American Wildfires

hanimmal

hanimmal

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https://apnews.com/article/business-science-fires-environment-and-nature-trees-0a6cbe1f39380531fc367b033481f261Screen Shot 2021-07-11 at 10.35.48 AM.png
TACOMA, Wash. (AP) — A federal jury has convicted a timber thief who authorities said started a large forest fire in Washington state, a case that prosecutors said marked the first time tree DNA had been introduced in a federal trial.

The jury deliberated for about seven hours before convicting Justin Andrew Wilke, 39, on Thursday of conspiracy, theft of public property, depredation of public property, and trafficking and attempted trafficking in unlawfully harvested timber, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Western Washington said in a news release.

The wood he sold to a mill in the city of Tumwater had been harvested from private property with a valid permit, Wilke said. But a research geneticist for the U.S. Forest Service, Richard Cronn, testified that the wood he sold genetically matched the remains of three poached trees.

Wilke used gasoline to destroy a wasp’s nest in the base of a maple tree he was stealing, prosecutors said, though jurors did not convict him of charges related to the fire. Some witnesses testified that, although Wilke was standing next to the nest when the fire began, they did not actually see his actions in the dark.

Wilke and others conducted an illegal logging operation in the Elk Lake area of the Olympic National Forest, near Hood Canal, between April and August 2018, according to records filed in the case. He poached maple trees prized as wood for musical instruments and brought them to lumber mills.

In July 2018, a man who had just been released from prison, Shawn Williams, joined the conspiracy; he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to more than two years in prison.

In August 2018, the group decided to cut the maple tree that had the wasp’s nest near the base, prosecutors said. The poachers sprayed insecticide and gasoline and then lit the nest on fire — starting a 5.2-square-mile (13.4-square-kilometer) wildfire that came to be dubbed the “Maple Fire,” according to authorities.

Firefighting efforts cost about $4.2 million.

Williams testified during the trial that it was Wilke who set the blaze, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.

“When people steal trees from our public lands, they are stealing a beautiful and irreplaceable resource from all of us and from future generations,” Acting U.S. Attorney Tessa Gorman said in a news release. “That theft, coupled with the sheer destruction of the forest fire that resulted from this activity, warrants federal criminal prosecution.”

Wilke faces up to 10 years in prison when he is sentenced in October.
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xtsho

xtsho

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"The wildfire grew to around 148,000 acres by Sunday afternoon after dangerous conditions Saturday prompted firefighters to pull back and move to safety zones. Crews were back on the fire lines Sunday."

www.oregonlive.com

Arrests threatened if people don’t evacuate as southern Oregon’s Bootleg fire explodes

The Klamath County Sheriff's Office is issuing citations and warning of arrests for people who fail to evacuate as the Bootleg fire razes through Southern Oregon.
www.oregonlive.com www.oregonlive.com
 
xtsho

xtsho

Well-Known Member
I don't know how the hell they're going to put out all these fires burning in states across the west. It's so early in the season and we won't be getting any significant rain for months. If we do get any there will be thunderstorms in parts of the state and more fires will likely be started by lightning.

They need to mobilize the National Guard, send in troops, whatever it takes to get these fires under control. They're going to keep growing and more are going to pop up. We have the third largest military in the world with almost 1.5 million personnel. Get them off the bases and use them. Maybe there's something I'm missing here. We can send hundreds of thousands of troops across the world. Why can't we send them to fight fires? The damn fires are killing more people and destroying more property than any terrorists we're chasing.

 
doublejj

doublejj

Well-Known Member
xtsho said:
I don't know how the hell they're going to put out all these fires burning in states across the west. It's so early in the season and we won't be getting any significant rain for months. If we do get any there will be thunderstorms in parts of the state and more fires will likely be started by lightning.

They need to mobilize the National Guard, send in troops, whatever it takes to get these fires under control. They're going to keep growing and more are going to pop up. We have the third largest military in the world with almost 1.5 million personnel. Get them off the bases and use them. Maybe there's something I'm missing here. We can send hundreds of thousands of troops across the world. Why can't we send them to fight fires? The damn fires are killing more people and destroying more property than any terrorists we're chasing.

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no South Dakota is sending their National Guard to the border to fight the Mexicans....smh
 
hanimmal

hanimmal

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/07/16/true-cost-of-american-food-system/Screen Shot 2021-07-16 at 10.50.42 AM.png
The true cost of food is even higher than you think, a new report out Thursday says.

The U.S. spends $1.1 trillion a year on food. But when the impacts of the food system on different parts of our society — including rising health care costs, climate change and biodiversity loss — are factored in, the bill is around three times that, according to a report by the Rockefeller Foundation, a private charity that funds medical and agricultural research.

Using government statistics, scientific literature and insights from experts across the food system, the researchers quantified things like the share of direct medical costs attributable to diet and food, as well as the productivity loss associated with those health problems. They also looked at how crop cultivation and ranching, and other aspects of U.S. food production impacted the environment. Focusing on the production, processing, distribution, retail and consumption stages of the food system (not including food service), they evaluated what it would cost to restore people’s health, wealth or environment back to an undamaged state, as well as the cost of preventing a recurrence of the problems.

“Realizing a better food system requires facing hard facts. We must accurately calculate the full cost we pay for food today to successfully shape economic and regulatory incentives tomorrow,” asserts the introduction to the report, written by the foundation’s food research group.

Health impacts are the biggest hidden cost of the food system, with more than $1 trillion per year in health-related costs paid by Americans, with an estimated $604 billion of that attributable to diseases — such as hypertension, cancer and diabetes — linked to diet.

In calculating the financial burden of environmental problems, the researchers evaluated direct environmental impacts of farming and ranching on greenhouse gas emissions, water depletion and soil erosion. They also looked at reduced biodiversity, which lowers ecosystems’ productivity and makes food supplies more vulnerable to pests and disease.

They determined the unaccounted costs of the food system on the environment and biodiversity add up to almost $900 billion per year.

The report examines 14 metrics — health, environment, biodiversity, livelihoods and more — to quantify what it calls the true cost of food, reflecting additional, externalized costs, incurred within the food system not covered by the price of food. These externalized costs are being incurred by the public sector, businesses and producers, consumers and future generations, the report argues. Across many of the areas, communities of color bear a disproportionate burden.

The report found that rates of diagnosed diabetes are 1.7 times higher in Latinx Americans and 1.5 times higher in Black Americans than in White Americans. And it found air pollution exposure is 41 percent higher for Black Americans than White Americans.

“This report is a wake-up call. The U.S. food system as it stands is adversely affecting our environment, our health and our society,” said Rajiv Shah, president of The Rockefeller Foundation. “To fix a problem, we need to first understand its extent. The data in this report reveals not only the negative impacts of the American food system but also what steps we can take to make it more equitable, resilient and nourishing.”

Advocacy groups hailed the Rockefeller report. Paula Daniels, board chair of social enterprise at the Center for Good Food Purchasing said the report pulls back the veil on the hidden costs of food.

“If an organic apple is 99 cents and a sugary beverage is also 99 cents, there are layers of subsidies in that sugary beverage. We need to examine not only what we’re paying, but what that price reflects, the subsidized cost and the external costs — diabetes, obesity; you can monetize the health impacts,” she said.

Dariush Mozaffarian, dean of Tufts University Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, who was an adviser on the new report, said that the pandemic, coupled with Black Lives Matters and the reawakening around racial justice, has been a “Sept. 11 moment around food.”

“We’re at a tipping point. People widely recognize that the food system is broken,” Mozaffarian said, adding that most current public policies around food and agriculture are based on the 1969 White House Conference on Food, Nutrition and Health. Yet, 52 years later much of it doesn’t make sense.

“The priority in the 1950s was to get calories into the world, because the world population had quadrupled. At the same time, the best nutrition information we had was about vitamins. Vitamin deficiencies have largely disappeared; we were successful. But we didn’t anticipate the explosion of obesity,” he said.

According to the report, if U.S. rates of diet-related diseases were reduced to similar rates in countries like Canada, health care costs could be reduced by $250 billion per year.

This would require the food industry to focus on creating healthier foods and adhering to more rigorous regulations for the marketing of unhealthy foods, said Roy Steiner, senior vice president for the food initiative at the Rockefeller Foundation, which funds an array of initiatives and nonprofits.

“We created the food system with a particular objective — low-cost and abundant calories — and we didn’t understand what that impact was going to be,” said Steiner, one of the authors of the report.

Separately, the report also suggests that if the U.S. could reduce agricultural greenhouse gas emissions to keep the global temperature increase below 1.5°C of preindustrial levels, then some $100 billion could be saved in additional environmental costs.

Melissa Ho, a senior vice president at the World Wildlife Fund and also an adviser on the report, said that while people are increasingly aware of the connection between diet and health, they have trouble understanding the connection between the food system and environmental damage. She would like to see more performance-based metrics and tools to assess things like how much carbon a farmer or rancher is returning to the soil.

“We must shift our farming practices and systems to be more regenerative and resilient. We can do this if we realign and shift our public policies and programs to support producers and drive this transition from the ground up,” she said.

Based on the way the system is set up right now, she added, it’s not easy or lucrative for farmers to transition to less harmful agriculture practices, such as not tilling or using cover crops that help build soil and prevent erosion.

“Covid exposed so much that was broken,” she said, “but building back better means supporting producers and connecting the dots to health, environment and business viability for farmers.”
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hanimmal

hanimmal

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https://apnews.com/article/science-fires-environment-and-nature-oregon-wildfires-3255d07c698462a9221c090f212ac98e
Screen Shot 2021-07-17 at 12.22.22 PM.png
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Smoke and heat from a massive wildfire in southeastern Oregon are creating giant “fire clouds” over the blaze — dangerous columns of smoke and ash that can reach up to 6 miles (10 kilometers) in the sky and are visible from more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) away.

Authorities have put these clouds at the top of the list of the extreme fire behavior they are seeing on the Bootleg Fire, the largest wildfire burning in the U.S. The inferno grew Friday to about 75 square miles (194 square kilometers) larger than the size of New York City and was raging through a part of the U.S. West that is enduring a historic drought.

The fire was so dangerous late Thursday and into Friday that authorities pulled out crews. Meteorologists this week also spotted a bigger, more extreme form of fire clouds — ones that can create their own weather, including “fire tornadoes.”

Extreme fire behavior, including the formation of more fire clouds, was expected to persist Friday and worsen into the weekend.

WHAT ARE ‘FIRE CLOUDS?’

Pyrocumulus clouds — literally translated as “fire clouds” — look like giant, dirty-colored thunderheads that sit atop a massive column of smoke coming up from a wildfire. Often the top of the smoke column flattens out to take the shape of an anvil.

In Oregon, fire authorities say the clouds are forming between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. each day as the sun penetrates the smoke layer and heats the ground below, creating an updraft of hot air. On this fire, crews are seeing the biggest and most dangerous clouds over a section of wilderness that’s made up mostly of dead trees, which burn instantly and with a lot of heat.

For four days in a row, the Bootleg Fire has generated multiple fire clouds that rise nearly 6 miles (10 kilometers) into the atmosphere and are “easily visible from 100 to 120 air miles away” (160 to 193 kilometers), authorities said Friday.

The conditions that create the clouds were expected to worsen over the weekend.

WHAT’S THE SCIENCE BEHIND THESE CLOUDS?

When air over the fire becomes super-heated, it rises in a large column. As the air with more moisture rises, it rushes up the smoke column into the atmosphere, and the moisture condenses into droplets. That’s what creates the “fire clouds” that look much like the thunderheads seen before a big thunderstorm.

These clouds, however, hold more than just water. Ash and particles from the fire also get swept into them, giving them a dark gray, ominous look.

IS THERE SOMETHING EVEN MORE DANGEROUS THAN A ‘FIRE CLOUD’?

Yes. When a pyrocumulus cloud forms over a fire, meteorologists begin to watch carefully for its big brother, the pyrocumulonimbus cloud.

NASA has called the latter the “fire-breathing dragon of clouds” because they are so hot and big that they create their own weather.

In a worst-case scenario, fire crews on the ground could see one of the monster clouds spawn a “fire tornado,” generate its own dry lightning and hail — but no rain — and create dangerous hot winds below. They can also send particulate matter from the smoke column up to 10 miles (16 kilometers) above Earth’s surface.

So far, most of the clouds on the Bootleg Fire have been the less-intense fire clouds, but the National Weather Service on Wednesday spotted a pyrocumulonimbus cloud forming on what it called “terrifying” satellite imagery.

“Please send positive thoughts and well wishes to the firefighters. ... It’s a tough time for them right now,” the weather service said in a tweet.

HOW DANGEROUS ARE THESE CLOUDS?

Both types of fire clouds pose serious risks for firefighters.

Multiple pyrocumulus clouds have been spotted for four consecutive days, and one of them on the southern flank of the fire partially collapsed Thursday, causing dangerous winds and embers to fall on crews.

That prompted the emergency evacuation of all firefighters and dirt-moving equipment from that part of the fire line. Authorities say there have been no reported injuries.

“We’re expecting those exact same conditions to develop today and even worsen into the weekend,” fire spokeswoman Holly Krake said Friday.

WHERE ELSE HAVE THESE CLOUDS FORMED?

These types of fire-induced clouds are becoming more common as climate change lengthens and intensifies the wildfire season across the U.S. West and in other places, including Australia.

Experts with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory said in a news release Friday that they are seeing a “record number” of these fire-induced clouds in North America this summer, including in Oregon, Montana and British Columbia.

For example, a wildfire in British Columbia last month that leveled an entire town also generated a pyrocumulonimbus cloud.

Blazes in California in 2020 and in the years before have created multiple pyrocumulus clouds, with the Creek Fire in the Fresno area generating a mighty pyrocumulonimbus cloud last fall.

Australia’s bush fire siege in January 2020 also produced pyrocumulonimbus clouds that threatened to produce a fire tornado.
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