American Wildfires

mooray said:

Surely you know the difference between linear and exponential?

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Of course, it doesn't mean that it wasn't bullshit then too. x'(1/2) is still a number raised to a exponent right?

mooray said:

Remember the ol' "start by saving one penny and doubling it everyday" thing? Linear being to add one penny everyday. I mentioned it more tongue in cheek, because it's already well known the human population has grown exponentially. Only when you really zoom in does it appear to be linear. I'm thinking beyond tomorrow and beyond the next ten years, fwiw. Just look at growth from 1800-1900 and from 1900-2000. If the increase in number of people are the same, or close to the same, then the growth is linear and I offer you my apologies.

I'm not talking about the exponential rate, btw, because I recognize that the exponential rate is slowing.

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I would argue it looks more asymptotic to me.

mooray said:

Well now hang on a second....republicans do that to black people all the time. Just because it's technically possible to grow up to be a rockstar from generations of families held back to poor jobs/education, doesn't mean it's at all probable. I know you understand this concept just fine.

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Yeah, but every year we are graduating about 4 million (believe from last time I checked, might not be right) kids from higher education every year.

And it is only getting better. I have a lot of faith in the kids that are raised by parents who don't hold onto the racism and sexism that our generations grew up with.

mooray said:

All we do is shift our pollution somewhere else to give the appearance of being better while not actually being better. For example our imports from china have been going up significantly for decades.

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What is pollution if not stuff that we are getting from something else?

I think we are just learning what we can do.

I think we need to become a lot more use every part of the buffalo as a society when it comes to everything we use, and that we should be replacing everything that we have taken as a species over time.

I really hope that one day scientists actually get to be in charge and not just get murdered by the rich white guys when they start losing their stupid wars.

As for China, yeah we used the shit out of them, and allowed them to destroy their resources and sell them to us for decades now. It stopped us from having to reinvest in new clean tech for so long as the old way of manufacturing has become obsolete in many ways. Now it is a perfect time to bring all that production ability back home as we move our economy back (I am really trying hard to not use the build back better tag line now, but it works).

mooray said:

I'm honestly kind of surprised you'd say something about finally being close to a nation that is 100% efficient, because....it's hilarious.

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I mean our population. Once we can get 100% of our kids out of childhood without the scars we have allowed our minority and female population to accumulate until the last couple decades, I think we will see some truly amazing things as a society.

Desalination plants are as big and cost as much as a nuclear power plant and require insane amounts of energy to perform the electrolysis necessary to make fresh water. Im pretty sure only the Saudis have brought this tech online on a massive scale.
Believe it or not, several of their desalination plants are surrounded by massive solar farms to mitigate energy input. lol.

smokinrav said:

Desalination plants are as big and cost as much as a nuclear power plant and require insane amounts of energy to perform the electrolysis necessary to make fresh water. Im pretty sure only the Saudis have brought this tech online on a massive scale.
Believe it or not, several of their desalination plants are surrounded by massive solar farms to mitigate energy input. lol.

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Canary Islands are almost entirely dependent on desalinization.

Problems of sustainability – the two sides of desalination
The Canary Islands Water Centre says further development of the island economy and desalination plants will be limited by carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) - given the commitment by Spain to the Kyoto protocol, which obliges Spain to reduce greenhouse gases.

hanimmal said:

I mean our population. Once we can get 100% of our kids out of childhood without the scars we have allowed our minority and female population to accumulate until the last couple decades, I think we will see some truly amazing things as a society.

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Until the last couple of decades? When did we stop traumatizing women and Black people through our systemic if not overt misogyny and racism?

If only the Saudis had signed Kyoto

From wiki

"Saudi Arabia is the largest producer of desalinated water in the world. In 2011 the volume of water supplied by the country's 27 desalination plants at 17 locations was 3.3 million m3/day (1.2 billion m3/year). 6 plants are located on the East Coast and 21 plants on the Red Sea Coast".

Thats 1320 olympic sized pools every day....10 years ago

hanimmal said:

Of course, it doesn't mean that it wasn't bullshit then too. x'(1/2) is still a number raised to a exponent right?

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Inverse square law, then?

hanimmal said:

I would argue it looks more asymptotic to me.

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Kissing cousins, we've met halfway.

hanimmal said:

Yeah, but every year we are graduating about 4 million (believe from last time I checked, might not be right) kids from higher education every year.

And it is only getting better. I have a lot of faith in the kids that are raised by parents who don't hold onto the racism and sexism that our generations grew up with.

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Strictly from a problem solving perspective, I also see that trend as a positive.

hanimmal said:

What is pollution if not stuff that we are getting from something else?

I think we are just learning what we can do.

I think we need to become a lot more use every part of the buffalo as a society when it comes to everything we use, and that we should be replacing everything that we have taken as a species over time.

I really hope that one day scientists actually get to be in charge and not just get murdered by the rich white guys when they start losing their stupid wars.

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(insert idiocrasy scientist boner pill segment here)

hanimmal said:

As for China, yeah we used the shit out of them, and allowed them to destroy their resources and sell them to us for decades now. It stopped us from having to reinvest in new clean tech for so long as the old way of manufacturing has become obsolete in many ways. Now it is a perfect time to bring all that production ability back home as we move our economy back (I am really trying hard to not use the build back better tag line now, but it works).

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I also want to see manufacturing return. It's a really complex topic easily worthy of its own thread, on how the labor/material/cost/profit economic cycle is broken and is exactly why people had to cheat(i.e. step outside of that cycle by looking to china) in order to make the numbers work. "Stopped us from reinvesting" is exactly where we fucked up, by circumventing($) instead of addressing($$$$). You're going to get cranky with me for trying to attach the following comment, but I really see a parallel here to our water situation, where working on the surface symptoms and not the underlying issue, causes the problem to grow and be much harder to deal with later.

hanimmal said:

I mean our population. Once we can get 100% of our kids out of childhood without the scars we have allowed our minority and female population to accumulate until the last couple decades, I think we will see some truly amazing things as a society.

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Ahhhh I gotcha. I thought you meant efficiency, as in, environmental efficiency....like the average person producing 30 pounds of trash per week, using 100 gallons of water per day, eating nearly 300 pounds of meat per year, stuff like that.

Don't forget that half the people out there are redneck idiots and will fight your improvements for no good reason at all. I'm not sure how far we can get when don't even care about the problems themselves, because they're secondary to simply pissing you off. To your credit, they *definitely* wouldn't be onboard with anything I want. Heck, I can't even get the hippies around here to appreciate a car that's more efficient than a tesla.

I burned up a tinder-dry tree across the street from my friend's house with a "Colorful Bird" firework on July 4th, 1986 in Las Vegas

There have been ideas floated about, like towing icebergs and one that would take Sacramento River water filled in an enormous bladder and towing it to So. Cal. The problem lies when Mt. Shasta and the Sierra don't get their average of high water content snow, like last year. Owens Lake was drained because of the lust for L.A. to expand as it did and that wasn't enough, so the California Aqueduct was created. We've also cheated Mexico out of it's share of the Colorado River. That huge river never reaches the sea, the trickle that's left going into the sand. Hard to imagine.

topcat said:

There have been ideas floated about, like towing icebergs and one that would take Sacramento River water filled in an enormous bladder and towing it to So. Cal. The problem lies when Mt. Shasta and the Sierra don't get their average of high water content snow, like last year. Owens Lake was drained because of the lust for L.A. to expand as it did and that wasn't enough, so the California Aqueduct was created. We've also cheated Mexico out of it's share of the Colorado River. That huge river never reaches the sea, the trickle that's left going into the sand. Hard to imagine.

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We’re so fucked. Was just out on Lake Oroville a week ago. It’s not as low yet as it got a couple years before the fire, but it’s gonna get even lower. Scary shit. Salmon fishing on the feather is gonna blow again, but I’m more worried about burning down again this summer and fall. Going to try my hardest to not go anywhere from here until it rains. I can’t get a home owners policy on the new house i’m building until it’s done and it won’t be done until this winter.

Good luck!

Water and oil are of the same beast. When there is an abundance of both and the true cost is not factored in then it is wasted. Check out Bermuda (no source of fresh water) and how they cope using the same techniques for the last 400 years. It’s amazing what a properly designed roof can do !

Bill Maher got this one right!


I've been complaining about the amount of water it takes to grow almonds for a couple decades.

And to think we wanted to build a couple of 40ft water tunnels to further feed these farms, subsidizing the expense of the project so that private entities could privatize the profits. That shit was straight up politician embezzlement/fraud/backdoor/kickback/theft/whatever. Now it's been downsized to I-don't-know-what, but it's ridiculous on any scale. I lived in the valley for a few decades and every other year we had to deal with water shortages, then somehow there's a huge surplus, but oh...that water is needed for businesses in the desert and you're a huge piece of shit if you want grass in your yard.

topcat said:

There have been ideas floated about, like towing icebergs and one that would take Sacramento River water filled in an enormous bladder and towing it to So. Cal. The problem lies when Mt. Shasta and the Sierra don't get their average of high water content snow, like last year. Owens Lake was drained because of the lust for L.A. to expand as it did and that wasn't enough, so the California Aqueduct was created. We've also cheated Mexico out of it's share of the Colorado River. That huge river never reaches the sea, the trickle that's left going into the sand. Hard to imagine.

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Some interests in California have been trying to build an aqueduct from the Columbia River through Oregon so they can waste even more water on golf courses and almonds. It takes close to 1900 gallons of water to produce just a pound of almonds and the majority are exported. We're not just exporting almonds we're exporting water as well because it's our water being used to grow them and only a few profit from the export. It's a terrible waste of water.

Crops that are grown and consumed in the US definitely need to be irrigated. But with the drought it makes no sense to be watering a crop destined for export that benefits so few. Same thing with golf courses. Let that damn grass go brown. It was a stupid idea to build hundreds of golf courses across the Southwest to begin with.

And 1800 gallons for one pound of beef.

This is a depressing thread. And it's looking like this year may be a repeat of last year only worse. I have my fingers crossed but without rain it's not looking good.

At least the power companies all have plans in place to cut the power to the lines if needed. It may be inconvenient for people but it's better than a 300,000 acre fire starting due to power lines.

We only got the smoke where I'm at but there are so many trees and if the wind were to kick up under extreme dry conditions a fire could easily spread from tree top to tree top and very easily and get out of control.

mooray said:

that water is needed for businesses in the desert and you're a huge piece of shit if you want grass in your yard.

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^^This, I can agree with.

It's better if people don't try living in a desert but they have to live somewhere. I don't want all those bitchy Californians to come to Oregon. So, deal with it California.

Oh, and

Oregon's hazelnuts are better than your water hungry almonds.

mooray said:

And 1800 gallons for one pound of beef.

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That is a bunch of water. But most of the beef is produced in states that are not suffering from extreme drought conditions. Many of the top beef producing states experience flooding every year. Almonds are grown in California and they have a serious water issue. Plus we consume most of the beef we raise here in the US where California almonds are mainly exported and account for 80% of the total world supply and a big part of California's agriculture industry so I don't take scaling down the almond industry lightly. The same with other nut crops that are so water intensive grown in areas suffering from drought.

They need to transition to less water intensive crops. The world will just have to do without almonds or start growing their own using their water. One thing is certain, they're going to run out of water to irrigate if things don't change weather wise and conservation wise. Some are wise and are already plowing under fields and orchards that they know they can't irrigate.

xtsho said:

This is a depressing thread. And it's looking like this year may be a repeat of last year only worse. I have my fingers crossed but without rain it's not looking good.

At least the power companies all have plans in place to cut the power to the lines if needed. It may be inconvenient for people but it's better than a 300,000 acre fire starting due to power lines.

We only got the smoke where I'm at but there are so many trees and if the wind were to kick up under extreme dry conditions a fire could easily spread from tree top to tree top and very easily and get out of control.

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Where I live in the Willamette Valley, 60 years out, is projected to have the same climate as Redding. Ever been to Redding? Brown hills, scrubby trees and dry land. All of our green forests will be gone.

Portland will be something like Lincoln California:

The typical summer in Lincoln, California is 14.2°F (7.9°C) warmer and 88.2% drier than summer in Portland.

All of Oregon's forests will burn and they eventually will shift to drier ecosystems. They have to. The climate is changing. There isn't going to be enough water to sustain the temperate rain forests of the Oregon coastal range or the drier forests inland.

California is fucked. Southern CA's climate will be more like Baja is today. Cactus and shit. Forget the almonds, that's crazy.

It's definitely not insignificant. The only states that have more cattle are Texas and Nebraska.