Interesting, Adelaide has been having a terrible fire bigger than it's metro and outer suburb areas yet it doesn't even show up on the map. Either we're just not covered by whatever does the measurements, or our fire, which has been devastating to the affected area, pales in comparison to other states.
Is this primarily because of coal for power generation? That seems too high even in that case.
It looks bad in the US North East which is densely populated so I guess it could be vehicular pollution as well. Are those where the coal based power plants located?
Other coal reliant countries like South Korea, India are also densely populated but the graph doesn't look that bad over there.
Re: Africa, keep in mind that a lot of fires are natural and / or controlled; natural fires should not be interfered with, because that'll cause a buildup of shrubs and other easily flammable material that will only burn more and harder the next year.
In Australia, we normally have the resources to have controlled burns throughout the year to reduce available fuel and keep the wild fires smaller and controllable. The government chose to pull back funding for our fire services, which resulted in reduced controlled burnoffs and an increase in the amount of fuel available for fires in high risk areas.
Once the fires did kick off, we also had fewer appliances and equipment to fight them. This is partly a natural disaster, partly a failure of a civilization to protect itself.
Interesting. From what I read about a while back, these wildfires didn't use to be so bad when there were more resources allocated to controlled burnoffs. Why did the government pull back funding?
There are 2 political arguments against "controlled burnoffs", and one much more practical argument against them:
1) it damages the environment, destroys nature and ecological systems. it kills animals and plants. Lots of them. It's bad for biodiversity.
Fire dept response: it does, but less than the fires that are prevented would.
2) Budget cuts.
3) controlled burning is normally done after winter (when firemen would have to do them in the dark or make them smaller), but before the dry season gets too dry and the risk of fires spreading too far becomes to great. This period has become shorter and shorter in recent times, due to climate change.
"That's not to say that the 480 million have all died as a consequence of the fires because some things are going to be mobile — birds will fly away and come back," Dickman added.
"Some reptiles, like lizards, would perhaps go underground," he continued.
I hate big numbers without context. You can just replace whatever number given with "a shocking amount", and get a more honest statement.
A common one these days is "X tons of CO₂", which means absolutely nothing to 99% of people.
If you want to inform, there are ways to put numbers in context. How many % of some relevant emissions are these tons of CO₂? 480 million animals out of how many total?
Ever seen a bird fly away from your location only to see the fire move faster than the bird?
> Some reptiles, like lizards, would perhaps go underground
How long's the ground on fire? What's the ambient temperature just half a meter below ground during a fire? How much oxygen is preserved and for how long? Those lizards are being cooked alive. Those that aren't will suffocate.
Wonder what the Butterfly effect of this will be. We all know the chaos theory butterfly effect of if a butterfly flaps its wings, well. Certainly less chaos at play with a large fire on this scale and its global impact.
Which makes you wish Gerry Anderson's vision of International Rescue was real. Alas we still have a legacy response World with a focus upon combat armies over medical/disaster response armies.
Climate change affects us all and I can't recall a year without some disaster of fire/flooding/eruptions or other weather/climate related effect of extreme that indirectly affects us all. The climate does not know about country borders, and any solution equally needs to be a borderless appraoch by all.
I know we have the UN, but its remit is so broad in many respects and the political beuracracy that entails, slows and distracts from issues like this that any response is never timely or as you would expect.
Imagine if globally we didn't have country pride and ego's in the way when it came to dealing with such disasters. After all, whilst this is a fire in Australia, the effects will in various forms, be felt by all across the globe. Alas not as directly accountable as people like and hard to measure, but it will have an impact.
After all, if a butterfly wing flap can cause a storm across the other side of the globe - then I'd say a fire the size of a small country is going to have a much larger impact and with less chaotic uncertainty about it.
Sad thing is, if the climate was a weapon owned by one country, you can bet the rest of the World would of got its act together. After all, we have NATO for dealing with a far lower threat, indeed, if firefighting had a military sized budget - there would be no fires.
To stay under +2°C in 2100 we need to reduce our CO² emission to ~2T/year of CO² per human. We are at 15T/year in the US and ~10T/year at the OECD. We are currently aiming at +4°C or more.
Doind a Paris-NewYork (one way) is 1.3T of CO² emitted.
The effort that we all have to do is huge. And we need to to it NOW (CO² stay ~2 century in the atmosphere, everything emitted only add-up).
The alternative is what? Contract GDP in every nation until carbon emissions are below target? You think people will allow you to go through something larger a great depression in order to meet climate targets? Did you not see the shitshow that happened in Chile and France when those governments tried to hike gasoline taxes by a small amount?
There is very little we can do over the next few decades to curb emissions. Solar and wind are not viable replacements for coal and natural gas (and are disastrous for the environment due to the requirement for exotic minerals and land-use requirements). Nuclear power is, but the environmental movement is actively blocking re-investment, and we're so far behind that it would take decades to jump-start the industry. Outside of energy generation, freight (sea and air), as well as air travel have no obvious non-fossil fuel alternatives. There are also thousands of petroleum products that don't have obvious alternatives either.
> Nuclear power is, but the environmental movement is actively blocking re-investment, and we're so far behind that it would take decades to jump-start the industry.
That isn't true. With desire and enough money, we could be churning out small modular reactors (SMRs) by the thousands. ThorCon, Nuscale, Terrapower and many others have designs.
In fact, that's my recommendation for the conservatives/populists. Take climate change away as an issue by promoting the only workable plan - a massive shift to nuclear power generation along with "renewables".
Even if global warming isn't an emergency, clean air is a good thing, and so is cheap, plentiful power.
>Contract GDP in every nation until carbon emissions are below target?
well in rich nations yes but of course it'll absolutely never ever ever happen. people holding out hope for renewables are deluding themselves. i's just not happening. i don't know what the value of "remaining hopeful" is.
>To stay under +2°C in 2100 we need to reduce our CO² emission to ~2T/year of CO² per human. We are at 15T/year in the US and ~10T/year at the OECD. We are currently aiming at +4°C or more.
Start an integrated organic fuel farm, a CSA for gas. It's carbon-neutral, potentially profitable, and you can start today.
Here's the manual: http://alcoholcanbeagas.com/node/277 (Disclosure: I took a Permaculture course from Farmer Dave Blume years ago, and IMO he knows what he's talking about; but I'm not affiliated with him or his site or book. I just think it's a really good way to take constructive direct action to counter CO2 and climate change w/o giving up quality of life.)
> Alcohol Can Be a Gas! (subtitled Fueling an Ethanol Revolution for the 21st Century) is an information-dense, highly readable, profusely illustrated manual, covering every aspect of alcohol fuel from history through crops, hands-on fuel production, and vehicle conversion. It's the first comprehensive book on small- to farm-scale alcohol production and use written in over 90 years.
> Internally divided into six books, the single volume contains 640 8.5" x 11” pages, with more than 500 illustrations, charts, and photos. It sports a 700-word glossary and a full index. It retains the original 1983 foreword by R. Buckminster Fuller. Alcohol Can Be A Gas! is a complete toolbox for farmers, green entrepreneurs, and activists to wrest control of our energy system from the Oilygarchy and put it back in the hands of the public.
Bio-fuels are a disaster for the environment due to land-use requirements because this isn't a very efficient method of getting and storing energy. With biofuels, not only do we need to grow corn to feed the population and livestock but now we need to grow corn so we can burn it in ICEs. We marginally reduce carbon emissions but kill the environment.
That's a good point that Farmer Dave addresses in the book: this ACBAG model is totally different than large-scale biofuel production. The integrated farm permits high-efficiency closed loops. For example the leftovers (DDGs or whatever they're called) from fermentation can be fed to livestock. Or used to culture mushrooms and then fed to livestock (after the mushroom crop is harvested.)
All the nutrients and trace minerals stay on the farm: the molecules of alcohol are made from atoms that come from the air and water. In effect the farm is exporting sunshine in the form of reconfigured air and water.
Well, yeah, if you can afford it buy solar panels and wind turbines and
batteries. That's terrific! (No sarcasm, I'm sincere.) In the medium- and long-term we should transition to all-electric
vehicles with renewable and atomic power.
But there's a huge existing fleet of internal-combustion engines
in vehicles, generators, and tools like chainsaws and leaf blowers, etc.
A locally-produced ecologically benign carbon-neutral fuel source is an important part of the solution, eh?
As for efficiency, consider: Scenario A: grow a crop of corn and feed it
to pigs. Scenario B: grow a crop of corn ferment it and extract the
alcohol and feed the leftovers to pigs.
In B you get two crops for the price of one. (Alcohol is produced by
yeast from sugar. The leftovers are protein, the bodies of the yeast.
The corn is a better feed after fermentation and alcohol extraction.)
As for land use in a permaculture farm you would be growing more than one crop
on the same land at the same time. You might have two or three crops
that produce food and some yams or sugar beets for fermentation.
Also, a lot of things you might not realize can be feedstocks. Pretty
much anything with sugar or starch. Farmer Dave had a deal with a donut
bakery to get their scrap dough for fermentation and fuel production.
I suggest you try to put the plan down on paper to realize it’s feasibility.
Farm equipment is far more expensive than solar panels and batteries, not to mention the amount of man power to deal with the scale needed for fuel production. Plus the extraction equipment.
In option B you end up with a shit ton of fermented waste. The amount you’ll have to grow for fuel will feed 20x more animals than you’d have in a local/small farm.
You’ll need a lot more land than usual to try this. The soil will be depleted in a few years even if you try crop rotation as your options are limited for fuel production.
Unless you show me an example of this system working I’m very skeptic, a lot of wishful thinking.
Indicates that baseline is 2T/year/human (in Spain).
840lbs to 6710lbs (resting to active) exhalation. Which means, not below 0.5T/year/human. We are at 20T/year/human here in Canada -- but, of course, at 8953 trees/human, with each tree absorbing 48lbs of CO2/year, Canada absorbs 215T/year/human (carbon negative in Canada by 195T/year/human).
What action would you like? Carbon tax? We have that. Eliminate oil production? Working on that (no pipelines being built, tar-sands bitumen not being sold to anyone but the US).
Personally, I prefer not to freeze, so burn natural gas to heat my house. Really big country, need transport.
I imagine that I could use wood heating could be used - 2 cords per season should be sufficient (6 to 20 trees, depending on diameter - 8 to 14 inches). I previously (20 years ago) converted all wood burning to natural gas, but could convert back. I no longer own enough land for my tree needs but (afair) 2 acres for food, 4 acres for fuel, so 6 acres of land of be sufficient for my needs.
This would reduce my carbon footprint, but would be more polluting -- which would you prefer?
Trouble is that carbon-neutral flights are possible, but they're decades away. There is not way in which we meaningfully limit climate change that doesn't come with a radical change (reduction by most measures) in the quality of life of your average 1st world resident.
How do we change decades to months? Pretty sure it’s possible if we invest in it. Look at rocketry or nukes in the WW2. We need that kind of focus and investment.
What we need to do is figure out how civilization can survive in a 6 degree warmer world. I'd take it if I could get it, but I've given up hope of achieving anything lower.
FYI to anyone else reading, this is the other side of science-denial coin, the doomer side. The most authoritative reports (ipcc ar6 and sr15) show us probably landing in the low 4's in a "BAU" scenario. However those scenarios are widely acknowledged as no longer plausible, as the cost curves of three things: wind, solar, and batteries have invalidated several of the assumptions about future growth in coal and oil demand.
Scientifically speaking we are on target for something over 2C but below 4C. Keep in mind that what we're seing today (puerto rico, california, australia) is 1C. 2C will be terrifying, so the news that we will likely not break 4C is very very mild comfort. Its just that anyone talking about 5, 6, etc is negative-spiraling in a way unsupported by the research and current economics.
>FYI to anyone else reading, this is the other side of science-denial coin, the doomer side
Why not the 'realist' side?
>wind, solar, and batteries have invalidated several of the assumptions about future growth in coal and oil demand.
Did they now? Coal and natural gas growth have outpaced solar and wind deployments. There is still no grid-level storage solution to actually make solar and wind viable replacements, and there isn't one forthcoming anytime soon (right now, places like California, and Germany simply use natural gas backup).
> All of these numbers are fairly fuzzy, but what happens around 2 degrees is that the natural–the consequences of the warming trigger natural processes that contribute further to the warming (positive feedbacks as they are called) in which the permafrost melts and releases huge amounts of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere; in which the surface waters of the oceans become so warm they can no longer contain all of the carbon dioxide they absorbed earlier–high school physics, right? Warmer water can contain less dissolved gas. Buy yourself a beer and you’ll see what I mean: if you don’t drink it, it goes flat as it warms up.
> So, all of those feedbacks kick in around 2 degrees and then you’ve lost control, to the point where you may not be able to stop the warming process, even if you stop all of your own emissions.
I'm a fan of Gwynne Dyer youtubes, I think he does an excellent job of articulating the most plausible doomer case, particularly w/r/t to india.
However that's not scientific research published in peer reviewed journals and then aggregated into UN reports. That's just some professor telling plausible stories in a confident tone of voice.
Specifically the big distinction you will notice between the former and the latter is the latter always depends on "feedback loops" which are un-researched speculation that things will get exponentially worse faster than expected in some way. Now, I don't deny the basic premise of what feedback loops are and how they can work, but if you don't have any research or science to back it then talking about "feedback loops" is functionally just a fancier phrase for "depressive negative spiraling".
Its not that its not plausible, its that its a story, not science.
Okay, I mostly agree with you, but saying we should plan for something plausible but not (yet) scientifically established is different than "science-denial", eh?
the problem is IPCC does not includes these 'feedback loops' into their reports. which by themselves are based on atleast a half a decade old 'safe' science due to publication pipeline. This is the reason why most of the climate reporting these days has some sort of 'faster than expected' adjectives. do you honestly believe that there is going to be no impact of permafrost melting or ocean ICE loss resulting in increased albedo? the question is why is IPCC knowingly ignoring these important feedback loops in their reports?
another point to consider, IPCC reporting is typically condensed into 3 scenarios 33%/66%/99% probabilities of staying below 2C. the most quoted carbon budget numbers come from the 66% scenario. is that wise? if we are talking planet-wide death & destruction then shouldn't we be aiming for 99%. if you consider that IMO IPCC is too timid on this issue and is essentially making a case of massive geoengineering when the 'faster than expected' becomes really bad.
>2C will be terrifying, so the news that we will likely not break 4C is very very mild comfort.
how is terrifying any less provocative than "doom"? i'm just as concerned about terrifying circumstances as i am about being doomed? more likely person you responded to is just as terrified as you are and simply remembered the wrong figure (6 instead of 4).
To me the distinction between terrifying and doomed is that the former is something you can/should react to and the later is something you've defined as too-late or given up on.
there's literally nothing that suggests otherwise, other than that it's physically possible to reduce consumption (i.e. it's not counter to the laws of physics). there is zero political or practical plausibility for reducing consumption to the extent that is necessary to avoid 4 degrees. you're holding out hope for something as unlikely as a miracle.
edit: there was a talk given years ago (i forget where/which channel) where the speaker said that to avoid warming we'd need to mobilize on the scale that we did for ww2 i.e. factories would need to be repurposed and laborers re-skilled. in that scenario it would be plausible. ww2[1] mobilized roughly 7 million people. if today we applied that kind of effort to the problem then maybe we'd have a chance. i don't know i'm not an economist but it's a unilateral effort on that scale that's necessary. and if you look around you can see it's not happening.
France manages a reasonable standard of living at 4.5T/capita/year (albeit with a LOT of nuclear, which may be politically and economically difficult to reproduce elsewhere). EU as a whole is 6.3T. So not really an order of magnitude, necessarily. The US is an outlier, granted, but mostly for fixable reasons (in particular, over dependence on cars due to poor public transport).
2T/capita is extremely ambitious, but not inconceivable.
EDIT: By the way, it is notable that even before climate was a concern, CO2 emissions in developed countries were largely falling, since the 70s. This was a result of the oil crisis and other energy security issues pushing greater efficiency, plus the replacement of coal with gas for air quality and economic reasons.
>The US is an outlier, granted, but mostly for fixable reasons (in particular, over dependence on cars due to poor public transport).
This isn't an obstacle, given electric cars and clean electricity generation. As I said elsewhere, nuclear is the only viable answer. Sadly, it has been demonized, and that needs to be reversed.
ThorCon's efforts in Indonesia will be interesting to watch. I'm not sure I like its current plan of siting the reactors like oil platforms in coastal waters though...
The best approach is underground siting, with no or very little water cooling requirement.
No, but my impression is that even in cities in the US which have the density to support good systems, the systems tend to be... not great. I go to SF from time to time, and it's the only place I regularly have to resort to lyft/uber/etc, because the public transport system just doesn't seem... very useful. And I'm coming from Dublin, a city with a pretty bad system by European standards.
And it's _possible_ for public transport to work for fairly low density suburbs; I think some places have had success with small feeder buses feeding larger buses or trams.
Also, of course, urban planning can be improved. And tastes can change too; my impression is that the very large McMansion type houses are getting somewhat less popular in the US now, and they're a big contributor on two grounds (they exacerbate the low density problem, and they're expensive to heat and cool both due to sheer size and to generally relatively cheap construction prompted by the sheer size).
> And it's _possible_ for public transport to work for fairly low density suburbs; I think some places have had success with small feeder buses feeding larger buses or trams.
This is what I was sceptical about, but I haven't looked at these kinds of projects yet. I will 'research' more in to it. Thank you for these directions.
For those specifically worried about the 500 million animals dead in the wildfire, note that we kill 3 billion land animals and fish a DAY for meat (https://sentientmedia.org/how-many-animals-are-killed-for-fo...). Of course there are many many other terrible things about this wildfire (including the fact that we may have endangered some species)
Size matters. If sardines count into the 3 billion it doesn't really say much. Similarly if insects count in the 500 million estimate. It would be more appropriate to report the loss of biomass or at least the average animal size.
> If our goal is to reduce the number of animal lives taken for meat
The problem is that this shouldn't be our goal. Is neither a realistic goal, neither would be necessarily a desired outcome.
Big animals have parasites also. You kill a cow and also millions of simbionts in the cow's gut but nobody cares. You make a modern soy field and kill everything. All green and all hairy and all winged things. All is killed except soy.
Is the typical new age religious nonsense that ends in a dead end. Is not possible to do anything in this planet without stepping over some creature. Is full of life and life fills the gaps all the time. Is the quality and diversity what counts, not the amount of new rats that we can fit in the same space.
Some species evolved to fix that and other not. Some are keys, sustainers or big modificators of the ecosystem, and other not.
We also kill billions of animals a day for plants. Harvesting crops kills a lot of insects, small mammals, and reptiles. Most of them are so small that farmers never even notice, but those animals are dead all the same. So if you want to criticize meat eating then you'll have to find a better reason than just number of animal deaths.
> [[A graph in which one square equals 1,000,000 tons. Dark grey squares represent humans, light gray represent our pets and livestock, and green squares represent wild animals. The squares are arranged in a roughly round shape, with clusters for each type of animal. Animals represented: Humans, cattle, pigs, goats (39 squares), sheep, horses (29 squares), elephants (1 square). There are other small, unlabeled clusters also. It is clear that humans and our pets & livestock outweigh wild animals by at least a factor of 10. ]] {{Title text: Bacteria still outweigh us thousands to one--and that's not even counting the several pounds of them in your body.}}
The Australian bush has always burned periodically—full stop! It always has—full stop!
Whether in recent years the risk of bushfires has increased or not because of global warming is essentially irrelevant to the argument. In fact, the recent bushfires in mainly Eastern Australia are long overdue (which goes contrary to the global warming argument—no, don't put words in my mouth by suggesting that I'm a denier, I'm just stating a fact).
First, let me say that I do have some understanding and experience in such matters: decades ago when I was a young kid in primary school I stood on a hill overlooking the township of Leura in the Blue Mountains of NSW and watched a raging bushfire tear through the township burning down over 100 houses in about an hour. It is hard to describe or paraphrase neither the emotion that I felt then nor the experience I gained from witnessing the conflagration. Living in a bushfire-prone area, I've seen many fires like it over the decades.
It taught me a salient lesson about how truly dangerous and idiosyncratic bushfires can be—unpredictably, brick houses would often burn down whilst weatherboard ones would often be spared, and the fires would often unexpectedly gobble up ones out in the open whilst leaving houses with many trees and undergrowth in their yards or nearby.
Second, I've had to fight bush fires to save property, it's hot, horrible and extremely dangerous work.
The key issues are these:
- It can take many decades for a truly major bushfire to reoccur in a given location. For example, the recent fires in the Jamison Valley in the Blue Mountains of NSW burned through bushland that has not seen a major fire for over 50 years. Over such a long time, the undergrowth becomes thick, it's a tinderbox just waiting to ignite, and on the first truly hot day or lightning strike off it goes.
- Fire fighting in national parks miles from houses and other property is usually a waste of time (as I've just witnessed in the Jamison Valley where the water bombing was essentially useless (the fires progressed unhindered into more uninhabited national parkland despite ongoing efforts) and the cost of the fire-fighting helicopters was enormous for essentially nought effect). Fire fighting efforts would be more effective if they concentrated on protecting townships and populated areas. Nevertheless, gung-ho fire fighters have to be seen doing something even if it is useless.
- Unfortunately, as truly major fires only repeat every 50 or 60 years, these fire fighters don't have a firsthand memory of past events—simply: corporate memory of past fires is lost from one major fire to another and thus it usually results in stuff-ups which can be serious, loss of live etc. as we've tragically seen again in the recent Australian bushfires. (Remember, loss of life in bushfires in Australia is tragically common.)
- Residents in fire-prone areas often have short memories, they grow trees in inappropriate places and the tree-hugging councils make things worse as they will not take action to remove a dangerous fire situation. For example, near Echo Point in the popular tourist area of Katoomba (near where the fire was burning in the Jamison Valley) only a few weeks ago I personally witnessed the terrible situation of weeds and undergrowth right near housing and population centres that should have been removed by the Council. After all, fires are nothing new to that area but Council has done SFA about removing the fire threat.
- If fire fighting is overly successful in national parks and reserves, it can make the situation much worse for when the big one comes [which it inevitably will] as the fire will be much more intense. Instead of just burning the leaves of the trees it'll also kill them—great 400-year+ trees that have survived many a previous fire are now gone forever! It's damn stupid to do this!
- For those of you not in Australia who think I've lost my senses by saying this, you need to keep in mind what I said at the beginning—the Australian bush must burn periodically to survive. The seeds of many trees, Banksia for instance, only germinate after a fire has opened their seedpods. The aim should be to allow this to happen on a natural cycle whilst still protecting life and property. Unfortunately, the Australian people are like ostriches with their heads in the sand, decade after decade they continue to fuck-up fire management to the nth degree and they do so at the risk to life and property.
Finally let me note that Californians are not much better. Why they have let the Australian eucalypt, which burn like incendiary torches due to being full of inflammable eucalypt oil, overrun their state simply defies any reasonable logic that I can think of. Moreover, eucalypts, like many introduced species, grow like weeds in California (when I first went there both the size and the leafiness of the eucalypts amazed me). Unlike Australia where the eucalypt is native, Californians have a choice. It seems to me they ought to eradicate them, if for no other reason than in the interests of safety.
This is the most ethical choice, the animals are already dead and treated much better than factory farms. Their flesh will rot in the fields, it should feed people and not bacteria.
>Nature Conservation Council ecologist Mark Graham told parliament: “[Koalas] really have no capacity to move fast enough to get away [from the flames].
Seems like natural selection to me
lol someone was so irked by this small dose of truth that he proceeded to downvote all of my past comments
Both CO² and active fires layers: https://www.windy.com/-CO-concentration-cosc?cosc,-33.046,13...
Heatmap of active fires: https://www.windy.com/-Active-fires-fires?fires,-33.046,136....
Crazy to see this.
(Central Africa also seems to have crazy fires, but I don't see any news on this https://www.windy.com/-Active-fires-fires?fires,-2.592,19.24...)