Climate Change

Fires in the west are changing

While fires in the west once were “wide but shallow bands of flames advancing slowly,” they are now changing to “a once rare and dangerous phenomenon known as plume-driven fire, in which a fire’s own convective column of rising heat becomes hot enough and big enough to redirect wind and weather in ways that can make the fire burn much hotter and, with little warning, spread fast enough to trap people as they flee.”

2018 vs. 2020 fire season. A story in the November 2020 issue of Wired reported that the 2018 fire season burned 1.6 million acres in California, but the first four weeks of the 2020 fire season burned an estimated 3 million acres. Causes are varied, from the well-known policy to put out every forest fire as quickly as possible, interfering with natural processes that cleared out undergrowth and prevented large fires, to the phenomena of a plume fire, where the simultaneous burning of many small fires begin to join into a single, giant plume.

Understanding plume fires. “As the hot air in that plume rises, something has to replace the air at its base—more air, that is, sucked in from all directions. This can create a 360-degree field of wind howling directly into the blaze with the same effect as vents on a forge, oxygenating the fire and pushing temperatures high enough to flip even heavy fuels (giant construction timbers, mature trees) into full-blown flaming combustion. Those heavy fuels then pump still more heat into the convective column, creating a feedback loop: The column rises ever faster and sucks in more wind, as if the fire has found a way to stoke itself … A classic surface-driven wildfire ignites only the immediate area crossed by the fire’s own shallow flame front; falling firebrands, by contrast, allow plume-driven fires to propagate miles from the core burn, as if launching incendiary bombs to ignite entirely new mass fires.”

Climate change and wildfires. The Wired story reported that “the final elephant in the room, of course, is climate change—and the likelihood that it is already pushing even our current nightmares toward holocausts beyond imagining. Current climate-change patterns suggest we are headed for ever-less winter snowfall in the West, with hotter summers, ever-worsening droughts, and ever-more acute spells of extreme fire weather—long periods of dry heat that bake moisture out of grass and trees, combined with winds ferocious enough to whip even a small spark into a conflagration.”

What are the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? Did Covid set them back?

It hasn't been discussed much in the United States, but in 2015, the United Nations General Assembly created the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development that included 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) and their 169 targets, “which measure indicators on gender equality, education, food insecurity, poverty, health, climate action, and more.” A story in devex on September 18, 2020, asked if those goals are being achieved, did the pandemic set them back, and does it really matter? Even before the pandemic “not a single country was on track to complete the SDGs within the decade, given rising rates of inequality, food insecurity, and climate change.” The story reported that the global decline in economic activity and the reduction in data collection to measure the indicators have set back progress.

Political Division

Indicators of a divided country go back 50 years

In 1967, unprecedented damage from urban uprisings had demanded immediate action according to a March 18, 2021, article in the Washington Post. A 1968 report produced by a special National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, observed that the United States was moving toward “two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal,” and offered policy options to manage the “problems of race relations.” The remedies aimed to achieve “freedom for every citizen to live and work according to his capacities and desires, not his color.” The Post says the report recommended:

• Creation of 2 million jobs for low-income Americans.
• Continued federal intervention to ensure school desegregation.
• Year-round schooling for low-income youths.
• Construction of hundreds of thousands of public housing units.
• A guaranteed minimum income.

Ultimately, federal policymakers did not follow that path and did not even address the basic police reforms the report outlined. Instead, “policymakers escalated the use of aggressive patrol strategies from the War on Crime that Johnson launched in 1965, eventually fostering the mass criminalization of low-income Americans of color.”

Divided politics divide families, too

We remember from history class how we were told that brothers fought against brothers in the Civil War – something that seemed hard to believe. No matter your point of view, a March 12, 2021, Washington Post story illustrates how the political divisions and social media fueled disinformation can even tear families apart, making sense of the Civil War reports. In the story, an adult daughter compiles data to “stop dangerous political fantasies and extremism from metastasizing within their family.” Her mother “no longer trusted mainstream media to tell the truth, nor the country’s democratic institutions” and was certain the 2020 election had been stolen from President Trump. The daughter collected a spreadsheet of all the court cases validating the election, the reason for the decision and the political affiliations of the judges who made the rulings. The mother responded by suggesting the daughter watch a video by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. The daughter wants her mother back and is now “terrified of her.” This is a worthwhile read as an insight as to how our political divisions are ripping into families as well as communities.