Reporter’s Notes: California Ablaze
One thing you try to learn, covering these stories, is how to navigate around the tricky subject of climate change. The trickiness isn’t if it’s happening, but rather what, exactly, it’s doing, what the effects are.
Take this year’s particularly nasty fire season, for example. We’ve had the driest spring in 80 years, and warm weather, too. So, can we blame that on climate change? UC Berkeley fire researcher Max Moritz gets asked this all the time, and I sense it’s one of his least favorite questions. After all: Next year might be rainy and cold. Will we take that to mean that climate change isn’t happening after all?
Here’s the best answer I’ve heard: The fire season of 2008 may or may not itself be the result of climate change, but it’s the kind of weather we’re likely to see more of in the future. That explains the Governor’s call to arm CalFire with more helicopters and fire trucks.
But it also means there’s a lot more to learn about how, exactly, climate change will drive fires in California. And if you ask Moritz, we tend to neglect those questions. No, it’s no surprise that Moritz — the researcher — wants more money for research. Still, it’s worth noting that while more than a billion dollars will be spent on fire fighting this year, UC Berkeley’s Center for Fire Research and Outreach may go broke before winter.
Listen to the California Ablaze Radio report online.
Nutrient enrichment of our biosphere is not any longer only noticeable in our open water (dead zones, red tides), but the increase of this reactive nitrogen in our atmosphere, due to increased use of synthesized fertilizer and the burning of fossil fuels, now causes green rain (rain with fertilizer) that is causing grasses and brushes to grow well during wet weather, but become a source of fuel during dry seasons and are making range and wild fires hard to control.
Although reactive nitrogen also has an enormous impact on global climate change, it is hardly mentioned in the media, more then likely because the nitrogen cycle (unlike the oxygen, hydrogen and carbon cycles) are complicated and occur on land, in water and in the air.
Last year Utah experienced very large range fires close to an area where they have CAFOs (Confined Animal Feed Operations) and where the manure is dumped into self contained lagoons and while the ammonia is stripped out of such lagoons, this can not be regulated by any State Agency. The fact that EPA does not consider nitrogenous (urine and protein) waste a pollutant and allows rivers still to be used as urinals, does not help either even discuss what the impact are of this general nutrient enrichment of our biosphere.
global climate change, it is hardly mentioned in the media, more then likely because the nitrogen cycle (unlike the oxygen, hydrogen and carbon cycles) are complicated and occur on land, in water and in the air.this is an idea to cure….
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ammy
California Drug Addiction