[FRIAM] acutely destructive fires in Utah/Grand Canyon

[Prof David West]

Steve,

Raining all day today, thunderstorms last night, temp in high sixties. Wonderful relief.

Enjoyed your thoughtful response and agree with what you say with some minor addenda:

1) people in general in southern Utah: probably close to 90% Mormon and 70% Trump voters. But, issues like climate change, trans folk, immigrants, etc. were never hot button issues. "Government over reach" was THE primary reason for voting Trump. (People thought he might correct it by dismantling the deep state, and to some extent that is happening). The overreach of concern were things like EPA trying to regulate irrigation ditches and BLM changing rules on 'cows-per-acre' on government land and national monuments. There is also a lot of anti-Federal government resentment stemming from the time Utah became a state and the Feds not only outlawed polygamy, but also took the right to vote away from women and forced the breakup of the United Order. Orderville, was probably the best success story for United Order, amassing immense wealth and controlling a territory from the Colorado river, on east and north of Grand Canyon, to almost St. George on the west and Bryce Canyon to the north. And, there is a definite sense that "we know better than some pointy-head bureaucrat, laced with a dose of entitlement.

2)There was also a lot of push back on climate solutions, like electric vehicles—deemed totally impractical because of typical travel distances out west. Example, it was a 120 mile round trip from my house to the nearest major grocery store.

3) probably not a misquote, but more a mis-statement on my part. I definitely was pretty dismissive of the popular and political expressions of climate crisis because they seemed so superficial and almost silly to me. But I wish I had taken them seriously enough to actually engage the science behind the headlines.

4) I do hold "real scientists" to be more complicit than you do. Not their fault in a sense, but when science became the captive of government and large corporate financing, it pretty much ceased to be "science."

5) I won't disagree with you about carbon, but do reserve the right, should unanticipated side effects show up, to say I told you so. After all, eliminating flourocarbons did seem to close the ozone hole with no unintended consequences.

6) The problem with any pandemic or "civil-unrest/toxic-waste/denuded biosphere bed" is making sure the rich and powerful are, at least, as affected as the proletariat and poor. BTW, have you read John Brunner's, *The Sheep Look Up*? Fun read.

7) somewhat paradoxically, I used to be reasonably hard core technological optimistic myself. But, computing technology and the current AI mania pretty much destroyed every vestige of optimism.

davew


On Tue, Jul 15, 2025, at 7:59 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
> 
> 
> 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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