Colorado is the Future
There’s no way to know whether the fires ravaging Colorado are caused by global warming per se. Similarly, there’s no way to know whether the all-time high temperatures expected to be set in cities in the Midwest and South over the next few days are caused by global warming. Or the all-time warm winter and spring many states experienced this year.
Scorching heat, high winds and bone-dry conditions are fueling catastrophic wildfires in the US west that offer a preview of the kind of disasters that human-caused climate change could bring, a trio of scientists said on Thursday.
“What we’re seeing is a window into what global warming really looks like,” said Princeton University’s Michael Oppenheimer, a lead author for the UN’s climate science panel. “It looks like heat, it looks like fires, it looks like this kind of environmental disaster … This provides vivid images of what we can expect to see more of in the future.”
If liberal millionaires and their foundations just stopped bribing climatologists, none of this would be happening.
And the NSF, and NOAA, who are doing it with taxpayer dollars, just to add insult to injury.
LILLYWHITE SUBURB, FORMER CSA MEMBER STATE.
The Legislature is remiss in its duties for allowing such temperatures, winds and humidities. North Carolina would not.
These fires are the fault of the Big Government Liberals you find in places like COLORADO SPRINGS COLORADO, we have no fires here in COLONIAL HEIGHTS VIRGINIA
Which is awesome, because COLORADO SPRINGS, COLORADO is the home of Peterson, AFB, Fort Carson, the USAF Academy, and Focus on the Family. The LOVE Doug Lamborn, their rep. It’s the wingnut corollary to Denver/Boulder.
Actually, I believe the children are our future.
Ya’ know, I just knew this conclusion would eventually be jumped to.
No evidence. None.
BTW, you can tell who’s an asshole by the caps under their name. Lots of ‘em, too.
Actually, I believe the robots are our future.
What’s the problem here? If you don’t want your home destroyed by rampaging fires just move. If you think the earth is getting too warm just move north.
Cheap Wino
THE GUTTER OUTSIDE THE GAY BAR WITH THE AWESOME DRINK SPECIALS
Hemispherist.
But if I do that, they’ll want to pay for my health care.
This is just another example of public sector employees sucking at the bloated flaming teat of big government. All those firefighters racking up mountains of overtime would be unnecessary if we clear cut all the forests.
Njorl
CAPITAL LETTER HEIGHTS, VIRGINIA
Did you read about how they don’t even get health insurance, becuase they’re considred temporary workers?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/06/27/uninsured-and-fighting-blazes-welcome-to-the-life-of-a-federal-firefighter/
We have witnessed the birth of a new internet tradition.
Of which we are now aware.
We don’t care about any of this because it’s not happening to us. And by the way, we don’t want any of our tax dollars being wasted on these people. If they didn’t want this to happen, they shouldn’t have built their houses so close to the forest. After all, there have always been forest fires. Why should we have to pay for their new age tree loving lifestyles?
REAL AMERICANS
HEARTLAND, USA
We should give aid to the God Fearing folk of COLORADO SPRINGS COLORADO, well the pale ones at least and Michelle Malkin even if she’s far darker than NOBAMA after a few minutes out in the SUN.
Dear Sir,
Nunh-UH!
Don Blankenship
MY PALATIAL ESTATE, BEACHFRONT AFTER SEA LEVEL RISE, WEST VIRGINIA
I’d be more likely to blame more immediate causes, like decades of fire suppression and unsustainable forestry policy.
These things are not unrelated. It’s not like things are going to spontaneously combust because of climate change. But you have record heat and horrible drought on top of fire suppression and bad forestry policy and you have a far higher likelihood of catastrophic fire than if you have fire suppression and bad forestry policy and historically average temperatures.
Given the decades of fire suppression on ecosystems that normally burn regularly, these catastrophic forest fires were inevitable. What climate change has done is provide much greater amounts of combustible fuel for these fires. Within the last 10 years or so, warmer winters have allowed pine beetles to survive in larger numbers, in turn resulting in killing huge numbers of trees within the forest.
A fair point. You can’t just disentangle causes and say “X isn’t responsible because Y also happens.” I don’t withdraw the point, but I’ll just say let’s add it to the conversation.
IF that’s your argument, you’ve got to explain why it’s happening now, and why it wasn’t happening earlier, when all the poor management techniques you outline held sway. While I can’t speak for Colorado, I know that, in the case of Texas, controlled burns to clear out deadfall have been the norm for at least the last 20 years and yet that did nothing to stop the wildfires that raged across my state last year, most notably in plains counties with little if any forests and in River valley counties that haven’t seen a wildfire in decades if not centuries.
As I said I’m not terribly knowledgeable on forestry in the Mountain states, but given the rarity of wildfires in the high-altitude parts of Colorado -and generally in Wyoming and Montana- and the fact that controlled burns have been an established part of forestry for quite awhile now, I’d say the time is past to be laying this at the door of mismanagement. Just look at the weather conditions that held in Colorado before the fire started. Do you honestly think that drought and months of record heat and winds had nothing to do with it?
It’s not clear that global warming did not cause T.S. Debby to dump 15″ of rain here last weekend.
WHITE TRASH CRACKER
NEW PORT RICHEY, FLORIDA
Isn’t Colorado Springs a libertarian paradise? The photo merely shows ‘creative destruction’ in action as the free market trends toward equilibrium. This is right and just.
We live in the best possible world at all possible times.
So much of a paradise that they stopped watering public parks and turned out street lights instead of raising taxes.
FREE JESUSBURG, U.S. of A.
Is Jesusburg currently unfree?
The “Free” is there to emphasize that I live in a place where we practice free market fuckin’ A capitalism, not that fake “meek shall inherit the earth” and “rich men to heaven like camels passing through the eyes of needles” bullshit.
So, free as in beer?
Oh man…should have put that in the municipal charter. Dammit!
My plan to solve global warming problems goes like this:
1. Massively invest in power plants of all kinds, to power what follows.
2. Plunk down several HUNDRED desalinization plants, particularly in the Sea of Cortez (requires agreement with Mexico).
3. Build a pipeline system that delivers massive quantities of water, sort of like our oil pipelines, only moreso.
4. Use the water to turn deserts green, store up for future uses of all kinds, etc.
5. Repeat this plan for China, Saudi Arabia, North Africa, India, Brazil, and Australia, potentially on such a scale as to keep Netherlands and Vanuatu from slipping beneath the waves.
This is a totally workable plan, and I am not a crackpot.
Dirk Gently
ZOMBIE-PROOF, SELF-SUFFICIENT FORTRESS, EQUATORIAL PERU
(requires agreement with Mexico)
How many divisions do the Mexicans have?
Only slightly more than the Pope.
Will you do it holistically?
Those temperatures in 1980 are a problem, though. It’s tough to explain the high temps and a fraction of the carbon.
LITTLE BLACK SAMBO
ATLANTA GEORGIA
I can’t even see the subtext, the text is so heavily scrawled in crayon here.
You need to get over my blackness.
Cracker, please.
Is that like Hank Azaria’s Guatemalan-ness, but unfunny?
Colorado Springs is known as the Prostestant Vatican, because of the number of Fundamentalist Christian Organizations that have their headquarters in the city. This is thanks to some benighted City Council inviting them in (perhaps with tax abatements). Between the zoomies (retired Air Force personnel) and the American Taliban, that probably explains the pronounced conservative political bent.
That’s disturbingly redundant these days, except for Mikey Weinstein and his friends.
Anyway, it’s all Obama’s fault, because he didn’t waste money on more largely-ineffectual air tankers when he was repairing the damage done by the Bush administration. Also, down with taxes and government.
Sincerely,
mds
HATEAMERICABURG, THE VERY BEATING HEART OF CONNECTICUT
Paul Ryan would like to interject “We have seen the future, and it works.”
All according to plan!
On a boat, mutha-fuckers!
That “there’s no way to know” stuff is fine for 100-year floods and such. There’s no way to know if something that’s 3 sigma out of the normal distribution isn’t just chance. However, once you get to 5 sigma, which these fires arguably are, silly “there’s no way to know” concern-trolling becomes far more irresponsible than any 80s-era chicken-little-ism ever was. Because, as we’re finding out, sometimes chicken little is right.
Actually I think we can directly connect this to global warming.
First, Colorado had just experienced several days in a row of all-time record high temps – not high-temp-for-that-day, but highest temp ever, and yet it is only June. Colorado Springs had never topped 100F before in recorded history.
Second, although someone above mentioned decades-long policy of fire suppression that really doesn’t apply to the area in question. Being near a large city that part of the Pikes Peak National Forest had been subject to quite a bit of ground fuels reductions programs in recent years (which mitigates the fire suppression problem). In addition, the subdivision most badly hit, Mountain Shadows, had an excellent fire mitigation program and most of the houses were considered “fire wise”. This is why so many of the houses turned out to be protectable by the firefighters.
The problem on Tuesday afternoon was that the extreme temperatures combined with the normal (for this part of Colorado) afternoon clouds caused extremely high winds, at high temperatures, and that caused the fire storm which pushed the fire rapidly over two containment lines, through Queens Canyon, and over the ridge to the city edge. No one involved had ever experienced such conditions. NEVER. This was unprecedented and almost certainly is directly linked to global warming as it would not have occurred under what used to be normal weather conditions. And without the Tuesday afternoon event this fire does not burn any structures nor cause any casualties as the fire lines between the fire and the settled areas were already established (note that Highway 24 has still not been crossed).
Yes, Colorado Springs is wacko right wing. Living near here has taught me that wingnuts in practice actually tend to agree with most people about the proper role of government. They want collective security services, nice parks, top-of-the-line fire departments and roads, etc. Very few wingnuts are libertarian at all (though those that are tend to be very vocal) — most of them welcome strong police powers for anything from racial profiling of neighborhood visitors to restrictions on excessive dog barking.
The problem is that they imagine – mostly through immersion in wingnut media — that most of their taxes are spent on undeserving dark-skinned strapping young bucks driving Cadillacs. Even though they live in an area that is heavily propped up by government spending (AFA, NORAD, the huge Fort Carson and *two* Air Force Bases) they imagine that we get very little of our tax dollars back.
The worst are the retired military officers, enjoying their lifetime pension, medical care, and access to the subsidized PX and AFA country club-like facilities, for their 20 years work . All the while bitching about Obamacare and their taxes, not realizing that most of them are actually part of the 47% who don’t pay federal income tax.
You couldn’t be more right about that attitude. For the vast majority I know, it’s the perception that government “wastes” money on the undeserving, and that accounts for the vast majority of expenditures. When pressed, a lot of it still comes down to unconscious racism and pure selfishness–ironic, for good Christian folk.
[...] Colorado is the Future: Erik Loomis [...]
Also, finding out today that Michelle Malkin lives in Colorado Springs made me throw up in my mouth a little bit. I’m ashamed to be a Coloradan if she is too.
Malkin is kinda attractive.
Bottom line is…I’d DO her…in every way possible.
Yeowwwww……
Jennie, even Malkin can do better than you.