OT Fires in California

Terrible. It's constantly in the news. Are you anywhere near one or more of the hotspots?

Not close, but we have plenty of smelly smoke, intermittently. Fluffy white ash on my car. The sun is a dirty orange ball just now. One of my engineers lives in the Santa Cruz mountains, and there's a fire just a couple of ridges over from his house.

A week or so ago, we got spectacular lightning storms. We very rarely see lightning here. There were something like 12,000 ground strikes.

The situation here is that it rains and snows in the winter and things grow. It's dry in the summer and things burn. That's been our carbon cycle since the glaciers went away. Modern machinery keeps putting out small fires, so we get big ones. I suspect that "climate change" contributes by having more CO2 available for plant growth; more carbon in, more out.

If we open a window, the house smells smoky. If we close up, it soon smells fine. I assume that the smoke particles precipitate out onto surfaces, most likely carpet with its large surface area, maybe plant leaves, a little bit our lungs. The cat may help a little.

He is separated by some miles of water, the San Francisco Bay. The fires would have to burn their way through some trillions of dollars worth of businesses and homes to reach San Francisco proper where Larkin is.

His way out would be to cross the Golden Gate bridge, along with a few million others if they stayed too long. But to reach him it would need to burn homes rather than forest, so he should be in good shape.

We had that in Australia at the beginning of this year. Air purifiers with a HEPA filter do seem to help, so they sold out very quickly in retail shops, as did masks. Some of the air purifiers have a sensor that claims to measure pm2.5 and which seems to work. If you have a big soldering fume extractor at work, a lot of them have a similar filter that would do some good.

The smoke also provided a means to locate (and the motivation to get around to fixing) a lot of air leaks into the house. Perhaps your houses are built more carefully in the first place. There remain a lot of leaks that it was impractical for me to fix.

Nope. The level of CO2 in the atmosphere has remained pretty constant at about 385ppm for well over 100 years - but you wouldn't know that unless you study the *original* printed literature going back over that time-frame.

The Mauna Loa data is probably reliable.

The seasonal wiggle is interesting.

It makes sense that all that burning of oil and gas and coal would increase CO2. This real issue is, is that good or bad? Plants like it.

And your proof of this statement is? Links, please, to original papers...

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

John

You wouldn't know that at all, if you studied the sampled air in ices. Or, any modern data, really. Three decimal places, for a century past, is certainly a lie.

The vague 'printed literature' references don't satisfy, and it's odd that you should try, feebly, to foist such a whopper onto us. What's your game?

Well, it is one of a plant's nutrients, after all. Grasshoppers, though, have a complaint: the fast-growing grasses aren't nutritious enough.

So, what is CA doing to mitigate these fires? Answer: NOTHING - they are making matters WORSE by giving incentives to increase the fuel load in forests:

ProductionGrain.PNG

They are rather more interested in the amount of water their roots can get at. Global warming changes climate, and what were well-watered areas may n ot stay that way. Droughts in Australia seem to be getting more frequent an d more severe. Forest fires are a worse problem than they used to be, as th ey are - right now - in California.

It's not good if the extra CO2 turns into the kind of plant growth that get s burnt out every summer.

Mitigate them? We spend megabucks to put them out.

A bare faced lie from a well known anti-science *LIAR*.

The other stations curves are most interesting because the show just how strongly latitude dependent the CO2 concentration is with vast tundra forests and most heavy industry all in the northern hemisphere it is almost completely mixed up to a smooth trend line at the South pole.

It really thrashes around a lot at latitude 71 with mid summer continuous sunshine vs winters cold short days.

The Scripps O2 monitoring by Keeling's son is even more of an experimental tour de force requiring measurements with 5 sig fig precision and a very clever instrumental technique to measuring the O2/N2 ratio.

"I reject your reality and substitute my own"

Mythbusters??

t.

h, have

making matters WORSE by giving incentives to increase the fuel load in for ests:

But not a cent to deal with the climate change that is making them more fre quent and worse.

Robert Goodloe Harper famously said "Millions for defense but not one cent for tribute". Nowadays he'd be working for the fossil carbon extraction ind ustry, which makes a lot of money out of making forest fires more frequent, and more devastating in California, and spends some of it on propaganda de signed to obscure the connection, all of which John Larkin laps up.

I love it when CA burns, we get nice colored sunsets.

Yeah, pretty good show I used to watch as a young guy. Very sad to learn their electronics tech Grant Imahara died of a stroke or hemorrhage or such a few months back he was just 49, very talented guy it looks like.