[FRIAM] acutely destructive fires in Utah/Grand Canyon

[Steve Smith]

DaveW -
:
> Hi Steve,
>
> I am living in beautiful Saint Paul MN: 90 degrees and 90% humidity. 
> No air conditioning in our house. Dogs retreated to under porch 
> digging nests in the cooler soil - I just swelter. Oh, the air is 
> polluted with tons of smoke—"very dangerous level"—from the half of 
> Canada that is being consumed with fire.
In St. Paul, don't you have a basement?  Nothing like ground-coupling to 
mitigate the wild swings of air temperature we are experiencing.... like 
the dogs under the porch know!   I've never lived with a basement but 
always wonderd why a HEPA or similar filter on a basement window and a 
fan drawing air up from the coolth of below wouldn't give some 
whole-house relief?
>
> My brother still lives in southern Utah, about midway between Bryce 
> and Zion. There was a huge fire just to the east of him (about 20 
> miles) burning east and north, then the two Grand Canyon fires. Has 
> had smoke issues a couple of days but nothing more.
To your next point, were many of your neighbors when you lived there, 
climate skeptics?  Are they thinking "jewish space lasers" now?
>
> I have never been a climate change skeptic, nor unwilling to 
> acknowledge the role played by humans.

I was once a mild skeptic myself... mostly in the vein of what you say 
later with: "any meaningful effect on forces that accumulated over 2-10 
centuries"... the climate science (not even called that yet of the 90s 
was sneaking up on the problem one metric at a time and were 
consistently finding "bad news" but I had a hard time ignoring the 
implied "hubris" of the more vocal climate activists (grown out of an 
environmental activism of the time which I was significantly aligned 
with in spirit if not detail).   It wasn't particularl alarmist quite 
yet... if anything the folks working on the proto-field were *under* 
reacting (as seen in hindsight today).

I was just remembering a short note you once shared suggesting "the one 
thing I feel a little guilty about is not taking Climate Change more 
seriously earlier"?  It might be a bad misquote and it really doesn't 
matter...   I think we *all* recognize that things have probably been 
worse than we realized for some time?  Or not.

> I have been a critic of the monolithic orthodoxy surrounding the 
> political and "scientific" posturing. But that is just my general 
> antipathy to simplistic science.

I think I know that about you and respect it and to some extent share 
it.  I am not as *allergic* to it as I once was and find many today.   
It is this hyper-immune response I'm trying to understand at the 
collective level (returning to the question of whether a mob of angry 
people is actually an angry mob in the same way as the people themselves 
are).

  My father's peers from the timber/ranching world were signicantly 
hyper-immune to anybody telling them anything whilst falling back on the 
idea that "public lands" belonged to the public (in their case, to them 
personally somehow) while ignoring that the spanish-descended settlers 
in the valley were there before their grandfathers came with repeating 
rifles and rousted these folks who only had hoes and shovels to defend 
themselves. They of course were mostly backfill taking over the 
semi-traditional hunting/foraging grounds of the Dine' (Apache) rounded 
up by the US Cavalry after the Civil War, who in fact hadn't really been 
there that many generations since *they* wandered in from the PNW and 
forced the more sedentary, less aggressive Mogollon (descendents) out.

Some of this is willfully ignorant greed and hubris... but as I knew 
these folks (through their kids), they were pretty sincere about 
everything they did (otherwise) and had I not seen it from the Freddy 
(Federal Government Representative) side at least part of the time I too 
might have armed myself to the teeth and played 
Waco/Ruby-Ridge/BundyRanch as they like to ( orat least pretend to be 
ready to do).    And given the current gutting (to the backbone) of many 
of the federal agencies under Trump for the benefit of at least the big 
corporations but also, at least superficially the folks I just 
referenced who voted for him 3 times and are ready to put him back in 
charge for another 30 years even if they have to wheel his stuffed 
carcass out on stage with an LLM-driven speaker in his face, I thnk we 
have an immune-response problem.   I'll grant that the insults delivered 
to the body politic that elicited the immune response were a problem, 
maybe even (now we know where it leads) unconsciounable, but it is the 
immune response that is killing us.

> Gaia is a *complex* system (person)
I'm a bit panconscious/animistic by temperament myself, whether i want 
to project onto the entire earth system anything acutely human-nature 
like or not.
> so when scientists treat her otherwise
I'd blame engineers and economists and politicians and specifically 
those with vested money/power/professional interests more than "real 
scientists" though most of the scientists I've worked with play engineer 
and vested capitalist (their grants and salary and even bonuses and 
other perks may well depend on pleasing the current powers-that-be) much 
of the time.   The folks with a non-linear perspective, with a 
complex-systems lens, and not too attached to getting rich and famous 
and selling their best ideas to the highest bidder and publishing the 
most papers, they don't do this so much.
> —as if she was a deterministic system—and make bold, and dire, 
> predictions, set absolute tipping points, etc., I just want to scream 
> liar liar. It is more complicated than that—as our former colleague at 
> FRIAM used to say.
I am more incensed by those who *take* those  predictions and tipping 
points and make them bold and dire and absolute to promote *their* 
agenda, than those who ?innocently? gave them that ammunition.
> Worse, are the "solutions."
The geo-engineers among us are the most offensive IMO... to carry the 
legacy of the folks who fouled the nest and then insisting that their 
new version of "fouling for profit" will "solve everything" is a good 
example.  Even though I've been a vehicle-efficiency nut since I bought 
my first motorcycle, rode my bicycle primarily during college, and owned 
(mostly) high efficiency vehicles of various stripes up to and including 
trying to electrify a couple of vehicles (by thinking hard about it 
which as it turns out never gets anything done), I am pretty sure it is 
the car-culture I was raised up in (and embrace to this day) that is a 
big component of our pollution/energy-consumption/personal 
dis-connection, thoughtless hyperconsumption problems.    Electrons vs 
Petrol vs Diesel and 100mpg vs 10mpg are likely just deck-chairs on the 
Titanic.
> There is no way to know if reducing carbon will, in fact, have the 
> effect expected, let alone, solve the problem
Au contraire... only a little look into the facts will make it pretty 
clear that the "nutrient cycling" of sequestered carbon from millenia 
ago into our atmosphere at mega-industrial rates, as primarily CO2 and 
CH4 is a YUUUGE greenhouse driver.   I agree that backing off now on 
driving the flywheel might seem pretty hopeless, but "put the pedal to 
the metal" and "drill baby drill" is not just wrong but acutely 
wrong-headed unless of course apocalypse is our goal?  End times? 
Rapture anyone?  I prefer Gibson's "Jackpot"
> . And why does anyone think that human actions over a span of one or 
> two decades will have any meaningful effect on forces that accumulated 
> over 2-10 centuries?
If I thought the worst of our environmental/species-collapse was 
triggered *more* by the deforestation of Europe that was *already* a 
problem in 1492 or the REforestation of North America implied by the 
Orbis Spike or the acute particulate pollution raining down on London 
(and surrounds) as the Welsh/Brits learned to burn coal (poorly) and 
turn it into everything from motive power to cooking/heat source, or the 
replacement of horses in NYC circa 1900 with ICE motor vehicles 
(replacing feet thick layers of horse manure with "invisible" engine 
exhaust,........................................................... than 
for example the range of coal/crude-oil/natural-gas to 
CO2/CO/particulates we have dumped into the atmosphere in my adulthood 
(50 years) then I would agree "it doesn't matter what we do tomorrow".
>
> "Human Caused Climate Change" has ceased to be a scientific issue and 
> become nothing more than a cudgel used by various groups to increase 
> their political and economic power at the expense of the others. (No 
> cynicism here.)

Yeh, it's used a s cudgel, but I think MAGA took that away from the 
lilly livered, bleeding heart liberals and while they are busy beating 
them into the ground, are also taking out the baby seals, beluga whales, 
silvery minnows, spotted owls, and the (non-european) immigrants who 
pick our produce, pluck and butcher our chickens, clean our toilets and 
keep our children from running out into the street in front of 1 ton 
'murrican made 4x4 double-cab dually diesels "rolling coal" while 
sporting Trump/Confederate flags not to mention a non-trivial subset of 
the folks who wear their MAGA hats too tight and are ready to vote Trump 
in again for as many terms as they can prop his taxidermed carcass up 
(with an LLM-driven speaker in his mouth)... </rant>

> Mostly, i am betting on Gaia to solve the problem in her own way. 
> Probably indirectly with a mega-pandemic or some such.

I'm with you on this one, though I think a mega-pandemic would be a 
coup-de-grace where my cynicism/schadenfruede side wants us to wallow in 
our own civil-unrest/toxic-waste/denuded biosphere bed which we are 
making for a few centuries, before Gaia finally let's us pass on to 
re-incarnate as-a-species (whole/group conflation extra-ordinaire) with 
enough fresh humility to work our way back up some evolutionary chain to 
see if we can do "sentient" better?

And on the other hand Techno Utopians as Pieter (mildly) represents 
might be right, we might be able to build humanoid robots with so many 
legs and such good dexterity that they can kick *all the cans* down the 
road faster than we (and they) can toss new ones into our own path?

    The snail climbs mt Fuji
    Slowly, slowly

Or maybe not, maybe just pave the planet with PV panels and data centers 
so yokels like me can blather on on an internet Mail List instead of 
going out and nurturing the fig tree I thoughtlessly transplanted during 
the hottest time of the hottest summer in this area yet?  Probably 
nothing to do with Carbon cycling... so far our winters aren't getting 
colder, maybe I can just help warmer-climate flora/fauna migrate north 
through my window.
>
> davew
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 15, 2025, at 5:03 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
> > DaveW -
> >
> > I know you have moved from SoUtah to the Great Lakes (MI?) but must
> > still have family friends living back in Utah, not that far really from
> > both the North Rim fire which just burned the Grand Lodge (and much
> > more) there, and the LaSal FIreNado that was so spectacular and took 
> out
> > a small off-grid community there.
> >
> > I think you have reflected on feeling some regret over not taking
> > Climate Change more seriously earlier (we all have our processes and
> > paths around these types of things).   I grew up around fire and
> > fire-fighting, mostly in rural pinon/ponderosa forests with my 
> father as
> > a USFS disctrict ranger who used to also spend one or several 
> multi-week
> > stints leading fire-crews in the Pacific NW or California.   There was
> > no conception of there being a global scale warming/drying, but I do
> > remember him being acutely aware that "a good Spring" meant "a bad
> > Summer" in those Pacific forests, yielding a great deal more
> > undergrowth, etc to carry fire on the ground even before/outside the
> > bigger-hotter fires that would travel crown-crown.
> >
> > What I'm circling in on is the question of the general denial we have
> > all perhaps been engaged in, each in our own way, about the sweeping
> > (nominally global if not Global) changes which human activity has
> > triggered.  I once (a decade ago?) invoked the idea that homo sapiens,
> > at the end of the pleistocene, were the cause (as much indirectly as
> > directly) of the plunge in Megafauna in both the New World and northern
> > Eurasia.  Glen schooled me on the counter-arguments against that theory
> > and I don't need to re-litigate that range of possibilities so much as
> > to simply point out that "homo sapiens" is an acutely *potent* species,
> > especially come neolithics, agriculture, written language, 
> urbanization,
> > modern technological development (from archimedes to daVinci to the
> > folks doing the work in Musk's (and others) name).
> >
> > All this background to open the question of whether the otherwise
> > well-grounded, fundamentally intelligent, situationally clever folks
> > which I grew up around and DaveW (and others here I am sure) feel an
> > affinity with or closeness to (Permaculturists before Bill Mollison?)
> > have shifted "forward" to recognizing that the rate of change of our
> > (humans + domesticates + tech + self-modifying tech) is yielding
> > "unexpected consequences" in a short enough time frame to see the
> > consequences of our actions (albeit years or decades later, but not
> > generations?).   If my belief that homo-sapiens managed to disrupt the
> > megafauna (by spearing/driving-them-off-cliffs, or just disrupting all
> > aspects of the ecologies they depended on) holds any water, no
> > individual likely woke up one day and asked "where did all the 
> Mastadons
> > go?"   or even " where did those huge hairy, tusky creatures my great
> > grandfather used to speak of go?", but we are a smear of generations
> > (born 30's through 90s?) who likely recognize that truisms we grew up
> > with about the natural world as well as the political and economic
> > system are no longer what we either were taught to believe they were or
> > came to believe through our direct experience they were?
> >
> > My father struggled with the locals who lived on cattle ranching and
> > lumber milling, not accepting that those resources they depended on 
> were
> > not infiinite...  they saw the limits of "timber sales" and "grazing
> > allotments" a huge inconvenience (at best) to an acute insult to them
> > and their ability to "just make a living".   The local bar in the 
> town I
> > went to grade school in sports a taxidermed owl with the sign "eat an
> > owl, save a logger" (for example).   Some of the locals who worked as
> > seasonal fire-fighters occasionally would get busted for lighting off
> > forest fires to create work for themselves.   My father was very 
> pleased
> > with the roughly 50% of the ranchers he worked with who actually had
> > studied (formally or informally) range management and were as eager as
> > he was to make sure that 5-10 years later the grasslands their cattle
> > were grazing on were at least as healthy as the were today and often
> > they were interested in returning a formerly overgrazed section into
> > something yet-more-productive. Then were the other 50% who were just 
> mad
> > because *they* didn't get to take *their half out of the middle*.
> >
> > Mary's milieu was primarily W. Nebraska farmers who are still voting
> > Trump back in every chance they get, even though somewhere along the
> > line, most understand that the wells they sunk into the Oglala in the
> > 60s are now dry and have to be deepened and that the dead seeds 
> Monsanto
> > (and their ilk) and Fertilizers and Insecticides their fathers poured
> > over the landscape with gusto might well be the source of their cancers
> > and other maladies.
> >
> > Our own founder's main business in this domain (visualizing and 
> modeling
> > Wildfire and many other topographic/topological registered phenomena)
> > naturally engage with folks who are acute stakeholders in the areas
> > which are burning/flooding/toxic-pluming/eroding/etc.   I understand
> > that Guerin has his own (equally good) reasons as Glen not to mix work
> > and FriAM.
> >
> > And yet we are watching something as overwhelming as the Dustbowl of 
> the
> > 30s sweeping the whole earth, and yet we are arguing over whether EVs
> > cost more to operate because they are heavier and wear brakes and tires
> > faster?  Or whether the area of strip coal mine rendered useless for
> > other purposes is better or worse than the same area covered in PV 
> panels?
> >
> > Ok... just a rant... triggered by my childhood memories of watching
> > fires crown across the road near our home while watching firenados
> > destroy places I'v evisited and my favorite national Park Lodge burn 
> down.
> >
> >
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