Thursday Throughput: Nuclear Explosion Edition
Colorized photo courtesy of National Nuclear Security Administration/Nevada Field Office
[ThTh1]: This week’s “Ask an Astronomer” question comes from Maura Alwyen, who notes that a nuclear explosion is hotter than the surface of the Sun and asks how that is even possible.
The answer is twofold. First, the surface of the Sun is not actually that hot. It’s about 5800 degrees K or 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s hot — about two or three times the temperature of a blast furnace. But it’s not mind-meltingly hot. At the core of the Sun, where the weight of the star creates immense pressure, density and temperature, the temperature reaches 15 million degrees Kelvin (27 million Fahrenheit). That’s the temperature at which hydrogen atoms will start fusing into helium atoms, which powers the Sun.
And that’s the key here. A nuclear explosion works by recreating the conditions in the core of the Sun but — and this is the second part of the answer — in a very small space and for a very short time (about 500 billionths of a second). That incredible heat is part of the reason it destroys things (the others being the immense pressure wave and the intense radiation). And that’s nothing. In supercolliders, atoms can ram together at temperatures of trillions of degrees, albeit in an extremely tiny space.
I should also note that temperature is a bit of flimsy concept in these contexts. Temperature refers to how fast atoms are moving. But if there aren’t a lot of atoms, very little heat is being transferred. There are parts of the universe filled with hydrogen gas that has a temperature of thousands or millions of degrees. But if you went there, you’d freeze to death because there are very few atoms around to transfer that heat to your body. In this context, the density is extremely high, so what you have is a short-lived plasma.
So, to sum up: the Sun’s surface ain’t that hot and nuclear bomb temperatures only exist for a moment. So if you are standing next to a nuclear bomb, you will experience conditions similar to the core of the Sun. But…don’t worry. You won’t experience them for very long.
[ThTh2]: A new study finds something potentially critical about measles. It would seem that a measles infection can cause your immune system to suffer from “amnesia”, losing its ability to fight off diseases it has been exposed to. This means that infection you should be immune to — either from exposure or vaccination — could come roaring back.
This finding has made the case for measles vaccination — which is already slam dunk — even stronger. It makes the case for mandating vaccinations, or at least making exemptions very hard to get, even stronger. The decline of measles vaccination not only puts us in danger of a measles epidemic; it puts us in danger of an epidemic of almost anything.
Vaccinate. Now. There’s no reason not to. And every reason to do so.
[ThTh3]: The NYT has an article up about warrants being issued to search online DNA databases from places like 23andMe to enable criminal investigations. Apart from the privacy concerns, there is significant danger in this kind of blind database search. People who do DNA matching like to quote odds — e.g., the odds of the DNA linking O.J. Simpson to the blood found at the crime scene by chance were one in 9.7 billion. Such odds are useful in a case where you suspect someone for other reasons. However, a blind search of a database can turn up such matches by random chance. If you sell enough tickets, someone will win the lottery even if the odds against any individual winning it are one in ten million.
The odds of this database of 1.3 million profiles producing a random 1-in-a-million DNA match to a crime scene are approximately 73%. The odds of it producing a random 1-in-a-billion DNA match are about 1 in 500. When you expand that to the 20 million profiles now available, those odds go to almost 100% and 2%, respectively. Thinks about that for a moment. If you feed a few hundred crimes into this database, you are guaranteed to match a profile to some random person and claim — falsely — that there’s only a one in a billion chance they’re innocent.
Now, a blind DNA search could identify potential suspect. But confirmation requires additional evidence to show that it’s not just a random match. I’m not sure our law enforcement industrial complex appreciates that subtlety.
[ThTH4]: An astronomical mystery — where all the small black holes have got to — may no longer be a mystery.
[ThTh5]: The first scientific results have come out of Voyager 2’s exit from the Solar System. So far, no indication it will return as a planet-destroying super-being.
[ThT6]: This three-part tweet explains what exactly what is meant and what is not meant when we talk about the “habitable zone” when it comes to exoplanets.
We’ve discovered many planets in the habitable zone, but the majority (if not all) will be completely unfit for life. This is because those worlds may be dressed completely inappropriately for the conditions.
(Doodly in thread form: Part 1/3) pic.twitter.com/zl9RWktKXg
— Elizabeth Tasker (@girlandkat) October 18, 2019
[ThTh7]: A new analysis indicates that the carbon emissions and higher prices resulting from replacing nuclear power are killing more people than the Fukushima meltdown ever could.
[ThTh8]: A new book is arguing that one of the most famous psychological studies — one that led to mass deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill — may have been faked. If so, this is devastating. And yet another seminal study that’s turned out to be garbage.
[ThTh9]: In case you’re wondering why your clocks jumped this weekend, the Bad Astronomer has you covered.
Don't forget that tonight astronomers stop the rotation of the Earth for an hour for routine maintenance (mantle flushing, core convection rebalancing, Moho layer alignment, and so on). Things should be good as new when you wake up. The Sun might rise earlier but that's normal.
— Phil Plait (@BadAstronomer) November 3, 2019
What?
[ThTh10]: The more things change in academia, the more they stay the same.
Academics complaining that departmental service obligations interfere with their research and teaching. Assyria, mid 7th century BC: pic.twitter.com/SCkmgFk8by
— Christopher Jones (@cwjones89) November 2, 2019
[ThTh11]: An oldie but goodie in the way of optical illusions.
Each ball is traveling in a straight line but together they circulating pic.twitter.com/SE0eyYV47Y
— Physics & Astronomy Zone🔭 (@ZonePhysics) November 1, 2019
[ThTh12]: Via Andrew, scientists may have found the homeland of the Mitochondrial Eve. The theory here is that the power plants of our cells — mitochondria — are only inherited from our mothers. It’s possible that all humans have a matrilineal descent from a single woman. This is a bit confusing since it does not mean that one woman was the mother of the entire human race; just that we all share a common ancestor. This theory has been around for a while. We may now finally be closing in on her location in time and space.
It’s Christmas At Ground Zero!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t039p6xqutUReport
And you might be wondering “what you you mean recreate the conditions at the core of the Sun, how exactly do they do that,” and the answer is that modern nuclear bombs have a second, smaller nuclear bomb inside them that explodes as a trigger for the big bomb. The pressure of the smaller bomb’s explosion compresses the bigger bomb’s nuclear material to the point where it fuses, and that’s the “core of the Sun” thing.Report
Yep. The video I linked in the answer goes into that.Report
“The pressure of the smaller bomb’s explosion compresses the bigger bomb’s nuclear material to the point where it fuses, and that’s the “core of the Sun” thing.”
I’m kind of curious at what age did you read and understand this?Report
Not too long ago; I never really had a reason to read about thermonuclear weapon design until I was curious about something related. I understood the basic notion of “explosively compress radioactive material to increase its density and create a chain-reaction energy release” but it never occurred to me how exactly a fusion bomb got enough energy to compress material enough for fusion to occur.Report
Had a pretty strong drive when I was young to understand how everything was constructed. At 14 I was looking into fusion created by the tokamak configurations when I came across the various implosion/compress concepts.Report
I was a teenager and was reading “The Sum Of All Fears”.
Clancy gives a rather technical overview of how a nuclear warhead works.Report
I remember that. Clancy put a note in that he deliberately fudged some of the details, not because he thought it would make a difference but to salve his conscience.Report
Yep, but he got the overall physics right.Report
Which was rather conceited of him, as more detailed material had been published more than a decade earlier. See, eg, United States v. Progressiv, Inc.Report
Didn’t read that one, I did notice in the movie they did a pretty good job on the initial pressure wave, but not a lot on the low pressure wave that follows it. If I recall correctly, on average the initial p wave is lethal to 12 miles out or so.Report
Literally the most interesting part of the book.Report
Truth.
I was honestly shocked when they made it into a movie.Report
The movie was extremely bad though, so there’s that.Report
The only decent Clancy movie was Red October. Clear & Present Danger was ok, and everything after that was dreck.Report
As I’ve said before, I did think it amusing how they vastly downplay the beginning; like, if you didn’t know the historical context, it would look almost like some guys put a bomb on a jet and it just sorta took off and flew around and then a missile came out of nowhere and blew it up…Report
ThTh2: I already ranted to a couple of my classes about this study and about “so this is why you can get some really terrible follow-up infections after a disease like measles.”
Some of my students are parents and I hope none of them have been influenced by the anti-vaccinationist movement.
I mean, in the abstract, it’s an interesting finding and it explains stuff we’ve seen in the past. But in the concrete, it’s scary, because of the decline in vaccination rates (at least in some groups).
A few years ago I was having to travel to an area where a measles outbreak was happening; I actually went to my doctor and asked to be revaccinated just in case. She did an immune titer instead….I came up as still immune, so that was good. (I have had three MMRs in my life…got one with the standard set as a baby, got re-vaxxed when my younger brother did because the doctor thought that earlier batch of vaccine was not very effective for some reason, and then got vaccinated AGAIN in grad school because they couldn’t find a record of my having been, despite both myself and my mother telling them the history. It was okay, I didn’t grow a second head or anything….)Report
Also, this idea isn’t new (that Measles resets the immune system). Researchers had some pretty strong evidence about this a few years ago, so this study just confirms it.Report
ThTh-8- I had read that also, very depressing if it holds up. We may have F’ed up biggly.
Also, for all my science peps (too late for my dad and uncle):
Novelist Cormac McCarthy’s tips on how to write a great science paper
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02918-5
Report
Th Th 8
And to this day we don’t have a good way of dealing with mental illness.
Our modern way is to put them in jail instead of asylums, or let Darwinian forces of exposure, assault and disease cull them from the population.
Part of this is that there isn’t really a cure for mental illness, and treatment is wickedly expensive.
But as with all things, how we choose to allocate the wealth we create says a lot about our priorities.Report
ThTh3: There’s some old (long before DNA testing was a thing) science fiction short story about a police detective working a case where the outcome hinges on him realizing that two people have an identical (to measurement error) fingerprint.Report
I’ve seen recent research to suggest that fingerprints are not actually that unique, at least not if you look at how we match a lifted print to a recorded print.Report
Definitely with partials. Maybe even with full ones.Report
If you are comparing a found print with a suspect that was developed through other investigative techniques, it’s pretty good.
But if you send a partial through the database, then it’s a lot like your DNA database, not enough statistical reliability for the number of comparables.Report
ThTh3: “Now, a blind DNA search could identify potential suspect. But confirmation requires additional evidence to show that it’s not just a random match. I’m not sure our law enforcement industrial complex appreciates that subtlety.”
The recent DOJ guidelines for using forensic genealogy require police to first exhaust traditional crime solving methods, including searching their own criminal DNA databases, and limit genomic research to violent crimes such as murder or rape, and to identify human remains. I believe it applies to the feds, plus state and local agencies that receive federal funds.
In any event, the Golden State killer case was solved by identifying a class of suspects using a public genomic website, then conducting a genealogical research, taking into account age, gender and location, which was followed by taking a confirmatory DNA sample of the accused (by some accounts a sample taken from a discarded cup).Report
I was reading on the Golden State Killer case while writing this post. It wasn’t clear to me: do they have any other evidence linking him to the crimes besides the DNA evidence?Report
Occasionally see reference to the results of “other” investigation, but no details. They certainly would have developed a profile based upon the crime scene and victim statements.Report
ThTh7 Of course. I mean, of course it is. But nuclear is scary.Report
But nuclear is scary, because people are ignorant.
FTFYReport
Yes, but if a sensible policy on addressing climate change requires vanquishing the collective ignorance of the populace on nuclear power I struggle not to despair.Report
Or not caring about it.Report
Not caring about what? Climate change or nuclear power?Report
Not caring about the collective ignorance of the populace.Report
Well yes, in that case a sensible policy on addressing climate change wouldn’t require vanquishing the public’s ignorance about nuclear power.Report
There’s a point at which someone will seize power and explain that they’re doing this for the species.
Democracy will always vote for donuts today, eat vegetables tomorrow, after all.Report
Call me a cynic, but I don’t think that will ever happen. Our own history, both recent and near recent, pretty clearly identifies that environmentalism is a luxury good. People aren’t going to pitch a coup over environmental issues unless we’re dealing with something unambiguous, severe, something the government can directly and immediately address and something that the public can blame mostly on government policies. AGW basically ticks none of those boxes.Report
We’ve got 12 years, dude. 12 years.
I won’t even be retirement age.Report
The “We’ve got 12 years” crowd won’t even throw a bricks or attack a gas station. I can’t say if that says more good things or bad things about them but there it is. Launching an enviro-coup is not really in reach unless they’re planning an enviro-coup of a mid sized coastal town.Report
I’ve read a few articles linking the Little Ice Age to all sorts of historical, political, and technological changes in the period.
There is no reason to think that a changing climate won’t affect the future in a similar fashion.
For example as the polar ice cap thaws and the Northwest Passage becomes a reality, history will likely link the political and military struggle over Arctic mineral rights to climate.
Meaning that no, no one is going to grab a gun because of thawing Arctic ice, but plenty of nations will go to war over the spoils that the thaw reveals.Report
Chip, I am most assuredly not saying AGW won’t be a huge deal- I think it will. I agree that climate related migration, famines, and struggles over newly habitable northern climes all may have an impact. I think that’s all unambiguously true.
But AGW doesn’t click that way. The effects of it are too dispersed, too long term, too unimmediate to provoke some kind of mass uprising that could lead to a coup. That’s always been what makes it such an insidious problem.
And likewise the solutions to AGW are about 5% sticking it to Mr. Richy-Rich and 95% about costs that everyone will have to pay. The trade offs aren’t made for Hollywood.
And that is why no one is gong to seize power and say “we’re doin’ it for the species”. Not over AGW anyhow- it doesn’t work as that kind of issue.Report
Agreed.
AGW will always be the hidden energy input driving things that seem entirely unrelated and unpredictable, but in fact are the inevitable outcome of a changing climate.Report
Nuclear powered climate change is da bomb.Report
Quite literally.Report
Nuclear may be scary, but the study found that it was the increased cost of energy that was the killer, so by extension any tax or regulatory cost on energy also kills. Well, kills old people. Or more specifically kills old people when the temperature drops below zero Celsius.
More constructively, I think nuclear needs subsidies to be competitive with subsidized green energies, and nobody like the big energy companies that would receive them.Report
And certainly, old people not being able to pay for electricity can have only one solution, which of course, is socialism.
So really, not implementing socialism has killed more people than Stalin.Report
Well yes, I’m inclined to agree with that and probably the solution is simply to apply a cost to carbon energy sources and lump nuclear in with other non-carbon energy sources for subsidies.Report
As long as all the externalities are priced in.
In real life (like, having worked in power generation for close to 30 years), I can’t make an economic case for nuclear power that adds all the costs associated with it. Most of which no one even mentions:
Like…
– Disposal of fuel residues
– Decommissioning and cleanup of the site (what, did you think the plant will be there one hundred years from now?)
– Insurance. Nuclear power in not insurable in the commercial reinsurance markets
– Financing and cost overruns protections (I.e. no matter the final costs, the tariff will be adjusted to make the plant profitable enough to service debt) or loan guarantees.
– Accident clean up costs.
Plus, the large size of nuclear power plants (to squeeze the last possible economy of scale possible), and their must-run characteristics (not only they can’t cycle up and down following the load, they can’t easily be turned off and on either) create further operational issues
– The grid has to carry large generation reserves (for those days when nuclear is off for maintenance) which are rarely used, but have to be paid off by customers too (he, another externality).
– Lastly, for now, nuclear requires large (and expensive) transmission systems to distribute all that energy. More distributed generation would be far easier to manage, more reliable, and much cheaper to move around.
I would agree that many of these issues could be avoided if somehow there were commercial small nuclear plants, similar to those in nuclear powered vessels. I do not know what are the technical and economic reasons why no one in the world has, to my knowledge, built one such small (let’s say 50 MW) nuclear plant. But, 1GW nuclear plants only make economic sense to investors if the public bears almost all the risks. Not even Apple, Shell, or Aramco, could survive Fukushima.Report
Well if we build passively safe nuclear power systems then a lot of these concerns go away. The long and the short of it is that nuclear has been actively smothered by both the left (environmentalists) and right (fossil fuel fetishists) for decades. It’s like talking about powering the country on Solar power panels or wind turbines from the 80’s. An enormous amount of the issues you list are significantly caused by a hostile regulatory regime and a regime hostile to new nuclear development that was put in place by those same powers with the express purpose of eliminating nuclear research and use.
And, of course, any wind or solar powered grid- if it was even remotely possible at all- would also require enormous transmission capabilities.Report
New nuclear coming online today would receive the same ¢/kWh type subsidy that wind gets. The wind subsidy goes away at the end of 2020, the nuclear does not. Vogtle 3 and 4 have received $12B in federal loan guarantees which drastically reduced their borrowing costs. NuScale Power is getting free land and federal risk assumption for their first-of-kind plant to be built at the Idaho National Lab, and will be eligible for both the loan guarantees and the production subsidy.
The biggest problem for nuclear today is that it costs about $8B per GW to build, and takes 8 years. Wind costs about $1B per GW* and typically less than 2 years.
* Apples to oranges somewhat. Wind in good locations produces 30-40% of the time. Nuclear historically produces 80-90% of the time.Report
I was referring to state subsidies. I think half of the six nuclear plants in my state threatened to close if they didn’t get the same subsidies as solar and wind.
If I roughly understand the technical issue that was raised — nuclear has an on-off switch for each plant; coal has the ability to modulate (maybe not the right word) by virtue of multiple units in the plant and controlling the coal feed or other features so as to allow it to generate percentages of potential outputs, and wind and solar just run based upon environmental conditions regardless of energy price. When wind and solar are generating significantly, the nuclear plants were being forced to generate below their operating cost and the companies involved would rather just run coal plants in that environment.
Nukes got their subsidies.Report
Im only familiar with California, but renewable generators do not get a state subsidy in CA. What you have is a mandate that utilities buy X% of renewable energy.
Which obviously, is a big thing, but it’s not a cash subsidy.Report
Illinois taxes utilities and spends the money on green energy. It’s got a lot of complicated elements, including the tax at some point starts to decline as a market index for electricity rises. Illinois has a zero-net-emissions objective, for which I think nuclear is currently providing 95%. The closures would have scrapped that, so they gave subsidies.
(I also recall some part of the issue is how the auction is conducted by regional transmission organizations, which the state has no authority over)Report
With newer technology used today, 40% is in the very low end of onshore wind being built today, though 30-40 % is right (for now) for solar.
Offshore wind produces way above 50%, and it’s significantly more reliable. Regretfully, in practice, the Jones Act makes it impossible to build offshore wind in the USA. Just one more thing the Jones Act is fishing us with.
(If Tulsi had wanted a cause that could propel her in the nomination, she should have seized the Jones Act. Hawai’i is the state most fished up by the Jones Act, even more than Puerto Rico (though PR doesn’t have EVs so it doesn’t count for fish). The Texas Gulf Coast oil industry is up there too (hey Senator Rafael Eduardo, do something for your state for a change, instead of looking for things your state can do for you))Report
ThTh7: This is where The Trolley Problem ceases to be merely a silly thought experiment. Do you pull the lever?
ThTh9: I cannot believe that we still do Daylight Savings Time. I cannot believe that the argument that we needed to extend it all the way back in the oughts by the Energy Policy Act resulted in it being extended. I can’t believe that the studies that said that the extended time change resulted in additional power use were ignored. I would prefer getting rid of DST entirely but, if we can’t, please let’s put it in year round AND JUST STOP CHANGING.Report
If we go to year-round DST, we also need to move the start of school back by a couple hours so kids won’t be killed in the dead of winter by tired adults trying to get to work in the dark.
the last (dark) morning of DST, I was coming up the road (which runs past apartments) to get to my building, and there was a middle-schooler, standing in the middle of the road (either waiting for the bus or walking to a bus stop) and she was in entirely-dark clothing. I saw her in plenty of time to swerve but it still gave me a hell of a jolt.
I would be more amenable to “one last move-ahead of a HALF hour, and then we stop” than going to year-round DST. I find going home from work in the dark a lot less objectionable than going to work in the dark.
Disclaimer: I am almost at the western-most edge of my time zone, so it’s darker later in the day than it would be in, say, Memphis.Report
Split the difference? I’m down.
(When I was a kid, we lived in Michigan and had a very, very Western Eastern Time Zone experience. Then we moved to New York and had the same Time Zone, but, man, everything was completely different. On top of that, suppertime moved from 5:30PM to 8PM.)Report
I’d hate year-round DST because all that extra daylight will fade my drapes and awnings.Report
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4EUTMPuvHo
DST is so bad that they’re making horror movies about it. Sadly, this looks like it would be a better movie than the latest Terminator or Star Wars flicks.Report
That’s great.Report
I’d watch that. I’d watch the crap out of that.Report
If you just use the database you’ll look pretty silly claiming a ten year old is guilty of 20 year old crimes. Most people are wildly inappropiate matches for a specific crime and any closer examination will trivially exclude them.
Yes, you need more data/evidence, but this is one of those situations where knowing the answer is the bulk of the solution and what comes after that is easy and obvious.Report
Tangential to ThTh 7:
An interesting article in WaPo about how climate change is threatening a small North Carolina island:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/how-do-we-continue-to-have-life-here-amid-flooding-and-rising-sea-levels-residents-of-one-barrier-island-wonder-if-its-time-to-retreat/2019/11/09/dff076c0-fcab-11e9-ac8c-8eced29ca6ef_story.html#comments-wrapper
The basic outline is pretty straightforward- rising sea level causes seasonal hurricanes to become increasingly destructive, forcing residents of both the island and mainland to make hard choices about whether to rebuild or not.
But the deeper takeaway for me is how the ripple effects of this one factor spread out through the body politic. The hard choices turn into political standoffs over public resources and pit once-friendly groups against each other.
The shifting economic prospects of the town cause a demographic shift as the more affluent leave and less affluent and more desperate enter.
A sense of peace and optimism about the future changes to pessimism and despair and erodes the trust in community that allows it to do even the most simple and basic of tasks.
A similar story can be written about communities in the West where wildfires ravage towns forcing the same sort of decisions about how to allocate scarce reconstruction resources.
Global warming is usually written in the future tense in terms of speculative science fiction, but what we are seeing is the actual manifestation of it and how it looks. Instead of bizarre events, it looks utterly banal and ordinary.Report
Or you could cast all such stories as “Let’s stop taking responsibility for making bad decisions and just blame other people, or better yet, blame mother nature for being cruel!”Report
Blaming mother nature for burning billions of tons of coal and petroleum is certainly one way of taking responsibility for bad decisions.Report
It’s both, really. The decision to burn fossil fuels is pretty hard to denounce in hindsight. The disasters you’re pointing out here are the result of bad general policy colliding with the shrinking envelope of latitude that nature is giving us for bad policy that AGW is causing to constrict.
Paying people, especially wealthy people, to build and rebuild in flood zones is terrible policy. California’s perverse NIMBY and and proposition 13 incentives encourage spraw out into the hilly arid woodlands far from the urban centers is likewise terrible policy. In the past we skated by with these awful policies because nature was a tech more clement and temperate. As that temperance is declining from AGW we’re watching these raw edges of bad policy decisions start to bleed.
We need both to take steps to mitigate/prevent further AGW and fix the terrible decisions and policy structures that’re making us especially vulnerable to AGW’s initial fallout.Report
You make a good point about the “shrinking envelope” caused by AGW.
One of the benefits of the Industrial Age was the ability to expand the envelope of buildable areas through technology like dikes, dams, flood control channels and breakwaters.
But as the weather effects of climate grow more pronounced, at some point there will be a scene like in The Day After Tomorrow where some Dennis Quaid will take a big Sharpie and draw a line across a map miles inland from coasts, and declare that anything seaward of the line has to be written off.
Even today, Miami experiences flooding on a near daily basis. At some point in the near future entire neighborhoods will become uninsurable and unllivable.
No one knows what sort of effect this will have on real estate and the economy of which it is a part.Report
Any areas not covered by glaciers or deserts are subject to wildfires. Alaska has really big wildfires in areas whose average annual temperature is 30 C lower than Cailfornia’s. Canada has huge wildfires. In fact, wildfires are common across a climate range of of 40 C.
California has had severe wildfires all during the Holocene. Indians often set fires as a hunting strategy, and three bird species in Australia intentionally spread wildfire to flush put game. So as we built permanent structures, we came to rely on forest management and other techniques to try and reduce the scope and intensity of such fires, along with trying to reduce our vulnerability to them.
California decided to do the opposite, encouraging the growth of underbrush, building structures in fire-prone areas, and cutting back on normal fire prevention and mitigation policies. The 1915 Fresno fire (in Fresno!) burned 151,000 acres but only destroyed four structures. The 1932 Ventura fire (in Ventura!) burned 220,000 acres but didn’t destroy any structures. The Camp Fire was in the middle of no place (Butte County) and only burned 150,000 acres, but destroyed 18,800 structures. If was the same size fire as 1915 or 1932, but it did vastly more damage.
The only change afflicting California is political, because it has always been fire prone, but now they promote the fires instead of preventing them.
Everybody else just laughs and points at them as they blame global warming. Well, it’s long been noted that the chief effect of global warming is stupidity, so perhaps California can indirectly connect these fires to global warming.Report
In a lot of places, we can build homes to survive fire, storms, and flooding, but the unit cost is quite a bit higher than traditional stick frame construction, and the architecture of such structures is often non-traditional and people don’t find it as appealing (although if they weren’t having their homes constantly rebuilt courtesy of the tax base, they might find a new appreciation for them).
Regarding fire, I was reading the other day some article that was critical of the fact that some wealthy CA communities hire private fire fighters to combat wildfires. Of course, they buried the lede that the bulk of what the private fire companies do is work with the insurance companies to encourage home owners to mitigate fire danger in the first place (non-combustable roof and siding, insulation, fire breaks, sprinkler systems, etc.). It was very rare for said companies to gear up and actually fight a fire, because their clients homes were survivable.Report
Some years ago some genius out there came up with the idea of spraying the super-absorbent diaper material on homes, which formed a water-logged coating that looked like papier-mache. It worked wonders and hosed off easily, so I assume the state banned it because the gel was made of sodium polyacrylates (an evil plastic) that would end up in the soil.Report
I wonder if the people who are spending these exhorbitant amounts of money to combat fire damage mark that down in their accounts as “Cost of AGW” to offset the “Taxes Required To Combat AGW”.Report
There was a professional fire guy on NPR a few weeks ago talking about all this. He said in the fire-expert community it was known a lot of these communities were fire traps before/while/after they were built, many of them went through bad fires 30+ years ago, and the problems are mostly political.
If I build a community that will burn down in 30+ years, I will probably be dead or retired before that happens. The people that approved it will be dead or retired. Even the people who originally moved into the first generation of houses will likely be dead or retired.
And yet we still have the fire-experts who expect there to be serious problems over the next 30+ years and expect it to end in tears.Report
Yet AGW has nothing to do with the fires, since California has had devastating fires for thousands of years, and the rest of the planet, which in theory is having the same AGW as California, isn’t burning.
AGW doesn’t cause power lines to arc. It doesn’t cause speeders to flee from cops and end up in fiery crashes. It doesn’t cause people to let underbrush build up. It doesn’t cause people to neglect basic land clearing.
Overall, the state’s average precipitation varies by a factor of 50 from one area to another, or 5,000%. The average annual temperature varies by 50 F from one area to another. A shift of 0.5 degrees is nothing.
The mindset in the state is that they’re going to let everyone’s house burn down, in fire after preventable fire, and keep blaming Republicans and oil companies. Maybe that’s a winning issue in local elections, but the result is that Californians be sleeping in tents, with no electricity and no water, while the rest of the world laughs at them as perhaps the stupidest people on the face of the planet.Report
OK, Boomer.Report
I’ll put it to you this way.
Suppose the rest of us are burning fossil fuels because we love watching California burn in preventable fires. Suppose the Chinese have increased their coal consumption by more than the entire US’s consumption just to drop California real estate prices so they could buy up charred land on the cheap. Suppose the Indians are burning massive amounts of fossil fuels merely to burn California homes so more Californian’s have to stay in hotels owned by the Patels. Suppose the Central Americans have convinced their sun god to scorch California so their gangs can exploit the wildfire chaos and take over. And suppose the oil companies are pump oil just so California wildfires make people flee their homes, burning more gasoline in the process.
If all of that were true, how would screaming about global warming prevent a single wildfire or save anyone’s house, ranch, or barn? The rest of us are not going to do anything different because we think it’s funny to watch California burn, in part because people there won’t do even common sense things to save themselves. For us it’s like watching Mama June and Honey Boo Boo.
No, ranting about CO2 isn’t going to stop your fires. Only doing those common sense things that Republicans keep telling you to do is going to stop your fires. We’re confident that since Republicans are telling you to do those things, you will refuse to do them and keep banging your sippy cups about CO2, and we’ll keep watching our favorite reality TV show, “California Burning.”
If you valued your homes and environment more than virtue signalling and political posturing, you’d of course grab up some tools and start clearing some undergrowth, and conducting controlled burns like other states, so that the problem recedes and your electric service comes back on.
And it will take a lot of controlled burning. My chat buddy in Florida sets fires for a living. He’s accidentally shut down all of I-75 more than once. Florida burns 2,000,000 acres a year, every year, because if they didn’t the whole state would go up like a match.
Lots of states do that, because back in the old days the country had a lot of wildfires. From the 1920’s through the early 1950’s, about 30 million acres a year would burn from wildfires, peaking at 50 million acres a year in the 1930’s. So we started doing controlled burns and spraying and other measures and dropped that rate to under 3 million acres a year, a rate that we maintained for forty years, and where it still remains in states that aren’t called “California”.
100 Years of Wildfire Acreage.jpg
Yes, we had ten times as many acres a year burning in wildfires before global warming or intervention than we now have with global warming and continued intervention. If you drop the interventions, you can expect to return to the rates of wildfire destruction that were common in the early part of the 20th century, and those rates are devastating given California’s modern sprawl.Report
Yes. Which is why the political establishment HAS to make things work for the upper/middle classes. They have the resources to flee and they will.Report