The Fire This Time.2: That's The Way It Is

With a load of our furniture, clothes and books, I drove the biggest truck Ryder rented from Pittsburgh to Arcata, CA almost 22 years ago.  I'd never driven a big truck before. I drove mostly on interstates until I was on the 5 north of Sacramento.  There are only two routes from the 5 west to 101 near the coast, and north to Arcata.  One of these is route 20.  I knew it would be on my left, and as I drove on the flat superhighway outside Sacramento I glanced in that direction to see a line of formidable mountains.

The Ryder was heavy and the mountain was steep on the twisty two-lane 20.  When I pulled over at a truck stop near Clearlake, I asked the guy I bought coffee from if I had more to climb.  He looked at me and must have seen my harried, wild and weary eyes looking back.  No, he assured me, you're pretty much at the top.

In fact the road soon started downward, sometimes steeply, another challenge.  It skirted the lake itself and then Upper Lake, and I marveled at the lush mountain scene, especially the wild flowers, though controlling the truck on that road absorbed most of my attention.

All that area--and much more--is now either in flames or black and desolate.  It's the Mendocino Complex fire, now officially the largest fire in California history.  By Tuesday it covered 450 square miles-- more ground than New York City and almost as much as Los Angeles.

It is the largest of more than 70 major fires in California right now, with some 14,000 firefighters in action.  These fires are uniformly described as spreading faster and behaving differently and more ferociously than fires in the past.

Here on the North Coast, the smoke from fires to the north and east of us is dense at higher elevations (a resident of Kneeland said it was the worst she's ever seen) and mixes with the marine layer here below.  Parts of both route 299 and route 20 connecting to the 5 are in fire zones and are closed.

The height of the fire season would usually be a month away, so it's likely that this will be the worst fire season in California history--although the record might not last very long.  The previous record for the largest fire in the state's history was set eight months ago.

The AP story quotes Governor Jerry Brown from last week: “We’re in uncharted territory. Since civilization emerged 10,000 years ago, we haven’t had this kind of heat condition, and it’s going to continue getting worse. That’s the way it is.”


It is going to continue to get worse just because of past greenhouse gases emissions, and whatever level heating reaches, it will stay at that level for centuries.  But if the causes of this heating continue--if greenhouse gases continue to pour into the atmosphere at accelerating rates, even at current rates--then things could get exponentially worse in the farther future.

Last week yet another report by scientists concluded that the planet is headed for catastrophic heating that will begin feeding on itself.  After an unknown tipping point is reached, the feedback mechanisms that keep the planetary temperature within livable bounds will not only break down but in some instances reverse.  A gradual, fitful climate crisis will become a cascade, and the Earth's fate will be sealed for thousands if not millions of years.

It's quite possible that human civilization will destroy itself even before the runaway climate crisis takes hold.   Meanwhile, the New York Times Magazine has the first part of an extensive report describing how real efforts to address the climate crisis and prevent it from becoming unmanageable almost happened in the 1980s.  It's like a sci-fi movie in which skeptics become alarmed and people in power recognize the common threat, and move to meet the challenge.  But unlike the movies, it was just almost.

I read earlier how the Carr Fire last week created its own tornado but I thought of it only as a normal tornado of wind.  But it wasn't.  It was a tornado of wind and fire.  That should suggest the kind of destruction the climate crisis will bring.  Sometimes it will be relatively sudden and obviously horrific.  But even when it isn't, when heat waves get hotter and longer, droughts get longer and dryer, and the seas rise a little more each year, until they rise a lot in one year, there will always come a time of reckoning.

"That's the way it is" will increasingly inform the pragmatic attempts to address the effects of the climate crisis.  The only prospect for perhaps stopping short of runaway global heating is a complete stop to carbon emissions and only unavoidable emissions of other greenhouse gases, globally, by 2050.

The chances of that happening seem very remote. Some I suppose by then will acknowledge that as human civilization, we did this to ourselves.  Humanity destroyed the planet's ability to support us and much of the life we know.  But whether or not we admit it will not matter, except perhaps in clearing the psychological space to deal more deftly with the effects, for as long as we can.  Because that will just be the way it is.