No Touch, Let It Burn, and You’re All Going to Die
Thermageddon is upon us, there is nothing our benevolent and caring government can do about it, forest fires are going to be biblical, and you are all going to be incinerated.
That’s the desultory and depressing message delivered at the recent May 21-23 Wild Idaho Conference. The End Is Nigh. Global Warming did it. We, the Government, are not to blame for the pending Ecopalypse. You are, you fools.
It’s science people! You can’t fight science.
Will climate change equal bigger fires?
Scientists say a warming Idaho will faced increased risk of longer wildfire seasons
by JASON KAUFFMAN, Idaho Mountain Express, June 2, 2010 [here]
According to ongoing research, the Idaho of the future will be a place where winter snowpacks melt out earlier and summer wildfire seasons arrive sooner and last longer due to climate change.
The effects of that will likely translate into bigger and longer-burning blazes that will be difficult or impossible to extinguish, one Boise-based researcher stated during the recent May 21-23 Wild Idaho Conference hosted by the Idaho Conservation League at Redfish Lake Lodge.
Further, there’s significant evidence that these changes on the local landscape are already visible across the forests and ranges of Idaho. According to Dr. Jennifer Pierce, an associate professor in the Department of Geosciences at Boise State University, Idahoans shouldn’t expect these trends to end.
And whose fault is all that? Why it’s YOUR fault, of course. You did it. You changed the climate through your greedheaded ways, and now you will pay, pay, pay!
Pierce, a geomorphologist who studies how natural processes such as glaciers, rivers and fires helped shape the Idaho we know today, is using this knowledge to investigate how human-induced climate change could impact how the state is shaped in the years to come.
Poor Jennifer. She tried to warn you. But would you listen? Nooooo. Now you have to die.
Unless… there a slight chance… if only you will give all your worldly wealth to the government and huddle in the cold and dark, maybe the Scientists can save your bacon and turn the climate around. With your wealth in tow, the Scientists will go upon the Mountain, speak the Incantations, sacrifice some virgins, and maybe Gaia will hear their pleas and beseechings.
Or there is one other possibility. It could be that the Scientists are blowing smoke, have no idea what they’re talking about, are essentially clueless, or lying, and there is no need to worry about climate change at all, because it isn’t happening or going to happen.
There are some curious indications:
In many ways, Pierce said, the No. 1 issue in the West will be declining snowpacks. She pointed to information from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a scientific body established by the U.N. Environment Program that assesses the risk of human-induced climate change, that indicates that while precipitation may actually increase due to climate change, more will fall as rain.
Well now, according to the data, snowpacks have NOT been declining. According to the data, in the Snake River watershed (which includes most of Idaho), maximum snowpack has neither increased nor decreased over the last 75 years [here].
Through all the alleged warming of the last 75 years, it turns out the snowpack hasn’t changed. In terms of maximum annual snowpack, there has been no detectable, much less statistically significant, “climate change” in the Snake River watershed over the last 75 years.
That’s just what the historical data says. The data are not from the future. They cannot tell us what the future might hold. To the extent that the past portends the future, however, the data exhibit NO TREND.
There has been a trend in Spring temperatures, however, a downward trend! According to the National Climate Data Center (NCDC) Climate Services and Monitoring Division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Spring (March - May) temperatures for the West North Central Region (Idaho, Montana) have been trending downward at a rate of -0.34 degrees F per decade for the last 30 years.
Spring temperatures (Mar-May) 1980-2010 with trend line, courtesy NCDC [here]
But that’s just what the NCDC says. Who are you going to believe, the National Climate Data Center or Al Gore’s minions?
Scientists have crystal balls the rest us of don’t have, evidently. The IPCC projects a warming planet, and they are Scientists. Well, mostly scientists. Well, there are some scientists in that august U.N. body. Just because the IPCC 4th Assessment was written mainly by political operatives of ComIntern, and that instead of “peer reviewed” science they relied on “grey literature” (pamphlets and screeds written by extemists with a political agenda), that doesn’t mean the IPCC is wrong, per se.
Besides, as readers of SOS Forests are well-aware, temperature doesn’t burn — fuels do. It’s the fuels, stupid (pardon my French).
And as long as our benevolent and caring Federal Government continues with their policy of No Touch, Let It Burn, Watch It Rot, the forests will accumulate more and more fuels, fires will burn hotter and spread more readily, and Idaho will become a scorched earth moonscape, climate change or no climate change.
The latest policy wrinkle? The benevolent Federal Government, funded by your tax dollars, is telling you, “Leave early, like yesterday, or stay and try to put the fires out yourself, you fools, because we’ve given up and are not going to even attempt to save your sorry skins.”
And why should they? Thermageddon is going to happen anyway. Why should Big Brother manage the fuels by restoring forests to their former fire-resilient condition when your driving around in your car and heating your home in the winter is going to cause the seas to boil away into outer space, the tipping point has passed, and the End is Nigh?
You don’t see important government officials purchasing beachfront mansions in Santa Barbara. They know the jig is up. They don’t spend your money on limousines and jet airliners. They don’t live high off the hog. They practice Gandhi-like abstinence and parsimony — doing what they can to stave off the End of Life As We Know It — despite the profligacy and overindulgence of the ignorant masses (meaning you).
Well, you’ll get yours in the end. It will be your homes that will burn in Federal megafires, though your humble abode might be 20, 25, or even 30 miles removed from the Federal Estate. It’s your own damn fault for daring to live within an hour’s drive (or two days’ march) from the US Forest Service.
There’s nothing the Feds can do. They can’t manage the land entrusted to them. That would be anathema and heresy. They can’t restore landscapes to their heritage conditions, no matter what Congress has ordered them to do, because the precious wolf packs (dumped there by the Feds) might get disturbed by all that stewardship activity.
Nope. The best they can do is tear out the roads, drive humanity off the land, and burn, baby, burn. It’s all going to burn anyway. It’s Gaia’s punishment to sinful humanity. We have sinned just by breathing, and now we must do the penance. We must suffer and die. We must be incinerated in retribution for our transgression of existing.
The Scientists tell us so, the Federal functionaries tell us so, and we pay them good money to say such things; therefore they must be right.
Thank goodness for Scientists and Federal functionaries. What would we do without them?
by YPmule
Every decision or non-decision has consequences. We don’t log. We don’t prescriptive burn. We spend no capital on our public forests except to keep honest citizens out. Now our forests grow fuel for fires and in them drug cartels grow marijuana with impunity. We are getting the results that happen due to the decisions we make as a nation.
We don’t demand oversight of education by parents. We let unions controls teachers and schools. Graduating 60% of kids after 13 years of schooling is the norm and now we import the intellectual capital to run our economy. The people who determine forest policy and the people who determine our education policies are one and the same: the nanny state. We don’t manage our forests because we are now collectively dumbing down our society, and ruining the environment by neglect is how you get there.
The idea that we have to drill for oil at 5000′ in the Gulf is because we can’t drill for oil on public lands (burning them, all the while keeping people out is a better option), we can’t drill for oil off the Pacific, Atlantic and Arctic coasts. The Gulf is the only available remaining option. And that hasn’t worked out as well as one would want. We import lumber because we burn our public forests, and honestly believe that is a better option than logging.
And all the while we are dillying and dallying about in a search for affordable energy, energy that we can depend on for a long time, we have elected a President whose environmental goal is to end the burning of coal for energy, and respecting his party’s idea that nuclear power is too dangerous. The corner this country painted itself into is drilling for oil in the Gulf. Think about it. Where I live, 250 miles from the Klamath River, I am expected to pay to remove hydro dams, a clean, green, renewable power source, and then replace that power with what? Our uneducated underclass of the future running all day on a treadmill connected to a generator? We feed them anyway, and broke our economy and most of the world’s trying to house them without their being able to pay their own way. I guess human power generation is the future. Lots of work for the night shift. You know, to keep the television glowing late at night. And news. News of the latest fire, oil blowout, or Presidential convoy from the Presidential 747, all hauled in by jet for the occasion. We need to drill a new well just to keep the President mobile and protected. Too bad that well has to be so deep in the Gulf. But you can’t fly over to view the blackened earth from the last public land fire without adequate and timely transportation fuels.
I feel so guilty!
I gave away my truck and stopped driving.