There was a discussion in the post below wherein Ms. Cynthia J. Laughery chimed in with the following comment regarding Climate Change and forest fires. She lives in Oregon.
You may be certifiable to anyone living in Oregon.
“Climate Change is absolutely based on nothing. I tell people all they have to do is stick their heads outside and look around and see that nothing is changing.” Seriously? I’m new here, but I’ve lived in southern Oregon in the forest for over thirty years and have seen the drought come up from California for the last ten years, with the trees now dying at an alarming rate….not from beetles or other critters/pathogens but from lack of deep water in the aquafers, rivers, lakes and streams due to NO RAINFALL OR SNOW PACK of significance. What was once a six foot deep snow winter is now a light snow twice in a three month season that may not stick at all, and if it does, stays overnight, then melts off. The 100 year old trees are shedding needles and branches all the way up.If you are going to tell me there is no such thing as climate change and I’m frigging living in it, looking at it, and just spent TWO MONTHS in summer with doors and windows shut, three air purifiers going 24/7, what other lies would you care to spout before I remove myself from a subscription that begins with ‘the king has a new set of clothes’? Believe you or my own eyes? Do you write at the behest of a fossil fuel corporation of just own a hedge fund?You may be certifiable to anyone living in Oregon.
“Climate Change is absolutely based on nothing. I tell people all they have to do is stick their heads outside and look around and see that nothing is changing.” Seriously? I’m new here, but I’ve lived in southern Oregon in the forest for over thirty years and have seen the drought come up from California for the last ten years, with the trees now dying at an alarming rate….not from beetles or other critters/pathogens but from lack of deep water in the aquafers, rivers, lakes and streams due to NO RAINFALL OR SNOW PACK of significance. What was once a six foot deep snow winter is now a light snow twice in a three month season that may not stick at all, and if it does, stays overnight, then melts off.The 100 year old trees are shedding needles and branches all the way up.
If you are going to tell me there is no such thing as climate change and I’m frigging living in it, looking at it, and just spent TWO MONTHS in summer with doors and windows shut, three air purifiers going 24/7, what other lies would you care to spout before I remove myself from a subscription that begins with ‘the king has a new set of clothes’? Believe you or my own eyes? Do you write at the behest of a fossil fuel corporation of just own a hedge fund?
I understand where she is coming from. I spent my first 59 years in Montana. Our wedding day in 2001 had a smoke-filled Bozeman the day before and the day after, but on that day, things were miraculously clear. From a distance, forest fires seem immense and devastating, and sometimes they are so. It seems as though the world is going to hell. But we have walked through burned areas and are usually surprised at how little acreage it took to create what looked like a massive inferno. Burning trees make a lot of smoke.
Unfortunately I cannot find photos of the event, but in August of 2000 I attended a Willie Nelson concert in Red Lodge Montana. As he performed, a motorcycle rider skidded and created sparks that set off what was called the “Willie Fire.” The forest was very dry, and when the forests are that dry, we have fires. I’ll never forget watching Willie perform as what looked like an atomic bomb erupted behind him. He calmly told the audience that anyone living west of Red Lodge would probably not be able to return home that night.
Fire fighters will attempt to fight such fires when structures are threatened, and indeed, the Willie fire did so, and crews of hot shots and thousands of gallons of retardant were brought in to contain it. But generally speaking, when there is no threat to humans or structures, fires are monitored but neither money nor lives are invested in fighting them. They are a natural occurrence. It is humans moving into the forest interface that makes the problem seem so immense and threatening.
My family and I were camping at Island Lake, 9,800 feet in elevation, a few miles east of Yellowstone National Park in 1988 when fires broke out. It was a time bomb waiting to go off, moisture levels so low that any lighting strike would set off an inferno. And it did. As we drove home from Island, we were engulfed in smoke. I felt threatened, and also felt a sense of loss. In the end, as seen in the map below, over two million acres would burn.
Most of the burnt acreage was lodgepole pine. These trees have an unusual feature. Their pine cone seeds are encased in resin, and usually do not germinate. However, during a fire, the resin melts, and the seeds are disbursed. Consequently, seeds quickly took root, and within a few years, the park was covered in seedlings. Today that part of the park known as the “caldera” is lush and green again. Other parts of the park, where andesite soil supported other species of trees such as Douglas and subalpine fir, along with white bark pine, are slower to regenerate. In fact, in some areas the soil was sterilized by heat, and what was once forested is now meadows. Nature is resilient.
No amount of fire fighting could even lessen the impact of the 1988 YNP fires. All of the heroics shown in photographs were to preserve structures. The fires would not be extinguished until October, and it was nature, not humans that put them out. It rained and snowed.
It seems as though lodgepole forests grow and burn regularly. Nonetheless, from a human standpoint forest fires are devastating. Our favorite areas are torched, and we feel loss, as the life of the forest spans decades and centuries, while our lives are much shorter. So I understand Ms. Laughery’s sense of pain and loss. Nonetheless, I showed her a precipitation graph of Oregon, 1918-2018, taken from NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as follows (credit to Bob Tisdale, Extremes and Averages in Contiguous U.S. Climate, 2018):
The black line drawn through the green one is a moving average. The green line is the highest monthly precipitation each month. The far left is 1918, the far right in 2018, or one hundred years of precipitation history. Each vertical line is ten years. All of the jumping up and down is called “climate variability.” Note how the worst years for rainfall in Oregon were the 1930s, while the 1970s, 80s and 90s saw some very dry years. What is happening in Oregon this year is not unusual. That does not make it easy to bear. But here is an optimistic note: Over the 100 years, precipitation has been increasing at the rate of .14 inches/decade. That is why the black line ever so slightly inclines up.
I have graphs like this for every state in the lower 48, and they all tell the same story – a very slight temperature increase over time, increased precipitation, and slightly fewer droughts. And for every state, the 1930s were the worst, and no one knows why. (Climate Change alarmists are working to change that history, altering records to make it appear that our current era are the warmest years. Not so. They lie, they lie, they lie.)
Below is a graph showing tendencies in the acreage burned since 1900 or so, given us by Gregory Wrightstone in his book Inconvenient Facts:
You can see while temperature has been slightly increasing the past 100 years,the acreage burned has decreased dramatically, including the 1980s when my beloved Yellowstone burned. This is a worldwide trend.
Here we see the number of forest fires, which dropped off dramatically in the 1980s and have stayed down. The blue line is atmospheric CO2, showing no correlation whatsoever.. This should (but won’t) put to rest the carping about CO2 being a problem. It is not. It has a slight warming effect that decreases exponentially, that is, 100ppm will cause a slight warming effect, and 200ppm less so, and so on. CO2 has been demonized by the Climate Change/Global Warming crowd, but they have a different agenda having nothing to do with climate, and everything to do with command and control and population.
By the way, just as a passing thought, I notice that many people do not know how to read graphs. What, I ask, are the schools doing with all that time in captivity? Oh, I know, they are teaching Climate Change/Global Warming as fact, not fiction. Schools are part of the lying machine.
PS:This is a photo of Cooke City, Montana, four miles outside Yellowstone. It was taken in 1988 as the Park burned. Fire fighters set a back fire to protect the town from destruction, but the wind shifted, and the fire headed directly for the town. There was a heroic and successful effort to save the place. The fire burned north and around it, as seen in this photo. But to this day many residents think that the fire was a deliberate effort by Park Service to destroy the town. It most surely was not.
Piece of Mindful 
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs40641-018-0098-x I neither support, nor reject the cited document and/or its supporting documents.
Drought is real, especially in California and the Middle East/Mediterranean areas. Its causes have been debated forever. I understand people’s reaction to “reliable” sources, ie. “experts” when it comes to believing the framing, narrative and incessant push to relate extended drought to “climate change.” The “man-made” cause will never be disbelieved by the same people who fall for the usual propaganda on most everything that comes out of those screens, large and small. As long as screens are our source of information, the human mind will follow the bouncing ball, all the way to the end of the earth if those little dots of light and talking heads say it is so.
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The Tisdale book that I have also has, for each state, something called the Palmer Drought Index. I’ll put one such graph up here later today, for Montana. What they show, for the most part, is a slight tendency towards fewer and less severe droughts, nationwide. The climate alarmists simply make up their facts, including the paper you cite above. Their agenda has nothing to do with science and evidence, everything to do with mass changes in the way we live, and the number of us living. As Richard Lindzen said in a paper I linked to as a PS I to the Power of Propaganda piece below, if the people pushing the Climate Change agenda believed their own science, they would not be buying mansions on the coast, as did Obama and Al Gore. They lie, they lie, they lie.
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The ‘man-made’ part of climate change (no longer called ‘global warming’) is most likely caused by intentional geo-engineering perpetrated by the same aristocracy that brings so much love and happiness to our lives. CO2 is good for the planet’s plant life and plants are good to us, and for us. Keep inhaling and exhaling, it’s what we’re supposed to do and it’s good for the planet.
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Below is the Palmer Drought Severity Index from 1918 to 2018 for Montana. The downward trend indicates a slight increase in drought conditions. Most other states show a slight upward trend.
Tisdale downloaded the data from the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). Here is their description: The Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) uses readily available temperature and precipitation data to estimate relative dryness. It is a standardized index that spans -10 (dry) to +10 (wet), It has been reasonably successful in quantifying long-term drought.”
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Montana precipitation 1918-2018:
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Montana temperatures 1918-2018:
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The top line is daytime high temperatures during that period, basically a flat line these past 100 years. The bottom line is nighttime temperatures, a slight uptick thought to be caused by location of weather measurement stations, on airport tarmacs, etc. If nighttime temperatures are going up because of global warming, so too should daytime temperatures, but it is not happening. The whole of Climate Change is a big lie, and an absurdity.
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Hoisted from the comments at NakedCapitalism. I’m not sure if it’s satire or in dead earnest…
“I am working from home with COVID-19 today. I picked up my eighth infection in the office on Friday. I have had five infections before being fully vaccinated in May and three infections since being vaccinated.
It is my opinion that the basic ensemble of personal protective equipment for a worker in an office building with a central HVAC (air conditioning) system is a particulate respirator, N95 or half-face cartridge respirator. Add to that chemical splash goggles for entering the restroom. The HVAC system effectively distributes Delta throughout the building. The highest concentration of Delta is in the restroom where those with COVID-19 diarrhea release virus into the air.
I had been feeling healthy over the past three weeks since I had started wearing my respirator full time in the office and putting on my goggles for the restroom. What happened? I forgot to wear my goggles once on Friday afternoon. Sure enough, over the weekend I had signs of infection.
I notified my employer. I took a nose swab. I am sure that it will come back negative. I will feel better tomorrow, though I have been suffering from post-acute COVID19 since the pandemic started.
We can learn to live with the virus. But officer workers need to be wearing respirators and goggles.”
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I’ll go way out on a limb here and suggest satire.
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I don’t know. Some people love to wallow in misery, and Covid is the best thing that ever happened to them. My sympathy goes out to this idiot’s co-workers.
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I just picture the guy donning his goggles in trepidation every time he approaches the restroom…! Really cracked me up when I read it yesterday. That totally deadpan, earnest delivery with all its absurdity of multiple infections, “COVID-19 diarrhea,” etc.
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The commenter you quoted is either an idiot or a spook.
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Possibly. I simply viewed her as someone frightened out of her wits, overwhelmed by connecting the dots, seeing the horrors of Climate Change on TV and seeing wild variability this year, thinking one is causing the other. “We’re all gonna die!!!”
They’ve arrested a second arsonist in the California fires, this one an academic like the first.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/09/27/second-californian-academic-arrested-accused-of-starting-wild-fires/
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I was referring to Tim’s quote, not your original post, Mark.
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Gotcha.
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Here’s a recent cartoon I drew on the topic at hand. Not sure if it’s very clear (let alone funny!) but thought I’d share:
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Very nice, like your style. And cartoons are one of the most powerful methods to convey a good message, certainly more than Tartarian Walls of Chinese jargon like your friend (she’s consulting Burbank, CA as we speak to answer a few simple questions). Same holds for Scott, his pathetic trolling of me is irrelevant in recognition of the delivery method as powerful and valuable.
Do you have a site or page where you show your cartoons? I like to see them and I am quite sure more do!
PS: is it me or is the white-black-red color scheme so well chosen because it gives a nazi vibe, even in a Native American setting? And in the whole drawing till now avoiding green, detaching that color from the pseudenvironmentalists, well done.
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https://montanafreepress.org/2021/09/28/how-wildfire-burn-scars-threaten-the-wests-drinking-water/?utm_medium=email&mc_cid=a5908793c4&mc_eid=ff51821ce4
Here’s a stupid, young reporter hyping the (party line) threat to municipal water supply. This is more propaganda used to manipulate minds into believing post-fire (‘salvage’) clearcutting and roadbuilding will prevent normal post-fire events from impacting surface waters 2 to 3 years after the fire. Natural, stochastic events cause disturbance, which nature begins to heal immediately. Removing all the trees (live and dead) is not part of nature’s plan. Fish have persisted among these random events and changing conditions for millennia. Why can’t people seem to accept nature’s system? Man always seems to have a ‘better’ idea, believing nature is flawed. Does that make fish smarter than man?
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Well said and something which is an ongoing problem for decades already. For you, one generation my senior, it must be even more astounding.
Related to this and even more fundamental is people’s complete inability to navigate, orient themselves, without the biggest cancer of society; the smarkphone.
The general degeneration is incredible.
State of Fear is the only book one needs to read to nail not only the past and crescent climaturgency, but especially the future.
I read it in about 6 hours from Newark to Amsterdam. On 9/11. 5 years later. And unaware of it, everyone was staring at me on the airport.
I apparently had chosen my Ground Zero – New World Order hardstyle T-shirt for the day. Normally I would do such a thing for fun deliberately, but now I let Gaia lead me. That must have lead me to the bookshop, a place I sometimes visited but rarely bought something.
as a nice bridge of what I alluded to in the MIPS thread #10 by sister Stephers, another Gaia Guidestone/Gift was of course Molly always. But now, knowing what she is, she is even more special.
note the synchronicities:
1 – I named her Molly because she looked like the Molly also small half border collie of my friend with whom I organized what appeared to be the Rollocoaster Ride
2 – already on the streets of Villa de Leyva I saw her magic, but how she turned out afterwards could not have met my wildest dreams
3 – my last new country (60) I visited was Hungary, back in 2017
4 – I went there to the only F1 race I have been and in the 32 deg C summer sun I drank a tad too much of the beer I still drank back then. Molly’s night was only the next time I was drunk (not ugly drunk or wasted, just pretty influenced),
5 – the race almost got wiped out with the “””Second””” World War (we are in the First one now), just like the thread my jewish grandpa was for me.
6 – the confederation of Hungarian Colombians founded last year (11-11-2020, nicely chosen!) in….. Villa de Leyva
to hear about her amazing intelligence and our adventures together, enjoy her Mollycasts and Molly Medleys @ your favorite podcast platform ; we are aLOUD.
we are very MUCH aLOUD.
FUCK you niggajews.
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