English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

12:18 AM

So it's grown 150,000 acres in 36 hours. This just never never never never happens here, let alone in late October. Never before.

The two worst fires in Colorado history are burning right now, ten miles apart from each other.

The third worst was a couple months back.

They keep breaking new records.

There's an icy mist here now, and at Estes apparently. Boulder County has set up lots of Red Cross shelters for today's refugees on this side of the Divide. And they moved a couple hundred horses to safety down in Silverthorne from the other side of it in the Granby area.

I guess they've announced that it was human-caused. We knew that at some level. All these have been. There has been no lightning. Just warm autumn weather and idiots.

nytimes.com/2020/10/22/us/colorado-wildfires.html

washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/10/22/…

The Times piece is from later on in the day today than the Post's.

You can't just jam all the refugees into a bunch of high school gymnasia either. Covid.

And... the Post cannot spell.

> The ingredients for the massive, rapid growth of this fire, Livingston said, were the thick stands of trees, many of which had been weakened or killed by beetle invasions in recent years, a phenomena linked to climate change that is occurring across vast stretches of the West and into Canada.

Every send them hate mail for their phenomenomina.

Cerberus

12:46 AM

Alas.

Disaster upon disaster.

@tchrist Has the fire grown nearer your house?

tchrist

@Cerberus No, and they let some of the folks back into their homes for a few hours today even. They had to be out by 6 though.

If our own fires in this county had exploded like that one did, this city would be gone.

Some of the refugees fleeing our fires in this county ended up in Estes Park, and so have had to flee wildfires TWICE this week!!

Cerberus

@tchrist I'm glad to hear it.

Where do you consult that map, by the way?

@tchrist That must be terrible.

What does one generally do to protect a city?

Build firewalls?

tchrist

@Cerberus You cannot stop a fire this big and this fast. Nothing can. It's considered an Act of God in contract law.

Cerberus

The embers that fly over the wall?

tchrist

Wall?

No wall can protect you from this.

The flames are hundreds of feet high, and that doesn't even count the wind.

Nobody but George R.R. Martin builds the thousand-foot walls of ice you'd need to have for even the start of any protection.

Think Dresden, ok?

Nothing can stop a firestorm of this magnitude.

Cerberus

1:03 AM

A wall, a moat, and many kms of bare earth?

When the Spaniards threatened, all trees in a large circle around my home town would be felled.

tchrist

You need to get out more. :/

Cerberus

And all buildings would be destroyed.

(No stone nor brick buildings were allowed within this radius.)

That was all done so that the cannon could see and hit the enemy far away in all directions.

tchrist

All our towns are IN THE FOREST.

Cerberus

Against fire, you'd also need to remove all carbo-hydrates in a very large radius...

Yeah, you'd need to destroy a very large area of forest.

tchrist

In the mountains. We live here because of that. You cannot flatten it, you cannot get to it.

Cerberus

1:08 AM

It's kind of like the Teutoburg Forest, I suppose.

tchrist

Boulder itself includes mountains that rise 3,000 feet above its downtown. That's within the city limits.

downtown = city center

And the smaller mountain towns are even more exposed.

Cerberus

So I can imagine.

tchrist

We have binding covenants that you have to have trees on your property here.

Cerberus

A huge infrastructure of fire-extinguishing water pumps and spouts, then?

tchrist

Because a century ago, the parts of the town that aren't up into the foothills were denuded.

The scope is impossible. And you simply cannot stop a firestorm.

Cerberus

1:10 AM

If it's large and hot enough, it will vaporise the water.

tchrist

You live in place where they have tamed everything. You have no idea what this is like here.

Cerberus

Perhaps someone very rich could build his house on an elevator.

tchrist

Elevator?

Cerberus

Which sinks into the earth when threatened.

I'm fantasising.

tchrist

Um, what earth?

This is granite.

Cerberus

1:12 AM

He'd need to blast a large hole into the rock, then.

tchrist

The government used nuclear bombs to hollow out NORAD down in Colorado Springs. I don't think they'll let your rich old man do that though.

Cerberus

Poor man.

What happens when such firestorms arrive at a lake?

tchrist

They boil it.

Cerberus

Are smallish lakes completely vaporised?

tchrist

They would be, yes.

Cerberus

1:14 AM

One wonders how large and how deep a lake would have to be to stop them.

tchrist

I guess it got up to Lake Granby today. That's very big. It is not a pond to boil.

Cerberus

What do you think will happen to the lake?

tchrist

It will be ok.

Cerberus

And what would happen to a houseboat in the centre?

tchrist

Because I think it is just one inlet.

Well, you know.

Cerberus

1:15 AM

What if the firestorm surrounded the lake?

tchrist

People die that way. They have died that way, this summer, in the Pacific Northwest.

They found bodies in rivers, in lakes. People trying to hide in the water. They died.

Cerberus

Because the water boiled?

tchrist

Scan down here and there are some videos of it burning at water's edge.

@Cerberus For the rivers, yes. For the lakes, no: the fire merely consumed all the oxygen. So they died.

Cerberus

Ah, right.

tchrist

Entire towns are gone in the Northwest this summer, just like Paradise was wiped off the map.

Peshtigo fire

The Peshtigo fire was a very large forest fire that took place on October 8, 1871, in northeastern Wisconsin, United States, including much of the southern half of the Door Peninsula and adjacent parts of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The largest community in the affected area was Peshtigo, Wisconsin. The fire burned approximately 1,200,000 acres (490,000 ha) and is the deadliest wildfire in recorded history, with the number of deaths estimated between 1,500 and 2,500.Occurring on the same day as the more famous Great Chicago Fire, the Peshtigo fire has been largely forgotten, even though it...

The Americans studied that fire to figure out how to create the firestorms to destroy the Axis cities.

Cerberus

1:20 AM

I can imagine.

tchrist

I just got an emergency alert blast through on my phone. Scared the shit out of me. But this wasn't the FLEE FOR YOUR LIVES! alert, it was an alert about someone having kidnapped children, and included the car details etc.

I don't know how many properties have been evacuated since last night. Something like 10,000+.

It was 6,500 when it was just Granby Lake, not Granby or Estes Park.

Cerberus

Oh, that must have been terrifying.

There is nothing about the Colorado fires in Dutch newspapers.

Only the Children's News has a short item.

tchrist

The deputies were running through the streets banging on doors telling people to GET OUT RIGHT NOW OR DIE.

@Cerberus It's just now all happening. There's a lag for reporting.

The Times and the Post did pick it up today.

But they're behind.

Cerberus

The item was in yesterday's edition.

tchrist

Yesterday?

Yesterday there were another 150,000 acres yet unburnt that are gone now.

That's the lag.

Cerberus

1:26 AM

Yesterday as in 12 hours ago.

But nothing in the papers.

tchrist

Here is the fire at the lake.

Don't know more about its scope yet.

Cerberus

At what speed does the fire travel when it goes very fast?

tchrist

As fast as the wind can carry it?

It's different when there's wind.

That's what happened to cause it to come roaring down the mountains and into the plains here just north of me a few days ago. And nobody expected it to grow 20 linear miles today but it did.

Cerberus

Can it overtake pedestrians?

tchrist

Of course.

Easily.

It can overtake cars.

Cerberus

1:33 AM

If they travel perpendicularly?

tchrist

They've found people dead in their cars in the western fires this year.

Cerberus

But what if the car is perpendicular to the (straight) edge of a fire?

tchrist

You cannot escape if the raging wildfire is on both sides of the road. It will kill you.

Cerberus

Yes, of course.

tchrist

But when you're in the mountains, in the forest, you do not get to choose which road you take. There is usually only one possible road.

There are no roads. It isn't a crisscrossed concrete jungle. It's steep slopes and winding valleys.

Estes Park had I think 3 roads in and out. Those were all closed off and they had one escape route today. In Granby there ran the outbound in both lanes they had to go so fast.

Cerberus

1:38 AM

Right.

tchrist

google.com/maps/place/Estes+Park,+CO+80517/…

There, that shows you how boxed in they are.

Cerberus

And you cannot tell where the fire is from the ground.

tchrist

Were.

Nope.

Cerberus

You you must be warned by the authorities, who get information from helicopters and otherwise.

tchrist

How would you "protect" that town?

Notice that the town itself is not forested.

But if the firestorm had come to city's edge, it would have all burned. It still may.

How would you defend that? What public works would you construct? Now remember that it has a year-round population of around 7,000 souls. Who pays for that? Taxes? Residents? Impossible.

Cerberus

1:46 AM

Yeah, that would seem wholly unpracticable.

In a way, forest fires are like an epidemic: the more areas in a forest have been burned, the less likely it is that fires may spread there again.

At a terrible cost, of course.

And immunity is temporary.

tchrist

People want to live with trees.

They won't rebuild in a fire-blasted zone.

Robusto

@Cerberus Well, in fact forest fires are inevitable, and they are a natural way to clear overgrown forests. There is a cycle. The problem is, we are having more and more fires than are natural because of climate change.

Cerberus

Right.

tchrist

And do you know what happens when there's been a fire? You have massive flooding and landslides.

The trees hold the slope.

And you have massive contamination too.

Cerberus

I remember we played the game "Hunger and Erosion" in first grade.

Robusto

1:51 AM

Right. But the roots are what hold the slopes, and the roots don't burn in a fire.

Cerberus

But the roots will die and rot, won't they?

tchrist

The runoff poisons the water table.

@Cerberus Unless they're magical trees like redwoods or aspen, yes.

Cerberus

Those are deep and energetic enough to survive and resprout?

Robusto

> Most aspens grow in large clonal colonies, derived from a single seedling, and spread by means of root suckers; new stems in the colony may appear at up to 30–40 m (98–131 ft) from the parent tree.

CowperKettle

Good morning

Robusto

1:55 AM

Доброе утро

tchrist

I think it's lodgepole pines' cones that require fire to open them. There are such trees.

Robusto

Yes.

That's what burned in the Yellowstone fires of 1988.

tchrist

> The blaze has all the hallmarks of climate change. It’s burning at an elevation of 9,000 feet at a time of year when snow should be falling. The fire is also raging during a severe drought, aggravated by record heat, through stands of trees killed or weakened by a bark beetle infestation.

The normal, "severe" winters would kill off the beetles, and a healthy, well-watered forest can repel them with copious sap.

CowperKettle

> lodgepole - a pole used (as by the Plains Indians of North America) in the construction of a lodge.

I wonder what an Indian lodge looks like. Maybe a traditional hut.

Robusto

@tchrist Yes. People are simply unaware of what a crisis we are experiencing in our forests, far beyond the fire Armageddons we are experiencing now.

@CowperKettle This ^

CowperKettle

2:03 AM

Sweat lodge

A sweat lodge is a low profile hut, typically dome-shaped or oblong, and made with natural materials. The structure is the lodge, and the ceremony performed within the structure may be called a purification ceremony or simply a sweat. Traditionally the structure is simple, constructed of saplings covered with blankets and sometimes animal skins. Originally, it was only used by some of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, notably the Plains Indians, but with the rise of pan-Indianism, numerous nations that did not originally have the sweat lodge ceremony have adopted it. This has been co...

Robusto

@CowperKettle Those are special purpose lodges. But the plains Indians lived in mobile structures like the one in the picture I linked.

tchrist

@Robusto Drive through the continental crown in Colorado along I-70 and you'll see it everywhere.

Or really, anywhere in the mountains.

Robusto

@tchrist Yes. But look what happened to our elm trees, the maple trees are endangered, much of the Appalachian Trail goes through mountains denuded of their natural foliage. It goes on and on.

tchrist

@Robusto Maples??

Robusto

Yes.

tchrist

2:08 AM

> Under the spreading chestnut tree, the village smithy stands.

Ubi sunt?

Robusto

Maple trees face extinction

tchrist

Fucking urban blight. Fucking agriculture.

We have to stop all that. Reverse it. Regreen the planet.

Or die.

Robusto

I agree.

CowperKettle

> When, having but to turn my head,
Through the stripped maple I shall see,
Bleak and remembered, patched with red,
The hill all summer hid from me.

tchrist

README: David Attenborough

2

Oh maybe that's not the article?

Robusto

2:13 AM

The climate change crisis is an existential crisis for us.

tchrist

He says we have to stop everything, reverse.

Stop building cities. Stop cutting down forests. Restore the prairies.

Return the earth to the earth.

Robusto

@tchrist Stop increasing the human population. Get it down to replacement level or less.

tchrist

@Robusto We're no more able to control ourselves than a bacterial colony in a petri dish can stop itself from consuming all available resources and dying in its own wastes.

People want more concrete. They like it. It's horrible.

And more "managed" land. Leave it the fuck alone!

Robusto

It is depressing.

tchrist

> A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammelled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.

Don't expect Europeans to care about wilderness.

They've almost completely annihilated theirs.

wilderness-society.org/where-in-europe-is-wilderness

Robusto

2:23 AM

@tchrist And don't even get me started on Asia.

tchrist

It's all tiny.

Fragmented.

Trite.

It is not magnificent and limitless. They've left no stone unturned, no forest unlogged or converted into fields.

No vast tracts of land where the earth and its community of life are untrammelled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.

Trammel trammel trammel.

And the rest of the world wants the same.

Robusto

Soon the billionaires will buy up what's left of nature so that they have a pretty place to live.

tchrist

> In Europe, with its long history of human settlement, the southern Carpathians present an anomaly. The area stretching from Djerdap National Park in northern Serbia across the Danube gorge at the Iron Gates, up to the Retezat, Romania’s flagship national park and across the Fagaras mountains almost to the bend that the Carpathian Mountains make at Brasov is surprisingly well preserved, almost untouched in comparison with most other parts of the “old” continent.

The southern Carpathians represent one of Europe’s very few remaining great wilderness areas. The area totals over 1 million ha …

Of course Siberia has wilderness, but that's in Asia.

Quoted text is from wwf.panda.org/?unewsid=165401

It's a good article.

We need to rewild the world before we finish killing it, and ourselves.

We don't need mammoths and giant ground sloths. We just need to let nature run its own course on those lands we would rewild.

It shouldn't require a Chernobyl.

But the story there is fascinating.

No big cats though. There were still lions in southern Europe in Roman times, and of course in Greek myth.

Oh the Great Yack has finished. Any fireworks? Surprises?

tchrist

4:16 AM

Looks like they didn't manage to transport all the horses. So they wrote their info on them and freed them to fend for themselves.

We also appear to have human deaths now.

I guess that's why they call it doomscrolling.

tchrist

4:28 AM

@Robusto This is the best map.

tchrist

4:58 AM

So ok, just a very few hot spots on the wrong side of the Divide there, up by Irene Lake.

It's a pretty hard barrier to get past.

You can see fingers of forested fuel pretty close to those strays in a few places, and those all lead east into real trouble if they took.

The Stanley Hotel, the one from The Shining movie, is putting 380 firefighters up in style overnight. Good.

The jump over the Divide seems to have made it about 0.8 miles past it to the east.

I don't think almost anyone here reading this understands what it's like to try to fight fires up at 11, 12, 13, 14 thousand feet where that is, where you can't breathe. There's only 60% of the oxygen.

Okay, it's only 12 kilofeet there.

No wonder the trees are so close.

Still, Not Much Air.

There's the same area, showing the Divide itself with the dotted line, not the dashed one.

CowperKettle

5:15 AM

M.A.R.

7:33 AM

CowperKettle

8:03 AM

The second peak might be indeed higher. But that also might be due to increased quantity of tests performed.

Matt E. Эллен

@M.A.R. yeah! I remember when they recorded that psalm. was a good time.

CowperKettle

> All seniors, health care workers, first responders and vulnerable individuals could be vaccinated against COVID-19 by the end of January, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Alex Azar told reporters Wednesday

Way to go!

CowperKettle

8:44 AM

Matt E. Эллен

enjoying seeing the world from a different perspective, no doubt

CowperKettle

He loves laying on his back. I read that many Scottish Folds do this

> In the early 1990s a group of Australian veterinarians demonstrated convincingly that all Scottish Fold cats have abnormal bone development of their distal limbs. This is generally associated with early onset and accelerated progression of osteoarthritis (degenerative joint disease) in joints of the distal limbs and tail.

theconversation.com/…

Lying on his back, rather.

Matt E. Эллен

interesting. lying on his back because his legs hurt. makes sense

CowperKettle

He sometimes limps on his forward paw

And he does not tuck his forward paws under when sitting, but spreads them out

It's indeed very cruel to let these cats breed.

Matt E. Эллен

9:02 AM

yeah

like pugs

but with a different defect

more like sausage dogs

what is their breed...

Dachshund

their legs are so short compared to their body length they end up with spinal problems

And Corgis, too I believe

Robusto

12:38 PM

@tchrist Jayzus.

@CowperKettle I'll believe it when I see it.

RegDwigнt

2:28 PM

> Universal Dirp has posted discussion "feedbach pls" in group "MuseScore Composers"

Unfortunately, I can't feed Bach anymore.

He died like 270 years ago, mate.

And not of malnourishment.

KannE

3:00 PM

It's witch week. I don't set the holidays. It's just a calendrical fact.

CowperKettle

3:20 PM

Baranchinsky

Baranchinsky is a settlement in the Sverdlovsk Oblast of Russia, located 15 km south of the town of Kushva and 30 km northwest of the town of Nizhny Tagil. The settlement straddles the Barancha river, a tributary of Tagil. Baranchinsky's population in 2010 was 9461, down from a steady level of over 13000 seen in the Soviet times. Baranchinsky was founded in 1743 as an industrial settlement along with the establishment of an ironworks in what then was the Perm Governorate. The factory was launched in 1747 under the name of Nizhne-Baranchinsky Plant, and used the rich magnetite deposits of the...

Started a Wikipedia article

It's curious how a Pokemon character may have its own Wikipedia article but a lot of settlements with thousands of dwellers don't.

Faheem Mitha

5:03 PM

@KannE Witch week?

As in the last week of October?

Technically 4 days, I think.

Also technically not a holiday.

KannE

5:28 PM

@FaheemMitha This week.

Faheem Mitha

@KannE Either a DWJ reference, or a huge coincidence.

@RegDwigнt An eye operation gone wrong. Sadly. Or so the story goes.

Has it been 270 years already? How time flies.

CowperKettle

5:45 PM

Russia’s Clandestine Chemical Weapons Programme and the GRU’s Unit 29155

Probably related to the poisoning of Alexey Navalny by Vladimir Putin's goons.

KannE

@FaheemMitha I don't know what DWJ is. I'm just a witch until All Hallows' Eve Eve. Then I'm going as a hyperglycemic mail-in voter--AAAAHHH!! Or not.

Faheem Mitha

@KannE Ah, a coincidence then. Never mind.

Faheem Mitha

6:17 PM

@KannE hyperglycemic mail-in voter sounds scary actually. Especially if you're voting Republican.

RegDwigнt

10:44 PM

A tiny clarification on the Chemical Weapons Convention is in order.

> Schedule 1 chemicals have few, or no uses outside chemical weapons. These may be produced or used for research, medical, pharmaceutical or chemical weapon defence testing purposes but production at sites producing more than 100 grams per year must be declared to the OPCW. A country is limited to possessing a maximum of 1 tonne of these materials. Examples are sulfur mustard and nerve agents, and substances which are solely used as precursor chemicals in their manufacture.

Anyone who thinks the US, UK, Canada, Germany, France, Spain, Israel, Japan, and a hundred others are not developing chemical weapons right now, which the Convention expressly allows, and to a certain limit without being declared, has no business calling themselves a journalist.

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