Wildfires Turn US West Coast into 'Hellscape'

Wildfires Turn US West Coast into 'Hellscape' Sept 13, 2020 19:10:32 GMT

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Post by Admin on Sept 13, 2020 19:10:32 GMT

The west is burning. Wildfires in California, Oregon and Washington are incinerating homes, killing scores of people, sickening many others, causing hundreds of thousands to evacuate, burning entire towns to the ground, consuming millions of acres, and blanketing the western third of the United States with thick, acrid and dangerous smoke.

Yet the president has said and done almost nothing. A month ago, Trump wanted to protect lives in Oregon and California from “rioters and looters”. He sent federal forces into the streets of Portland and threatened to send them to Oakland and Los Angeles.

Today, Portland is in danger of being burned and Oakland and Los Angeles are under health alerts. Trump will visit California on Monday, but he has said little.

One reason: these states voted against him in 2016 and he still bears a grudge.

He came close to rejecting California’s request for emergency funding.

“He told us to stop giving money to people whose houses had burned down because he was so rageful that people in the state of California didn’t support him,” said former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor.

Another explanation for Trump’s silence is that the wildfires are tied to human-caused climate change, which Trump has done everything humanly possible to worsen.

Extreme weather disasters are rampaging across America. On Wednesday, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration released its latest State of the Climate report, finding that just in August the US was hit by four billion-dollar calamities. In addition to wildfires, there were two enormous hurricanes and an extraordinary Midwest derecho.

These are inconvenient facts for a president who has spent much of his presidency dismantling every major climate and environmental policy he can lay his hands on.

Starting with his unilateral decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement, Trump has been the most anti-environmental president in history.

He has called climate change a “hoax”. He has claimed, with no evidence, that windmills cause cancer. He has weakened Obama-era limits on planet-warming carbon dioxide from power plants and from cars and trucks. He has rolled back rules governing clean air, water and toxic chemicals. He has opened more public land to oil and gas drilling.

He has targeted California in particular, revoking the state’s authority to set tougher car emission standards than those required by the federal government.

In all, the Trump administration has reversed, repealed, or otherwise rolled back nearly 70 environmental rules and regulations. More than 30 rollbacks are still in progress.

Wildfires Turn US West Coast into 'Hellscape' Sept 14, 2020 0:48:06 GMT

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Post by Admin on Sept 14, 2020 0:48:06 GMT

After a quick hike off a steep dirt road, forest ecologist Marin Chambers stands surrounded by grasses, shrubs and blackened bare trees. This is part of where the Hayman fire — until last month, Colorado's largest in recorded history — burned northwest of Colorado Springs back in 2002. The ground is dry, crunching underfoot.

"What we're seeing is a very large high-severity burn patch, where the vast majority of the trees have died," says Chambers, with the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute at Colorado State University.

These 18-square miles burned hot and fast in a single day, driven by how dense the forest was because of past fire suppression, high winds and extreme drought. Now, nearly two decades later, something you'd normally see after a wildfire is missing: new trees.

"Some regeneration may be occurring, but certainly not enough to recreate a forest in the near term," Chambers says. She and her colleagues have found that forests are struggling to grow back some of the state's most iconic species, like ponderosa pine and Douglas fir.

High-severity fires leave behind massive burn areas with almost nothing alive. And any baby trees simply can't thrive in the increased heat and drought brought on by climate change.

"Imagine being a ponderosa pine seed trying to grow out here," Chambers says. "It's a pretty intense environment."

If there is forest regeneration, Chambers says it happens in bands along the forest edge, where surviving trees can still drop their seeds. But she says even that isn't happening at lower elevations, where it's hotter and drier. She's not sure this area of the Hayman fire will ever reforest.

A new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder also finds large parts of the Southern Rocky Mountains will become unsuitable for ponderosa pine and Douglas fir tree regrowth as the climate continues to warm.

Lead author Kyle Rodman and his team found a stark dividing line, with very little regrowth after the 2000 Walker Ranch Fire near Boulder. The year 2002, Rodman says, "was one of the driest years we've had in the past century or more. So any seedlings that might have established right after the fire, there's a good chance they would have been cooked in that drought."