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Say goodbye to Jenks, Bixby, Owasso, BA

lawpoke87

I.T.S. Legend
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Dec 17, 2002
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Rioters are burning our cities. Now it appears the burbs may be done for as well

 
I don't even get the point of this thread. Are you trying to make fun of him? He's not wrong... there are certain parts of our country that are experiencing exacerbated (and costly) severe weather events due to global warming. Tulsa may not be one... but that doesn't make the point less valid.
 
He has no point. Weather patterns and the elimination/reduction of controlled burns are largely to blame for the fires in California not global warming. The middle section of the country has just experienced on of the coolest summers on record. The west is typically very hot and dry under such a pattern. I love how we try to blame every extreme weather event on global warming yet claim cooler than normal weather are weather patterns. I’m not arguing the earth isn’t slowly warming. I’m arguing against blaming such warming for these fires without considering things such as weather patterns and the reduction of controlled burns. Still waiting on our superstorm....whatever the hell that is :)
 
He has no point. Weather patterns and the elimination/reduction of controlled burns are largely to blame for the fires in California not global warming. The middle section of the country has just experienced on of the coolest summers on record. The west is typically very hot and dry under such a pattern. I love how we try to blame every extreme weather event on global warming yet claim cooler than normal weather are weather patterns. I’m not arguing the earth isn’t slowly warming. I’m arguing against blaming such warming for these fires without considering things such as weather patterns and the reduction of controlled burns. Still waiting on our superstorm....whatever the hell that is :)
You just experienced the coldest summer on record during a period where global carbon emmissions were drastically reduced. That might have had something to do with it. The summer might not have been that hot for many parts of the country but it was VERY dry. And it's not just California that's been having problems with wild fires. California, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Wyoming, Montana, Nevada... and all of those states haven't reduced or eliminated controlled burns. I'm not blaming EVERY one of these events on global climate change, but I'm blaming their increasing frequency and severity on it. I would also point to the flooding that's been happening more often and more severely on the gulf coast.

We're like a couple of lobster that were just thrown in a pot of water... and one of us is going... "hey man, I think there's a problem"... the other one is saying "water naturally changes temperature. Don't worry that it's just getting hotter and hotter."

I will admit that California has had more problems with fires this year than normal due to problems being able to get prisoners to work as firemen due to covid concerns.
 
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Regardless of whether it is correct or incorrect to blame this on climate change, I find it hard to comprehend this situation. No matter what the causes have been, there has been a serious increase in the West of forest fires. Ones that cause a great deal of property loss and death over the past 5-10 years. Can't imagine why they haven't been extremely proactive on doing controlled burns. Would seem to be more cost effective to do this.

Maybe they need to get all the insurance companies to chip in some funds. I'm pretty damn certain the insurance companies wouldn't have a problem paying a reasonable industry wide tax for this purpose. They could cut the tax down when the fires stop being such a problem.

Call it a tax, call it a voluntary state fund contribution for the area affected. I'm sure if there was an independent study done on the issue, about funds provided, versus funds needed, that insurance companies wouldn't mind volunteering funds to make up the difference if it was less than the projected insurance claims for the next several years. That would make some new jobs for retired, out of work, or newly trained fire trained workers to jump into that industry.
 
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Man.. its funny when an engineer throws thermodynamics under the bus in the name of politics.
 
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Funny how people act like there has ever been consensus on this subject from the scientific community. I choose to listen to the archeological community. People lie, Rocks don’t. The rocks show that climate change happens in a continuous 25,000 yr cycle. We are currently at the solar minimum and it’s affect on the very existing of humans was written about extensively in ancient cultures. This is why the worship of the sun God has been so integral throughout history.
 
Regardless of whether it is correct or incorrect to blame this on climate change, I find it hard to comprehend this situation. No matter what the causes have been, there has been a serious increase in the West of forest fires. Ones that cause a great deal of property loss and death over the past 5-10 years. Can't imagine why they haven't been extremely proactive on doing controlled burns. Would seem to be more cost effective to do this.

Maybe they need to get all the insurance companies to chip in some funds. I'm pretty damn certain the insurance companies wouldn't have a problem paying a reasonable industry wide tax for this purpose. They could cut the tax down when the fires stop being such a problem.

Call it a tax, call it a voluntary state fund contribution for the area affected. I'm sure if there was an independent study done on the issue, about funds provided, versus funds needed, that insurance companies wouldn't mind volunteering funds to make up the difference if it was less than the projected insurance claims for the next several years. That would make some new jobs for retired, out of work, or fire trained workers to jump into that industry.
Controlled burns aren't surefire and they sometime turn into massive forest fires as they skip the bounds of their control. I'm guessing it might have had something to do with the drought conditions that the west has been in for the last few years. The other factor is that some not insignificant percentage of the lands are privately owned, so that makes things difficult as well.
 
Controlled burns aren't surefire and they sometime turn into massive forest fires as they skip the bounds of their control. I'm guessing it might have had something to do with the drought conditions that the west has been in for the last few years. The other factor is that some not insignificant percentage of the lands are privately owned, so that makes things difficult as well.
Controlled burns happen all the time in Europe and rarely end up in fires like we experience in the US. Trump has pushed for controlled burns from day one. If I were a betting man, I would bet my last penny that these burns are similar to what Australia experienced where over 200 + people were arrested for arson.
 
Controlled burns happen all the time in Europe and rarely end up in fires like we experience in the US. Trump has pushed for controlled burns from day one. If I were a betting man, I would bet my last penny that these burns are similar to what Australia experienced where over 200 + people were arrested for arson.
Controlled burns happen all the time in the US too. And they occasionally jump their bounds and become really expensive to put out. I spent every summer of my childhood going to Grand Teton / Yellowstone for a month. I very vividly recall multiple time that "controlled fires" became "uncontrolled fires". It's not just the US dealing with this either. France has been having problems with wildfires recently as well as the Aussies. I'm not saying that controlled burns aren't good combatants to wildfires, but we've already been doing them for decades and things are just getting worse.
 
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People near the proposed controlled burns often object to the burn. Ironic isn’t it. Also, environmentalists have also taken actions to prevent them. They have been quite effective here and across Europe in curbing large wildfire outbreaks in areas where they are conducted. A thousand years ago California would experience millions of acres burned annually. Just part of the cycle out there. Man obviously now has a vested interest in keeping the number of acres burned as low as possible even if we haven’t necessarily done all we should to accomplish that objective.
 
People near the proposed controlled burns often object to the burn. Ironic isn’t it. Also, environmentalists have also taken actions to prevent them. They have been quite effective here and across Europe in curbing large wildfire outbreaks in areas where they are conducted. A thousand years ago California would experience millions of acres burned annually. Just part of the cycle out there. Man obviously now has a vested interest in keeping the number of acres burned as low as possible even if we haven’t necessarily done all we should to accomplish that objective.
I mean, if you moved to the timbers of Colorado and spent a boatload to live out in the trees you probably wouldn't want your area to burn either, but then it's more susceptible to wildfire. I see it both ways.... fires are actually very good for the ecosystem, but they also destroy the nature that people want to live in and among. It might be easier to keep these areas under control if they weren't perpetually dealing with drought conditions. In some areas, the trees that are burning probably won't regrow to their previous levels for hundreds of years. I know that I have a mountain near me like that. It used to have vegetation all over it on one side and it burned in the mid 2000's. Not a thing has grown for over a decade there because it doesn't get enough water anymore.

Another thing is, it's not only effecting forests anymore... we're seeing more and more grassland fires as well.
 
Are insurance companies lobbying for more controlled burns, and laws allowing them??? That would pit the insurance companies against the environmental organisations, but it needs to happen in those western states. The more lives lost in the present fires will probably stoke that argument in those states.(No pun intended.) All I've been hearing from trump is rake the forests, not controlled burns. Which is a silly thing to posit.
 
Controlled burns happen all the time in the US too. And they occasionally jump their bounds and become really expensive to put out. I spent every summer of my childhood going to Grand Teton / Yellowstone for a month. I very vividly recall multiple time that "controlled fires" became "uncontrolled fires". It's not just the US dealing with this either. France has been having problems with wildfires recently as well as the Aussies. I'm not saying that controlled burns aren't good combatants to wildfires, but we've already been doing them for decades and things are just getting worse.
Some of that insurance fund could go towards think tanks for finding better ways to encompass a controlled burn without it jumping it's bounds.
 
One has to remember that the landscape in parts of California is not naturally occurring. For thousands and thousands of years fires have periodically swept through the countryside out there and thinned the vegetation and underbrush out. Man has seen to it that this rarely now occurs. Resulting in massive fires when they now occur.
 
One has to remember that the landscape in parts of California is not naturally occurring. For thousands and thousands of years fires have periodically swept through the countryside out there and thinned the vegetation and underbrush out. Man has seen to it that this rarely now occurs. Resulting in massive fires when they now occur.
I have some problems of logic with some of the statistics that are being sited for Historical California wildfires.... they're saying that 4 million acres + were burning yearly in pre-European times.... but we have little to no record or mention to my knowledge of large amounts of haze in the sky from these fires. To compare, we've had 3.2 million acres burn in California this year and it's visibly noticeable all around the mid-US to the point that it's hazy several states away for me when I look out my window. You would expect, if that many acres were burning historically, that we would have some kind of mention of it through oral histories or through pictograms considering the Native Americans were pretty conscientious about recording yearly changes in the nature around them on rocks, or on their winter counts, etc... I've seen some mention of histories of aboriginal burning back east, but it's all been speculation as far as I can find historically out West (thought there are some mentions in the Comanche / Apache lands of the Southwest US near Texas / New Mexico / Southern Colorado)
 
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The article I saw stated 7 to 11 million acres in California were burned annually. No clue what scientific methodology was used to arrive at such a figure. I assume they studied ash layers across California to arrive at the figure.
 
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Regardless of whether it is correct or incorrect to blame this on climate change, I find it hard to comprehend this situation. No matter what the causes have been, there has been a serious increase in the West of forest fires. Ones that cause a great deal of property loss and death over the past 5-10 years. Can't imagine why they haven't been extremely proactive on doing controlled burns. Would seem to be more cost effective to do this.

Maybe they need to get all the insurance companies to chip in some funds. I'm pretty damn certain the insurance companies wouldn't have a problem paying a reasonable industry wide tax for this purpose. They could cut the tax down when the fires stop being such a problem.

Call it a tax, call it a voluntary state fund contribution for the area affected. I'm sure if there was an independent study done on the issue, about funds provided, versus funds needed, that insurance companies wouldn't mind volunteering funds to make up the difference if it was less than the projected insurance claims for the next several years. That would make some new jobs for retired, out of work, or newly trained fire trained workers to jump into that industry.
Of course that is more cost effective and pretty much everyone involved wants to do more of them. There things though, one of which is purely a political problem:

1) The budget for doing controlled burns in the fall often gets completely wiped out because it gets raided to fight wildfires during the summer. They are both usually technically part of the same line item in the federal budget, allocated as money for controlling wildfires. If actual wildfires eat up all the budget, then they don’t have the ability to do planned controlled burns in the Fall.

2) The weather. You have to have good conditions to do a controlled burn, lest it quickly becomes an uncontrolled burn. In a very dry and hot year, the window of opportunity in the Spring and Fall is shorter. This is not always an issue, but it often is.

3) Whackadoodles. There is a group in Santa Fe that claim to be ‘environmentalists’ that actively protest and fight controlled burns in court at every opportunity. They claim to want to ‘save every tree’ and believe that controlled burns do more harm than good. They are wrong, but they are determined. There was one particular controlled burn that got held up for years in court while they fought it, and they finally got to do it just last year. This year, there was a forest fire that burned up to 3000 acres near that very area. Fire managers credited the burn last year with helping to slow the fire on the southern flank so they could set up a god fire line before it ran straight up the mountain toward Lake Peak and likely threatened the ski area while burning 30,000 + acres. Thank god for controlled burns, and screw any ‘environmentalist’ that claims otherwise.
 
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People near the proposed controlled burns often object to the burn. Ironic isn’t it. Also, environmentalists have also taken actions to prevent them. They have been quite effective here and across Europe in curbing large wildfire outbreaks in areas where they are conducted. A thousand years ago California would experience millions of acres burned annually. Just part of the cycle out there. Man obviously now has a vested interest in keeping the number of acres burned as low as possible even if we haven’t necessarily done all we should to accomplish that objective.
Millions of acres may have burned, but not necesarily as catastrophically as they are now. By letting underbrush pile up unregulated, we’ve created a situation where the fires are more devastating and kill more vegetation than they would in a natural fire cycle. An underbrush fire through a forest once a decade that leaves many of the trees alive is a very different thing than what we are seeing today, where many areas haven’t burned in a hundred years, much to their own detriment.

I think you and I agree on this issue. I just wanted to point out that while even large forest fires are normal and healthy in a historical sense, what we are seeing right now is not a part of that.

Edit: And yeah, I know that big catastrophic fires that destroyed all vegetation in their path have also happened historically and are also arguably part of a long term healthy forest ecosystem. They just didn’t happen with the regularity that they do now and for that reason I think we are in unchartered territory.
 
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