[D66] California

[R.O.]

theguardian.com:


California's dark, orange sky is the most unnerving sight I've ever 
woken up to
Rebecca Solnit

What is happening now is astonishingly worse than any previous fire 
season. We are in a new kind of era

Thu 10 Sep 2020 11.21 BST

Last modified on Thu 10 Sep 2020 17.11 BST

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The sky was the muddy yellow of an old bruise at 7am in San Francisco on 
Wednesday, and by eight it was a dull orange and the darkness that felt 
like night was coming on. This morning was perhaps the most 
unnatural-feeling and unnerving of my life, with darkness rather than 
daytime rolling in. People around California reported that the birds 
that would normally be singing were silent. On some of the days, since 
the freak lightning storm in the heat wave of mid-August launched this 
explosive fire season, the sun has been red, and when the moon was full 
it was also red near the horizon, but this morning there was no sun to 
be seen through the murk. Ash was falling, the ash of trees, forests, 
homes, towns, dreams burning up. In the strange light, the world around 
us looked ghostly, otherworldly, unnatural, unnerving, disturbing.

I know that the smoke, the light, and the heat have been worse almost 
everywhere else in the Bay Area from friends and family, and beyond the 
inner Bay Area are fires, blackouts, evacuations, and more than 14,000 
firefighters doing their best against a monstrous new kind of wildfire. 
What is happening now is astonishingly worse than the western fire 
season ever has been before. There are catastrophic fires in Oregon 
–burning down a small town and prompting the evacuation of much of the 
small city of Medford. Near Oroville in northeastern California, a fire 
expanded by a quarter million acres in 24 hours, so far as the experts 
can tell. That is a new kind of fire and we are in a new kind of era.

This is the fourth year of a climate-crisis fire season amplified in 
duration, scale, and intensity, and it is already worse than the last 
three in most respects. It comes on the heels of unprecedented heat 
throughout most of California, with temperatures most of us never 
expected – 121F (49.4C) in Los Angeles County last week. I have lived in 
San Francisco all my adult life, which has meant living in relationship 
to the Pacific and its damp cool breath in the form of our famous fog. 
Often in summertime the rising heat inland sucks the cool air off the 
ocean in the form of fog, so that you can be eating soup in a sweater in 
a world without shadows and know that 10 miles east someone in shorts is 
sweating under a bright blue sky.

Lately I have not known if I was looking at fog or smoke, friend or foe, 
when I saw a gray sky, until I went out into it. On Wednesday, a marine 
layer of damp fog spread over the Bay Area with smoke atop it, creating 
the strange dimness that now weighs us down. Here the ocean is a beloved 
ally, bringing us cool fresh clean air—and most of our weather comes 
from over the Pacific – but we are not the ocean’s ally: the world’s 
oceans have soaked up most of the heat climate change has produced, with 
disastrous consequences, including intensified hurricanes and typhoons 
elsewhere. And even the ocean cannot save us now: the autumn winds – the 
Diablo winds here in central California, the Santa Ana winds in southern 
California – are due to bring scorching air from the arid east that will 
amplify fires. We are early in our fire season and already the records 
are broken.

UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain, who tweets regularly about weather 
and climate said on Wednesday morning, “Everyone is so far beyond 
capacity right now, and there so much else going on, that I don’t think 
the collective bandwidth exists right now to process what it happening. 
I really do feel like we’re running a marathon at sprint pace right now. 
It is deeply exhausting.” And “Standard reporting/mapping procedures are 
essentially not capable of keeping pace with the unbelievable rates of 
spread now being observed on these fires – it is historically 
unprecedented.” The night before he had tweeted, “The wildfire situation 
in California and Oregon has now escalated to the point that I can no 
longer keep track of the countless massive, fast-moving, and potentially 
very dangerous fires.”

     The toll takes many forms, from loss of life to loss of homes and 
communities to ... the dread and dismay of living in this whole new hell

Pacific Gas and Electric, the utility company responsible for horrific 
fires in previous years, including the one that completely destroyed the 
town of Paradise in 2018, has been deploying its new strategy of cutting 
off electricity to prevent its poorly maintained equipment from starting 
fires in hot, dry, windy conditions. This prompted local public news 
station KQED to run a story with the headline, “How to Prepare for Power 
Shutoffs During a Heat Wave and a Pandemic.” The pandemic made us move a 
lot of life outdoors, but the fires create air so bad that staying 
indoors is safer. There we check the AQI, the air quality index, or 
follow the fires online. Of course for the homeless and the displaced, 
indoors is not so easy to come by, and during a pandemic providing 
emergency shelter is a far more complicated business.

Some of the people facing evacuation or worse in the Oroville-area fire 
resettled there after their homes in Paradise burned down. In Sonoma 
County people who had to evacuate in previous years are prepared to 
evacuate again. Californians have loved their landscapes and many of us 
chose to live as close to wild places as we could; insurance costs and 
fire danger may take that option off the table for many of us; and 
cities are right now the safest place to be. Some small rural 
communities have burned up. A farmer whose produce I have been buying 
for perhaps 15 years lost his buildings, including his home, and 
equipment on the Santa Cruz coast. His crops survived, but when I went 
to his booth Sunday he was hunched and avoiding eye contact, clearly 
stricken. The toll takes many forms from loss of life to loss of homes 
and communities to displacement and disruption to, even for those who 
are not technically impacted, the dread and dismay of living in this 
whole new hell.

It was 10 years ago now that Bill McKibben published a book titled 
Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. To try to explain the 
enormity and peril of climate change, he described the transition as 
though we had landed on a chaotic, hostile new planet he dubbed Eaarth. 
This week, with snow throughout the intermountain west fast on the heels 
of a wave of record-breaking heat, firestorms up and down the west coast 
sending huge smoke plumes across state and national borders, and a 
hurricane-force windstorm knocking down thousands of trees in Salt Lake 
City, I have thought of his book and its premise often.

An aerial photograph today would show California and Oregon mostly 
smothered under smoke, but politically, along with Washington, we are 
the blue wall of the United States, the solidly democratic region where 
state policy recognizes and responds to climate change. From here, under 
the dark orange sky, I hope that all this leads to a dramatic escalation 
in climate action, regionally, nationally, and internationally. It’s the 
only thing that can help on the scale that help is needed.

     Rebecca Solnit is a US Guardian columnist. She is also the author 
of Men Explain Things to Me and The Mother of All Questions. Her most 
recent book is Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters