View from Lookout Mountain, CO. Not clouds. Not Smog. Smoke from wildfires 800 miles away.
Smoke from wildfires in the western United States. About 1.4 million acres of fires at the present time and over 7.5 million acres burned so far this year. Due in large part to climate change caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases.
As of this afternoon, 77 large fires are burning across 1.4 million acres in eight western U.S. states. That’s an area more than three times the size of Houston.
Since the beginning of this year, 46,951 fires have burned across 7,650,844 acres of the United States, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. For the prior 10 years (2006-2016), the annual average has been 5,488,788 acres. So eight months through 2017, we’ve already beaten the average for an entire year by nearly 40 percent. And we still have quite a ways to go before fire season ends — if it ends…
Research shows that wildfire activity in the western United States has increased dramatically, thanks to our emissions of greenhouse gases. Among the latest research is a study published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The findings were summarized in a news release from Columbia University’s Earth Institute:
. . . human-induced climate change has doubled the area affected by forest fires in the U.S. West over the last 30 years. According to the study, since 1984 heightened temperatures and resulting aridity have caused fires to spread across an additional 16,000 square miles than they otherwise would have—an area larger than the states of Massachusetts and Connecticut combined. The authors warn that further warming will increase fire exponentially in coming decades.
This smoke covers much of the continental United States. It’s affecting air quality in numerous states. If you have asthma or any other respiratory illness this is dangerous to your health. And poor air quality doesn’t discriminate against people based on color, religion, or any other basis. Houston and Hurricane Harvey is one giant reason we should be having a major debate on how to cut carbon emissions, but this is another one.
But we’re not. We are obsessing over a tinhorn dictator in North Korea and an idiot Tweeter in Chief. Some of us (Centrist and Establishment Dems) are busy smearing others of us (Progressive Dems, Socialists and Greens). Meanwhile this year we are on pace to set a record for Billion Dollar Extreme Weather Events in one year.
Welcome to The Coffee Shop, just for you early risers on Monday mornings. This is an Open Thread forum, so if you have an off-topic opinion burning a hole in your brainpan, feel free to add a comment. __________________________________________________________
“A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over.” – Joe Hill
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn – ‘The Rebel Girl’ song sheet cover – Joe Hill
Social media has an important role in shaping perceptions of current events, as well as influencing mainstream news coverage of those events. Platforms like Twitter provide real-time access to events going on around the world, allowing anyone to get a front-row seat for breaking news. But as much as it has opened up new channels of information, social media has also opened up new avenues for manipulating perceptions of reality. Misinformation and disinformation often spread faster than the truth, and by the time the narrative is corrected, social media has already moved on to the next “big thing.”
Check out who, other than bots and Russia was making #Antifa trend. Assange, Stone, Farage and Alan Dershowitz pic.twitter.com/bQRFf9229t
Unlike the incredibly dopey book Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg, Liberals can condone the fascistic … even as they must be by definition, anti-fascists. Yet because we do want to not take the law into our own hands, we are acutely aware of the fictions that suggest we do it without consequence.
Well-meaning liberals, who want tidy, peaceful protest marches, don’t want to remember that in order to make an announcement about not taking the brown acid, someone had to take that same acid.. and freak out.
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