In case y`all were curious. I can't go outside without coughing on the smoke, and I live, like, 75 miles away from the closest fire. Although from the map you can see that distance doesn't really much matter too much in the way of wandering smoke clouds.

They say it will likely be the worst fire we've had, and at least 20 have died and 100 hospitalized, with over 2000 structures destroyed.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2017_Northern_California_wildfires

sad!

stay safe, rev, despite the tongue in cheek comment i am actually concerned. same goes for the rest of all the cali-ians

Thanks, Zloc. Although, I am nowhere near the fire(s), actually. It's just super smokey.

It's really only the rural or semi-rural homes that are at risk for this kind of thing. Any property with brush everywhere, which is pretty much what CA looked like everywhere before it was developed.

Somebody told me that a lot of these fires were started because winds were incredibly strong (75 mph), which blew over power lines.

Yeah, everyone is coughing here at work. One of the guys is wearing a filtration mask and sounds like Bane

Stay safe, Jones and Thrawn!

Actually, the air is way clearer in San Jose than it was yesterday, when the sky looked like Mordor.

Thanks guys! I took some smokepix(tm)

Holy **** I looked through some maps and that area is a wind factory, no wonder things are so ****ed.

Ugh, good luck. We had our big fires a couple of months ago. Fortunately, it was mostly just wilderness that burned and no lives were lost and few structures destroyed (AKAIK). We didn't see the sun for a week or two and everything was completely covered in fine ash. Keep your windows closed and your windshield washer fluid topped off.

What's the update on this? You guys still lighting it up out there?

Smoke's mostly gone in San Jose.

Well that's good.

I didn't know they named fires like that.

i,m tubbs

Apparently British Columbia is on fire. How do I know? Because winds in the Pacific Ocean have blown its smoke all over the Bay Area.

Thanks, Canada!

You sent us your smoke, we had to send it back

The AQI in the Bay Area is hitting 200 ("very unhealthy") from the Camp Fire in Butte County. Many schools and universities will close tomorrow, and the air quality isn't forecast to improve until Wednesday next week.

90% of the town of Paradise has been destroyed, but here is a video of a guy driving out of it.



At least 63 people have died (with over a hundred unaccounted for), making it deadliest fire in California to date.

And, of course, Donald Trump blamed the state government of California for the fire.

Obviously stay safe, but it you can, try to rake the forest a little bit.

Well thankfully I don't live anywhere close to the actual fire. But I'm trying not to breath the air too much until it rains.

I don't know whether to laugh, be flattered, or embarrassed by the attention.

Anyway, thanks guys, but I honestly don't think it's going to work. You're not going to cure willful ignorance by putting out better newspaper articles (sadly).

If people stop buying oil, demand for USD will crater.

Time to invade Bolivia, then.

I really don't like when people try to blame individual events on climate change. It's too easy to poke holes in that. Big events happen, and they happen regardless of climate change. I scuba dive. There are a lot of reefs out there that are in bad shape, but there are still a good number that are doing ok, for various values of ok. You can't look at a bleeched reef and say, "Oh, must be climate change," because bleaching events happen. The problem isn't that reefs are getting bleached, it's that instead of being bleached, every fifty or a hundred years, it's now fifteen, or ten or five. Reefs grow back, but if you keep hitting them over an over, eventually erosion will happen faster than new coral can get put down.

Climate change isn't one drought, or one hurricane, or one warm winter. It's the average moving higher. Weather has a lot of natural variance, and ecosystems have been around long enough that they've adapted to being able to bounce back from extreme weather. But if you stress them continually for decades, they'll eventually die. And that's a lot more worrisome than any individual inconvenience we might suffer from an extreme weather event.

You're not wrong, but also--how do you condense that explanation into a sentence, or a picture, that's compelling enough to people to build the political will for radical action?

Headlines like that are definitely reductive, but I'm not sure if there's a good alternative.

man i hate it when i agree with obikwiet

Not wrong but also not entirely right. There are also positive feedback loops waiting in the wings there. Those would be single events you can attribute to climate change that would have immediate consequences.

Hey now, let's not get into Republican bashing.

I mean, Brutus was totally in the right to kill Ceasar. He did what was necessary for the Republic. And the populares have some good arguments.

That's a ridiculously dumb tweet.