Death, The Environment And Salience

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sun Dec 16, 2007 at 10:51

The civilized world has abolished the death penalty.  The United States, which once had the most humane criminal justice system in the world, now has one of the most barbaric.  We are second only to China and, well, we now are Iraq, I'm sorry, I haven't kept up with these things like I should have.  No executions are present because we're under a temporary moratorium, but death rows continue growing, so it's hard to know just which metrics make sense to apply, but suffice it to say, we're not civilized, and we're proud!

There's just two things:  (1) The death penalty doesn't deter murder. (2) Murder is not nearly the threat to human life that environmental destruction is.  Conservatives have done an incredibly effective job of steamrolling over these basic facts, and that job of steamrolling is the real subject of this brief diary.

California Wildfires Again

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sat Nov 24, 2007 at 17:43

The image below combines a satelite photo of the fires from last month with Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother."  She was a refuge from the most famous megadrought of the last century.  But there's been much worse centuries ago, and there's much worse to come, according to scientists I spoke with.

Story begins on the flip...

No, Global Warming Doesn't Exist

by: Paul Rosenberg

Wed Oct 24, 2007 at 03:56

And over the Pacific:

This is not really news:

Posted 11/12/2003 8:17 AM

Global warming could worsen California wildfires

LAKE ARROWHEAD, Calif. (AP) - Drought- and beetle-ravaged trees in this mountain community stick up like matchsticks in the San Bernardino National Forest, bypassed by the fires still smoldering, but left like kindling for the next big blaze.

Welcome to the future.

Fires that charred nearly three-quarters of a million acres could presage increasingly severe fire danger as global warming weakens more forests through disease and drought, experts warn.

"You're really going to increase the chances of and prevalence of fire," said Susan Ustin, a professor of environmental and resource science at the University of California, Davis.

Warmer, windier weather and longer, drier summers would mean higher firefighting costs and greater loss of lives and property, according to researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the U.S. Forest Service.

Both the number of out-of-control fires and the acreage burned are likely to increase - more than doubling losses in some regions, they say in a study set for publication in the scientific journal Climatic Change.

While the study examined Northern California, "the concern for Southern California would be much higher," because that region is drier for longer periods, said researcher Evan Mills of the Lawrence Berkeley lab.

Windier weather could bring to Northern California a variation of the desert Santa Ana winds that whipped the Southern California blazes into firestorms, said co-author Margaret Torn, also a Lawrence Berkeley researcher.

The researchers project at least a 50% increase in out-of-control fires in the south San Francisco Bay area and a 125% increase in the Sierra Nevada foothills, with a more than 40% increase in the area burned. The state's northern coast saw no significant change under the computer model and conditions used in the study.

2003.  News travels fast.