over....what exactly?