Floods and Fires
There is a new report coming out that posits: Global Warming Fuels Wildfires.
The basic premise derived from three decades of data is that the snow pack is melting earlier and there are longer periods of hot, dry weather every year that are resulting in conditions more favorable to wildfires. There are not only more fires, but the fires are lasting longer and affecting larger areas. The fire season is starting earlier and lasting longer.
Locally, tropical storm Alberto was welcomed over in eastern Florida as it put out a number of persistence wildfires, and reduced the fire danger after an extremely dry Spring. Private fireworks were banned this year on the entire Panhandle because of the fire danger. All of the debris from the hurricanes of the last two years has dried out and is available to fuel a major fire in our pine forests.
We haven’t had enough low wind, high humidity days that are needed for the controlled burns that had reduced the fire threats in recent years.
2 comments
Scary stuff. We’ve had enough rain here lately that it hasn’t been a local problem, but as summer wears on, I expect the inevitable no-burn orders in rural Texas. (It’s always illegal within Houston city limits.) This will be the first year that I don’t have to worry about my neighbors at Livingston sometimes ignoring the orders and risking my former property, except that I don’t want them to burn their own property, either.
A friend of Stella’s recently said she wondered whether Gore was right about our having sufficient time to save ourselves from ultimate destruction incident to global warming, even if we find the political will to do something about it. It’s unpleasant to think about, and Americans lately have gotten good at not thinking about unpleasant things. Maybe Gore is saying what he does in hopes that people will be motivated to give it their best shot, rather than simply giving up. I don’t know; I just don’t know.
Spending time and money looking for more oil is not going to help us in any way. Conservation and shifting to alternatives deal with both global warming and energy independence.
We don’t have enough time if we do nothing.