These people need psychological help.
Is the Colorado Wildfire the Future Norm?
The Colorado fires feature “a lot of the characteristics we would expect under climate change,” according to climate scientists.
Total BS. Fires don’t know anything about climate change. When it is hot and dry, the forests burn. Lodgepole Pine seeds can’t even germinate without a fire.
For the past thirty years, residents of tiny Laporte, Colo., near the Wyoming border have gathered inside Bob’s Coffee Shop to swap gossip over coffee and danishes near the dense pine forest of Lory State Park.
Total BS. LaPorte is a suburb of Fort Collins and is 25 miles from Wyoming. The CSU atmospheric sciences building is located almost in LaPorte. One of my kids went to junior high school there. The pine forest in Lory State Park is generally very thin. Much of the park is more like desert than forest. I ride my bike by there about once a week.
Most of Lory State Park doesn’t have any trees because of previous burns. Click below for a larger image to see the old burn scars.
But since the weekend, Bob’s has become a very different kind of social hub: a de facto refugee camp for homeowners fleeing what many here call the worst wildfire in decades. From a booth just a mile and half from the fireline, Bob’s owner Chris McCullough in a phone interview on Monday afternoon described seeing forest ridges ablaze with arching orange flames, a sky blanketed in thick white smoke, and ash falling like snow. At other tables, locals shared updates about the fire’s spread and talked about what they were — and weren’t — able to save from their homes, which may — or may not — still be standing. “It’s the fastest-growing, hottest-burning fire I’ve ever seen,” said longtime resident and Bob’s patron John Brewer, whose home was evacuated Saturday night. “I don’t know how we’re going to survive this one.”
Technology – Climate Desk – Is the Colorado Wildfire the Future Norm? – The Atlantic
Saturday and Sunday were hot and windy. The fire spread quickly for a couple of days, but has almost stopped moving now. It has burned about 40,000 acres – a little more than 1% of the three million acre fires which burned Montana and Idaho in 1910. This fire is much, much smaller than the 1871 fires in Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, New York, Connecticut, Ontario … etc.
During the previous two Junes (2010 and 2011) La Porte had a different problem. They nearly flooded from the record snow pack in the mountains. I took this video last June of a fawn stranded on an island which was about to disappear under the flood waters.
