http://spaceweather.com/nlcs/gallery2008_page1.htm
They hover on the edge of space. Thin, wispy clouds, glowing electric blue. Some scientists think they're seeded by space dust. Others suspect they're a telltale sign of global warming.
They're called noctilucent or "night-shining" clouds (NLCs). And whatever causes them, they're lovely. Link...
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arctic fox wrote
Here is another link that you might be interested in for Northern California wild fires
In fact all or most of the wild fires going on right now, should be fully or half contained by July 9th.
Pretty scary
http://www.fs.fed.us/r5/plumas/conditions/
You can check out this video, of a live video stream of the actual fires going on up north
http://www.fs.fed.us/r5/plumas/conditions/extreme_fire_behavior_video.php
(not sure how recent that video was).........
From what I heard on the radio, there were like 8,000 lighting strikes that started like a 1,000 fires. The smoke and fire danger are so bad that they are evacuating people around Big Sur. Every year California burns, it just depends on how bad. San Diego area had two super large burns over the past five years.
They have a pretty stupid fire fighting policy here. They put out all the small fires they can till there is so much fuel built up over the years, that you end up with super big fires. They then throw thousands of men and equipment at these fires trying to put them out, but the fires just burn out of control till they use up the fuel they allowed to accumulate.
What they need to do is set controlled burns during the time of year they can control them, like winter, a day or two before there is a 100% chance of rain, not wait until a dry heat wave hits, then a fire starts, then try to put it out. Duh.
Deron.
deron wrote
I just spoke with a friend of mine up in Butte county today ; he says that the smoke inhalition levels now are at 300!!!
Smoke inhalition (over the limit level) is 250. I can only imagine how many people with asthma and allergy problems are suffering.
I am going to have to disagree with your comment on the "stupid fire fighting policy" deal;
First of all, the reason why they have such a policy is for their own safety. You can't just send 1,000 guys out there
with certain amount of training and equipment, though it is their job.
They put out the small fires first because they are able to do so, quickly and effectivly.
The larger wild fires are handled by helicopter's or, I am not sure if cesna planes handle them also with water drops.
Fire fighters go through immense training techniques throughout the year, to prepare themselves for events such as these.
Through the events of mother nature wild fires will start, and this is something that you cannot predict;
it's just gonna happen. Fire fighters constantly do controlled burns throughout the year, so they can prepare themselves (safety wise) for unexpected tragedies and be able to make split second decisions in a matter of seconds,
that could also save a lot of lives.
(Oh and I happen to be a Fire Safety Officer) ;)
What I'm getting at is California (at least in San Diego country area) has no preventive fire policy that makes sense. The areas that we had the monster fires in 2003 and 2007 had been allowed to get overgrown. With overgrowth you get millions of dead trees from disease..., so when a fire does burn there is plenty of dead dry fuel. There is just no way to stop these fire storms, you have the hot dry winds, the fire generated winds and plenty of fuel.
In contrast, I was visiting Spain and when I was traveling the country side I noticed that everything as far as the eye could see was maintained. No dead trees, no excess of brush, the lower limbs of the trees had been removed... There was just no potential fire danger I could see, just the opposite of the San Diego country area. Now here is where the "stupid" comes in, after the fires go through and burn all the dead wood the live trees and the houses, they allocate millions of dollars and send crews out to remove the dead burned trees. Now that is backwards, they should have spent the money before hand and removed the fire danger before the fires.
Now of course I have point out that one of the big problems is the environmentalist. In the city they have all kinds of rules on clearing your property, a buddy of mine had the law come down on him for removing some native brush around his house. The fire department used to come around and notify people that they need to police there yards/canyons. You are not allowed to remove any wood from the forest, even if it is dead, so there is no logging going on.
You could write a book on how government/environmentalist mess things up.
Here's a couple of examples:
Cal fire would not allow the Marines help fight the fires. We have a huge Marine base up here with their own trained fire fighters, helicopters... Once the Marines had put out the fires on the Base (the base is huge, goes up into the mountains) they offered to help put out other fires around the county, but Cal Fire said no!
When one of the fires just got started, they had a chance to put it out with fire fighting helicopters, the fire was real small in a confined area, the guy was on his way with his bucket full of water when they called him back because it was after sunset. Even if it is still light out, but after sunset, Cal Fire will not let them fly. Turns out that the local sheriff was letting their helicopter fly after sunset, too bad they were not in the area to put out that fire. The fire that could have been brought under control in hours ended up burning for weeks after that.
Did you guys know that Cal Fire has a Franchise/monopoly on fighting fires. You are not allowed to put out fires in California, not unless it's been OKed with Cal Fire.
Deron.
Deron wrote
Yeah, some counties are like that where they just have no prevention method, I agree with you on that.
Just makes me think how crazy some places take care of the environment to the point where things could be prevented, atleast prevented in a way that's not so overwhelming.
Not only is it backward as you say! (exactly right) they should be charged with arson LOL.
No wonder why there is something wrong with this state!
The place that I work at, had a huge problem with overgrowing weeds bushes etc about the size of a football field,
so recently they cleared everything out of there. Just for this reason of prevention.
hehehehe, are you psychic or something? I plan to do something like this in the future.
It is a $10,000 fine for disturbing those endangered plants/weeds. Yes California is F-ed up; but, I would rather have the earthquakes and fires, than the tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, ice storms and blizzards, elsewhere. The average temperature, where I live is 72F, annual number of day below 32f zero.
Philip
Philip
2011 Nissan Leaf SL
For thousands of years, in europe and asia, people gathered every twig to burn in a kitchen woodstove, for heat or cooking. In California, its the microwave. We should be using convict labor, or something like the old CCC to tidy up the excess brush and turn it into pellets to run a powerplant, or mulch chips or something. In socal, new neighborhoods built for fire safetey went untouched by the fires last year. People are stupid, and insist on big trees touching the house.
Be the pack leader.
36 volt sla schwinn beach cruiser
36 volt lifepo4 mongoose mtb
24 volt sla + nicad EV Global
Here is some recent news of California wildfires, regarding resources.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080705/ap_on_re_us/wildfires
(Then again this is what the author writes)
A friend of mine up in Butte County says that they are still holding up of 300 for smoke inhalation level.
He says that some days it is so bad with the smoke that, there is one day where he can see the sky and it is clear for awhile, and then if he looks toward the front of his house, he cannot see the end of their street.
A lot of folks are in hospitals as well.
So far there are about 30 something wild fires going on up in Butte County, and the expected date to fully contain all of them is now July 14th.
So are they gonna keep pushing the date further???? Or are more wild fires gonna break out in between???
Live:
![](http://spaceweather.com/images2008/06jul08/midi512_blank.gif?PHPSESSID=6ag07876so9ikebgfp60khpil6)
Thank goodness for global warming! With no sunspots, we would all be locked in a season of frozen death by now!
LOL.
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So here is some of the latest "yahoo" internet news on the northern California wild fires.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080708/ap_on_re_us/wildfires
Now what they don't say is that fire crews from Los Angeles and Oceanside, other fire departments from other cities are out there as we speak, and the fact the Butte county just doesn't have staff. They don't say that now do they.
I happened to find one of the channels for an online internet scanner for Butte county in case some of you are interested, you might be able to listen to some of the on going fire incidents etc, and what they are doing. http://www.thenet411.net/(When you check out the link, hit the stop button on your browser because it will take you to a chat server, so ignore that; then click on the second link that says "windows media stream without video")
Note: on a police/medical/fire scanner, if you have long pauses that usually means that there is nothing going on,(so just be patient for the next radio transmissions to happen) also; when you have long loud beeps or weird noises that usually means that there is either police fire or medical emergency going on at the time.
So I'm driving home from the mountains today and the Sun still is super red when it sets in San Diego. The smoke is just not in the upper atmosphere either, you can see it settling in everywhere.
It's odd, the only source of air pollution that I ever though of in San Diego was from cars... man made. Now that we have not had any real pollution from cars in like fifteen years now, it just seems so strange that now the only real pollution that I can see is coming from Mother Earth. 2003, 2007 and now 2008 we are getting tons of air pollution from fires.
Deron.
Hmm... Maybe cars are "better" than they used to be but I think they're still doing bad stuff to the environment. However one change that's occurred is the exhaust from cars is now invisible and it seems to me that as an invisible thing it can be easy to ignore air pollution from cars.
I've collected some links to air pollution resources on the web: http://www.7gen.com/website-categories/air-pollution
Here's a couple which are directly relevant right now:
Health effects of specific pollutants, and the source of those pollutants (I think the word 'pollution' skips over the real issue that this stuff is poisonous)
http://www.arb.ca.gov/research/health/fs/fs2/fs2.htm
Frequently asked questions
http://www.arb.ca.gov/aqd/aqfaq/index.html
- David Herron, The Long Tail Pipe, davidherron.com, 7gen.com, What is Reiki
Reikiman,
Do not know where you grew up, but San Diego being a big growing city with mountains to the east had terrible pollution during the 70's into the late 80's. At that time San Diego was growing like crazy, adding like fifty thousand people a year at it's peak. The pollution would get trapped in San Diego by the mountains and a inversion layer. The pollution at it's worse would look like there was a big fire in the area. Not only was it bad looking, healthy people would gag on breathing it. I know, I felt the effects of breathing it.
Nowadays, even though the city has expanded to almost two million people, we never experience other then good air days (according too the pollution control district). Not to mention we have Tijuana with the millions that live there miles away, not sure what type of pollution controls they have. But anyways things are so much better, from my experience it's a night and day difference.
Deron.
Deron is right, the air is much better today. Most of San Diego's air pollution comes from Los Angles, back in the 70's and 80's, I would get a headache every time, I went to LA, now the air is much cleaner both here and in LA.
PZEV cars put out cleaner exhaust than the city air they take in, the more you drive the cleaner the air gets. :)
Philip
Philip
2011 Nissan Leaf SL
I grew up in Los Angeles for 45 years, lived in Utah now for 3.
I recall reading somewhere (notice how I'm purposefully vague so I can't be contradicted?) that once in the brush country the fire marshall told home owners they were required to clear away brush from 100' around their house, or they'd be fined.
The federal fur'n'fin guy said that some homes were in the fragile habitat of the endangered "Stevens" kangaroo mouse (apparently different from the common kangaroo mouse) and homeowners who cleared away brush would be in violation of a federal law.
Everybody did nothing except one home-owner, who figured if he was going to get fined either way, he wanted to protect his house at least. That year, a brushfire passed through and his house was the only one that wasn't burned down.
BTW, The "Stevens" kangaroo mice came out of their holes after the fire, they were fine. Hmmm, how was their habitat after the fire?
Recently a developer in Orange County (SoCal) kept getting his permits refused until he took extreme measures in his development design. A few luxury homes were in the center near a pond that could be used for irrigation and fire-fighting, and the perimeter of the development was a golf course that surrounded the houses.
I only know because it was a big story in the newspaper after a big brushfire a few years back that went around them. All of the homes had a fire resistant exterior.
Whats the carbon footprint of a lightning-caused brushfire?
Deron wrote
This is exactly what is going on up northern California.
I definetly remember Tijuana,(TJ) what a pothole (sorry but, yikes)
Philip
Volvo had planned to come out with a low temperature catalytic converter that was actually the radiator. It would clean up air pollution from other more polluting cars. I'm pretty sure it never made it to market.
What's kinda funny in a sick way is, with the introduction of the catalytic converter and other pollution controls, I'm pretty sure people can no longer commit suicide with their car in a garage with carbon monoxide. They have turned to "death by Hibachi".
Deron.
Alisa,
I hear ya about Tijuana, went down there to build a house for some family with a church group. We built the house in like two hours, four plywood walls and roof. These people were lucky, they had a concrete slab to build it on, most are just on dirt. The Tijuana river is their sewer. It's so weird that you can just cross a border and you are in a third world environment.
What a lot of people do not hear about on the news is, there is a War going on right on our border. Supposeably there were a thousand killings this last year. Kidnaping's, drug smuggling, people smuggling, slavery, tunnels... In San Diego, you hear it on the news every now and then. A few killings, kidnaping's the tunnels... And that is on our side of the border.
Deron.
Hey Deron, you are totally right about TJ. I drove down to TJ from the Bay Area California several years back ago, in 1999 (I believe). I remember crossing the border very well (that was a rather interesting experience.)
Some friends of mine were going down there for an event,
and when we got questioned by the border patrol officers,
they were like "what are you doing here, where are you from?" blah blah blah----
One thing I remember, was, you could not drink the water and you had to drink bottled water always. A lot of folks down there also live in trailers. People drive like crazy I don't even know if they have road laws out there?????
It was defiantly a "third world" environment
I have a friend that has dual citizenship, his family has a ranch down past Ensanada. Used to go down there with him all the time, but that was twenty years ago, felt pretty safe back then. He had a big party last month at his ranch, I did not go, one of the reasons is I feel less safe.
I have another buddy that goes down there because you can have a good time with young pretty women for like twenty dollars. No sex, not for twenty dollars anyways, but your allowed to touch. When he was telling me about his adventure, I was thinking this was a very bad idea. Even though I guess this is legal, your still dealing with the underworld. I would be scared that I would get jumped, robbed, beat up, thrown in jail...
It actually might appeal to some people that like a "Wild West" type of excitement/atmosphere. There's the military with guns in force, crazy roads, crazy drivers, everybody is trying to sell you something, buildings are put together with whatever, you can tell by the way people look they lead a much harder life...
Deron.
Man, I love Mexico.
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Deron wrote
hahaha, that name sounds familiar now; I remember staying in town way back when I went down there.
The rest of your quote geez, unfortunately true for TJ
WOW
...back on topic...
Look at how purrdy!
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Hey Arctic Fox, where is that exactly? Antartica or something??
I'd guess it would be in Greenland (Greenland has ice, Iceland is green). I image-Googled "global warming".
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Cool, either way that is a neat image. (guess I was close enough) :)
Video time:
Ooooohhh..... Aaaaahhhhh.....
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