THE NEXT GIGANTIC ISSUE.

[Bingo Fuel]

If 9 out of 10 dentists recommend a brand of toothpaste, I'm sure the top minds of AvCanada will always choose to trust the 1 doctor who disagreed.

[pelmet]

This article was written back in 2003, an era when people were not afraid of being cancelled for their 'transgressions' against the dogma....

https://www.hcn.org/issues/251/13986

History is full of big fires
Ray Ring May 26, 2003

Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue's feature story, "A losing battle."

"Investigating the ... arid lands, I passed through South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho by train. Among the valleys, with mountains on every side, during all that trip a mountain was never seen. This was because the fires in the mountains created such a smoke that the whole country was enveloped by it ... "

This squinty-eyed report came from Major John Wesley Powell back in 1889. The fires that year were so widespread and fierce, they greatly impressed Powell, who had already faced the rigors of Civil War combat and Grand Canyon rapids. But pioneer-era fires like those Powell saw are seldom mentioned today amid all the sensational stories about the recent wildfires, which are said to be unnaturally large. That’s probably because they put the lie to the "unnaturally" part.

"Fire in an ordinary year passes over the ground and burns the leaves and cones, etc., only," Powell, the director of the U.S. Geological Survey at that time, reported to Congress. "But there come critical years ... of great drought ... and the fire starts and sweeps everything away."

The 1889 fires burned even more land than the famous 3-million-acre Big Blowup of 1910. Other huge fire years in the Northern Rockies and Northwest include 1869, 1846, 1823, 1802, 1784, 1778 and 1756, says a leading fire ecologist, Steve Arno. In the Central Rockies and Southwest, huge fire years include 1879, 1851, 1847, 1785, and 1748.

In fact, fire ecologists say that far more land burned each year during the 1800s and earlier, than in recent years. In the preindustrial era, from 1500 to 1800, an average of 145 million acres burned every year nationwide — about 10 times more than the nation’s recent annual burns. In the West, Arno estimates that 18 to 25 million acres burned each year, as recently as the 1800s. Lightning strikes ignited some fires, while others were started by accident. Indians and settlers set many fires deliberately, to drive game, make room for their homes, stimulate their crops, or fight enemy tribes. Many of the burns were in grass or sagebrush.

The total burned acreage dropped after the federal government launched the war on wildfires, and after much of the burnable land was converted to farms and settlements.

There is disagreement about the impacts and severity of the fires in the old days, but there is "strong consensus," Arno says, that smoky skies were more of a fact of life back then.

[Bingo Fuel]

What the World Will Look Like in 2050 If We Don’t Cut Carbon Emissions in Half

Written by the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change from 2010 to 2016

https://time.com/5824295/climate-change ... ibilities/

It is 2050. Beyond the emissions reductions registered in 2015, no further efforts were made to control emissions. We are heading for a world that will be more than 3 degrees warmer by 2100.

The first thing that hits you is the air.

In many places around the world, the air is hot, heavy, and depending on the day, clogged with particulate pollution. Your eyes often water. Your cough never seems to disappear. You can no longer simply walk out your front door and breathe fresh air. Instead, before opening doors or windows in the morning, you check your phone to see what the air quality will be. Everything might look fine—sunny and clear—but you know better. When storms and heat waves overlap and cluster, the air pollution and intensified surface ozone levels can make it dangerous to go outside without a specially designed face mask (which only some can afford).

Our world is getting hotter, an irreversible development now utterly beyond our control. We have already passed tipping points, like The Great Melting of the Arctic sea ice, which used to reflect the sun’s heat. Oceans, forests, plants, trees, and soil had for many years absorbed half the carbon dioxide we spewed out. Now there are few forests left, most of them either logged or consumed by wildfire, and the permafrost is belching greenhouse gases into an already overburdened atmosphere.

In five to 10 years, vast swaths of the planet will be increasingly inhospitable to humans. We don’t know how habitable the regions of Australia, North Africa, and the western United States will be by 2100. No one knows what the future holds for their children and grandchildren.

More moisture in the air and higher sea surface temperatures have caused a surge in extreme hurricanes and tropical storms. Coastal cities in Bangladesh, Mexico, the United States, and elsewhere have suffered brutal infrastructure destruction and extreme flooding, killing many thousands and displacing millions. This happens with increasing frequency now.

Because multiple disasters are often happening simultaneously, it can take weeks or even months for basic food and water relief to reach areas pummeled by extreme floods. Diseases such as malaria, dengue, cholera, respiratory illnesses, and malnutrition are rampant.

Melting permafrost is releasing ancient microbes that today’s humans have never been exposed to—and as a result have no resistance to. Diseases spread by mosquitoes and ticks are rampant as these species flourish in the changed climate, spreading to previously safe parts of the planet, increasingly overwhelming us. Worse still, the public health crisis of antibiotic resistance has only intensified as the population has grown denser in habitable areas and temperatures continue to rise.

Every day, because of rising water levels, some part of the world must evacuate to higher ground. Every day you see images of mothers with babies strapped to their backs, wading through floodwaters. News stories tell of people living in houses with water up to their ankles because they have nowhere else to go, their children coughing and wheezing because of the mold growing in their beds, insurance companies declaring bankruptcy leaving survivors without resources to rebuild their lives.

Those who remain on the coast must now witness the demise of a way of life based on fishing. As oceans have absorbed carbon dioxide, the water has become more acidic and is now so hostile to marine life that all but a few countries have banned fishing, even in international waters. Many people insist that the few fish that are left should be enjoyed while they last—an argument, hard to fault in many parts of the world, that applies to so much that is vanishing.

As devastating as rising oceans have been, droughts and heat waves inland have created a special hell. Vast regions have succumbed to severe aridification, sometimes followed by desertification. Wildlife there has become a distant memory.

Cities such as Marrakech and Volgograd are on the verge of becoming deserts. Hong Kong, Barcelona, Abu Dhabi, and many others have been desalinating seawater for years, desperately trying to keep up with the constant wave of immigration from areas that have gone completely dry.

Extreme heat is on the march. If you live in Paris, you endure summer temperatures that regularly rise to 111°F (43.8°C). This is no longer the headline-grabbing event it would have been 30 years ago. Everyone stays inside, drinks water, and dreams of air-conditioning. You lie on your couch, a cold, wet towel over your face, and try to rest without dwelling on the poor farmers on the outskirts of town who, despite recurrent droughts and wildfires, are still trying to grow grapes, olives, or soy—luxuries for the rich, not for you.

You try not to think about the 2 billion people who live in the hottest parts of the world, where, for upward of 45 days per year, temperatures skyrocket to 140°F (60°C) —a point at which the human body cannot be outside for longer than about six hours because it loses the ability to cool itself down. Places such as central India are becoming increasingly challenging to inhabit. For a while people tried to carry on, but when you can’t work outside, when you can fall asleep only at 4 a.m. for a couple of hours because that’s the coolest part of the day, there’s not much you can do but leave. Mass migrations to less hot rural areas are beset by a host of refugee problems, civil unrest, and bloodshed over diminished water availability.

Even in some parts of the United States, there are fiery conflicts over water, battles between the rich who are willing to pay for as much water as they want and everyone else demanding equal access to the life-enabling resource. The taps in nearly all public facilities are locked, and those in restrooms are coin-operated. At the federal level, Congress is in an uproar over water redistribution: states with less water demand what they see as their fair share from states that have more. Government leaders have been stymied on the issue for years, and with every passing month the Colorado River and the Rio Grande shrink further.

Food production swings wildly from month to month, season to season, depending on where you live. More people are starving than ever before. Climate zones have shifted, so some new areas have become available for agriculture (Alaska, the Arctic), while others have dried up (Mexico, California). Still others are unstable because of the extreme heat, never mind flooding, wildfire, and tornadoes.

One thing hasn’t changed, though—if you have money, you have access. Global trade has slowed as countries such as China stop exporting and seek to hold on to their own resources. Disasters and wars rage, choking off trade routes. The tyranny of supply and demand is now unforgiving; because of its increasing scarcity, food can now be wildly expensive. Income inequality has never been this stark or this dangerous.

As committed as nations are to keeping wealth and resources within their borders, they’re determined to keep people out. Most countries’ armies are now just highly militarized border patrols. Lockdown is the goal, but it hasn’t been a total success. Desperate people will always find a way.

Ever since the equatorial belt started to become difficult to inhabit, an unending stream of migrants has been moving north from Central America toward Mexico and the United States. Others are moving south toward the tips of Chile and Argentina. The same scenes are playing out across Europe and Asia. Some countries have been better global Good Samaritans than others, but even they have now effectively shut their borders, their wallets, and their eyes.

Even if you live in areas with more temperate climates such as Canada and Scandinavia, you are still extremely vulnerable. Severe tornadoes, flash floods, wildfires, mudslides, and blizzards are often in the back of your mind. Depending on where you live, you have a fully stocked storm cellar, an emergency go-bag in your car, or a six-foot fire moat around your house. People are glued to weather forecasts. Only the foolhardy shut their phones off at night. If an emergency hits, you may only have minutes to respond.

The weather is unavoidable, but lately the news about what’s going on at the borders has become too much for most people to endure. Under increasing pressure from public health officials, news organizations have decreased the number of stories devoted to genocide, slave trading, and refugee virus outbreaks. You can no longer trust the news. Social media, long the grim source of live feeds and disaster reporting, is brimming with conspiracy theories and doctored videos.

The demise of the human species is being discussed more and more. For many, the only uncertainty is how long we’ll last, how many more generations will see the light of day. Suicides are the most obvious manifestation of the prevailing despair, but there are other indications: a sense of bottomless loss, unbearable guilt, and fierce resentment at previous generations who didn’t do what was necessary to ward off this unstoppable calamity.

[pdw]

A lot of angles covered in that essay.

The forest care interview too is informative. Harvesting out larger specimens (esp the tall/old/useless.house crushers) and planting/caring-for a mix that won’t burn as readily (esp near/between homes) is already working in so many places that take that seriously. The firebug problem is mentioned, which is so perplexing.

[pelmet]

I notice Pelmet was helpful in posting that Edmonton still gets cold in the winter — thank you — but somehow neglected to mention, after days in the news, that 1000 homes were destroyed by a wildfire.

In Colorado, right by the Rockies.

At Christmas.

Think about that. No snow until just the other night.

But when you claim without any evidence its a “scam” — kinda hard to back away from. So avoid mentioning anything weird. Its a “scam”. Why? “Well, because”.

Its climate change. Climate volatility. Not linear warmer temps everywhere at once.

Yeah its going to create lots of problems.

What the World Will Look Like in 2050 If We Don’t Cut Carbon Emissions in Half

What amazes me is how often the same people can be fooled over and over again. No wonder I get so many scam phone calls.

Anyways....I thought I might post the usual doom and gloom predictions made over 50 years ago on the first Earth Day by the same sort of people making predictions nowadays. Read them all...Are you in a state of panic yet?

1. “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” — Harvard biologist George Wald

2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” — Washington University biologist Barry Commoner

3. “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” — New York Times editorial

4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” — Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich

5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born… [By 1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.” — Paul Ehrlich

6. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” — Denis Hayes, Chief organizer for Earth Day

7. “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions…. By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.” — North Texas State University professor Peter Gunter

8. “In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution… by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.” — Life magazine

9. “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt

10. “Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” — Paul Ehrlich

11. “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate… that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt

12. “[One] theory assumes that the earth’s cloud cover will continue to thicken as more dust, fumes, and water vapor are belched into the atmosphere by industrial smokestacks and jet planes. Screened from the sun’s heat, the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born.” — Newsweek magazine

13. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” — Kenneth Watt



See you in 2070 to place three more laughing icons to todays doom and gloom predictions.

https://www.netzerowatch.com/earth-day- ... come-true/

[palebird]

From the CEO of One America life insurance. Deaths are up 40%. A typical catastrophe is considered 10%. What say about that..

"What the data is showing to us is that the deaths that are being reported as COVID deaths greatly understate the actual death losses among working-age people from the pandemic. It may not all be COVID on their death certificate, but deaths are up just huge, huge numbers," he said, adding that the company has seen an "uptick" in disability claims - at first short-term, and now long-term.

[dhc#]

RISKS TO 2022

https://intelligencequarterly.com/ameri ... s-to-2022/

[rookiepilot]

Pelmet;

If you really believe climate change is a scam, now is a wonderful time to start an insurance company.

Just look at policy rates for damages and what they are doing in BC and other vulnerable locations. If they will write coverage at all.

You'll make a fortune if you are right.

[palebird]

I see I am being edited. Oh well the truth hurts. Here are some main points that Dr Robert Malone makes on this Covid madness:

Calling the government “out of control” and “lawless” in their Covid response

Stating mandates of “experimental” vaccines are “explicitly illegal”

Noting that India had success in treating Covid early with drugs like ivermectin

Saying “half a million” excess deaths have occurred due to government actions

Arguing those with natural immunity have higher risk of vaccine adverse events

Alleging that people are living through a mass formation psychosis

I’m not going to rehash all of the doctor’s points about Covid, but instead will say that I believe he made an extraordinary amount of thoughtful points that the mainstream media and “big tech” are too scared (and/or too stupid) to touch on themselves.

[dhc#]

I see I am being edited. Oh well the truth hurts. Here are some main points that Dr Robert Malone makes on this Covid madness:

Calling the government “out of control” and “lawless” in their Covid response

Stating mandates of “experimental” vaccines are “explicitly illegal”

Noting that India had success in treating Covid early with drugs like ivermectin

Saying “half a million” excess deaths have occurred due to government actions

Arguing those with natural immunity have higher risk of vaccine adverse events

Alleging that people are living through a mass formation psychosis

I’m not going to rehash all of the doctor’s points about Covid, but instead will say that I believe he made an extraordinary amount of thoughtful points that the mainstream media and “big tech” are too scared (and/or too stupid) to touch on themselves.

[pelmet]

Pelmet;

If you really believe climate change is a scam, now is a wonderful time to start an insurance company.

Just look at policy rates for damages and what they are doing in BC and other vulnerable locations. If they will write coverage at all.

You'll make a fortune if you are right.

Insurance companies do alright. They are good at denying or nitpicking on coverage(ask me how I know) and raise their rates if they have an issue. At least I did well recently on the two policies associated with Economical Mutual(shared ownership as a policyholder). There was a demutualization and IPO which went very well and we all got a nice payout(or two). But the insiders got the the big payouts. My Manulife stock has mediocre return and the Sun Life and Great West fixed income do alright.

As for BC, I believe much of the flooded area used to be a lake. Perhaps that more than climate change explains why it flooded.

[goldeneagle]

What amazes me is how often the same people can be fooled over and over again. No wonder I get so many scam phone calls.

What amazes me is the folks that stop reading after the headline, and dont really look into the actual details of what they are being told.

But my own personal experience kinda sums up how things are headed long term. When I was a child, grew up in a small town in northern bc late 60's and early 70's. Every morning during December and January timeframe, we would get up and go look at the thermometer right away. If it was reading colder than 40 below, yahoo, I didn't have to go to school. We typically saw that 8 or 10 times thru December and January. For those of us that lived in town, if we did go, school was just a day of playing in the gym, so lots of us did go anyways on those days when school was optional due to cold.

My sister is a school teacher in that same area today. Last week she texted me a photo of a thermometer, it read -39, and her caption was 'Close, but no cigar'. She goes on to tell me, her school has not had a cold cancellation in the last 20 years, altho the policy of busses not running colder than -40 is still in place, it's just not happened.

On the flip side, summers have been a slightly different story. Growing up, we were always watching to see if the temp hit 100 (thermometers were still in F back then, so that's 38 on one marked in C), but we never did see it, not once. Saw high 90's a few times, but never did see it hit 100. This summer, same place, they had a week strait of temps in the mid 40's, so if they thermometers were still marked in F, we would have seen it touch 110.

So yes, we just had a cold snap out west, but, how cold was it, and how long did it last ? We were not setting all time record lows, and it only lasted a few days. Reality is, the differences between summer highs and winter lows are pretty much the same as they have always been, but, the summer highs are setting new all time records, and the winter lows are touching down for a few days into areas that were common for weeks when I was a kid. It's easy to sit back and look at -20 on the thermometer and say 'not getting any warmer', but in reality, we see -20 about as much as we used to see -40.

this year in BC we had a particularly bad period of warmer than normal weather in late November. Snow packs were already accumulating in the mountains, then a warm spell that brought torrential rains, which came down as rain instead of snow. It was a double whammy for some of the valleys, because not only did they get the rain, that rain melted the snow, and rivers were well above normal spring runoff levels. One needs only fly the Coquihalla and the Fraser canyon to see the results. Over on the island we saw some interesting things too. BCHydro has records of rainfall in the watersheds where they have dams, records that go back to the days before the dams were built. At the Jordan River installation they tell us that November has historically been it's wettest month of the year. During the November period of heavy rains this year, they had one day at that station where more rain fell than the previous records for the entire month.

One thing that I do find surprising in all of this. The climate is changing, of this there is no doubt. The fascinating part is, we have part of a society expending great effort on finding a way to blame somebody, and an equal amount of effort by folks in denial of the facts. Is the change due to human causes , or is it just natural change ? Those with in depth knowledge of the subject suggest it's natural change accelerated by human causes. Those with knowledge gained by hunting thru facebook tell us the whole issue is a bunch of hooey.

What I can say with some certainty, when I was a kid growing up we would listen to the old timers talk about -50 and -60 stretches thru the winter and chuckle as we accused them of exagerating. Now folks that have lived in that same town for the last 20 years chuckle and accuse us of exagerating when we talk about walking to school in -40 temps. Same old story, the 'ya ya, gramps is getting senile again' attitude, it doesn't get -40 and you dont let kids walk to school cuz the boogeyman may get them on the way.

[digits_]

Well, couple of general points:

- Just because someone might have exaggerated or might be exaggerating the effects of a certain event, does not mean that the event itself didn't or will not happen.
Whether 5% or 50% or the earth might become uninhabitable or have food scarcity doesn't really matter too much. Both options are unacceptable. The silly thing is that both sides cherry pick scientific results that fit their point of view. Exaggerated doomsday forecsts certainly don't help though to convince people that something's up.

- Older hypothetical doomsday forecasts might not have materialized because people took action.
Go walk around in some Cuban cities if you want to see what would have happened if we didn't control car exhaust pollution and related activities.

[pelmet]

Well, couple of general points:

- Just because someone might have exaggerated or might be exaggerating the effects of a certain event, does not mean that the event itself didn't or will not happen.
Whether 5% or 50% or the earth might become uninhabitable or have food scarcity doesn't really matter too much. Both options are unacceptable. The silly thing is that both sides cherry pick scientific results that fit their point of view. Exaggerated doomsday forecsts certainly don't help though to convince people that something's up.

The predictions are exaggerated intentionally so people will panic and make massive structural changers that are unnecessary. Like the 50 trillion energy transition and all its effects.

Mind you, I am happily letting it benefit my oil stocks.

[pelmet]

West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin is apparently on a mission to see just how much damage he can singularly inflict on the clean energy industry. Stock prices for major renewable energy technology companies were on the decline Monday following the senator’s weekend surprise announcement that he was tapping out on efforts to pass the $2 trillion Build Back Better Act despite months of negotiations."

You don't know much about how negotiations in Washington look like, do you?

They are still negotiating.

I Guess I know more than I get credit for.

"Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., told a gaggle of reporters Tuesday that there have been "no conversations" about negotiating with Democratic leadership and President Biden on the massive social spending bill known as the Build Back Better Act.

Asked whether negotiations or conversations about compromise have been ongoing, Manchin denied any knowledge of BBB discussions after his statement last month against the policy package."

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/manchi ... versations

Of course, I do realize that things can change.

[jhonalbert]

The problems of pollution, waste and climate change are so immense that the actions of one individual seem unimportant.

[pelmet]

For those worried about dying from climate related natural disaster…….the trends can be useful……

https://twitter.com/ecosensenow/status/ ... 38726?s=21

[imjustlurking]

For those worried about dying from climate related natural disaster…….the trends can be useful……

https://twitter.com/ecosensenow/status/ ... 38726?s=21

Ask yourself why less people are dying from weather related events?

The worry about climate change is rising sea levels, expected to displace tens of millions of people, and droughts that will limit access to fresh drinking water. Both of these problems can be dealt with using technology, but it's a problem that we can prevent through moderation and changing of habits.

[pelmet]

For those worried about dying from climate related natural disaster…….the trends can be useful……

https://twitter.com/ecosensenow/status/ ... 38726?s=21

Ask yourself why less people are dying from weather related events?

The worry about climate change is rising sea levels, expected to displace tens of millions of people, and droughts that will limit access to fresh drinking water. Both of these problems can be dealt with using technology, but it's a problem that we can prevent through moderation and changing of habits.

My point is the intentional misleading from the people arguing for change. We are told over and over about how much more death and destruction there will be and how much worse it will be than in the past. I just wanted to show the trend over the past century so we are all clear what the past was like in terms of climate related deaths and how much confidence one should put in the climate change predictions we see.

[imjustlurking]

For those worried about dying from climate related natural disaster…….the trends can be useful……

https://twitter.com/ecosensenow/status/ ... 38726?s=21

Ask yourself why less people are dying from weather related events?

The worry about climate change is rising sea levels, expected to displace tens of millions of people, and droughts that will limit access to fresh drinking water. Both of these problems can be dealt with using technology, but it's a problem that we can prevent through moderation and changing of habits.

My point is the intentional misleading from the people arguing for change. We are told over and over about how much more death and destruction there will be and how much worse it will be than in the past. I just wanted to show the trend over the past century so we are all clear what the past was like in terms of climate related deaths and how much confidence one should put in the climate change predictions we see.

Your assumption that past success will indicate future success is misleading.

Prime example is the 737MAX crashes. Their death and destruction is 0 until it's not.


Edit: For clarity... your evidence only proves that we haven't reached the point of destruction yet. Think of a spring... it's elastic and will rebound as all day until it reaches the point where it becomes plastic instead of elastic. That's the point where the spring will no longer go back and it's fubar.