environment: climate change peat fires Russia
by Warren
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Month 8, Day 14: Peat Fires
Jeebus. This sounds really depressing:
Firefighters laid down a pipe to a nearby lake and pumped 100 gallons of water every minute, around the clock, until the surface of what is known as Fire No. 3 was a muddy expanse of charred stumps.
And still the fire burned on.
Under the surface, fire crept through a virtually impenetrable peat bog, spewing the smoke that — until the wind shifted on Thursday, providing what meteorologists said was likely to be temporary relief — had been choking the Russian capital this summer.
The peat bogs were drained up to ninety years ago, when Soviet electrical generators burned peat. Naturally, nobody thought to reflood them after they’d been harvested. Now they’re just sitting there up to fifteen feet deep. And when they catch on fire, the firefighters’ lives really really really suck:
Fighting peat fires is an exhausting, muddy job, taking weeks or months, in which hardly a flame is visible. Matted, rotting vegetation smolders and steams deep underground.
In my letter, I tried to make the peat fires a specific example of a broader trend of disregarding the long-term consequences of ecological destruction…consequences which are going to affect all of us, sooner rather than later.
Russia’s peat fires are the disastrous result of an earlier failure to respect an ecosystem’s integrity. The early Soviet engineers who drained the peat bogs to fuel their generators but never reflooded them couldn’t have anticipated a smoke-filled Moscow. The Russian crisis is emblematic of the global one; our fossil-fueled economy (so rewarding in the short run) has triggered unintended long-term consequences all over the globe. Smoke, fires, drought, flood, wind, rain, weirdness.
The first rule of getting out of a hole is to recognize that you are in one. Our information economy must recognize and address the connection between global climate change and local environmental crises like the one choking Russia. The second rule is to stop digging. Our energy economy must move off fossil fuels as rapidly as possible.
Warren Senders
environment: Boston Herald climate change Russia wildfires
by Warren
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Month 8, Day 9: Fake Astroturf Redux
Man, this thing works great. The Boston Herald ran an AP article on Russia’s fires, so I zipped through this one in 10 minutes.
At first glance the Associated Press story on the fires currently raging through Russia are unexceptionable. Closer examination reveals that important facts have been left out: the devastating heat wave that has triggered those wildfires is part of a worldwide trend of increasingly severe weather — a consequence of global warming, or climate change, or global heating, or, to use the most accurate term, climaticide. Floods, heatwaves, tropical storms, droughts — we’re going to see more and more of them, and they’ll do more damage and destroy more lives than ever before. To respond appropriately to the threats posed by the climate crisis, the citizenry must by fully and accurately informed. By failing to connect the crisis in Russia to the broader crisis that affects all of us on Earth, the Associated Press has failed in its responsibility to journalism and to the American People.
Warren Senders
environment: climate change drought Russia
by Warren
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Month 8, Day 7: Nasty and Short (But Not Brutish)
The New York Times had a front-page article on how Russia is getting badly whacked by drought. Any mention of “climate change” in the piece? Hah.
As Russia’s food infrastructure crumbles under the pressure of a terrible drought, it’s tempting to think of it as a problem for “them,” not for “us.” But America isn’t immune to the devastating effects of global climate change. Russia’s crisis is part and parcel of the same complex set of phenomena that gave us Manhattan’s recent heat wave — and the freak snowstorms that brought Washington, DC to a standstill last winter. If we as a nation are to undertake meaningful action on behalf of the planetary systems that sustain us, the Jeffersonian ideal of a “well-informed citizenry” is more essential than ever: the fact that the phrase “climate change” does not appear at all in an article about the Russian drought is an unfortunate abdication of journalistic responsibility.
Warren Senders