My first rule about blogging is that I do not write according to a schedule, or stick to one topic. This is against the advice of those who want to advise bloggers, and assume we are all anxious to expand our readership and make money from writing. This tendency may lead to more readership, but it also produces lousy, repetitive writing.
I write when I have something to write about. I may go a couple of weeks without putting anything out. I put things out when they are ready.
I have had an idea for a post forming in my head all summer. It is about the large number of wildfires all over the world this year. They are of course being exploited to the max by the ‘climate’ hysteria machine.
Alas, one source of climate hysteria related to wildfires comes from a blogger I actually support. I like the way she writes. She is very good on some topics.
She actually uses the handle “Wildfire”. Find her prose which tipped my tipping point into writing this, here. Also note my despair over writers who are good on one or a few subjects, but step outside their area of competence, having not learned how to know, and to know when you do not know, and who go stupid. That is here.
The biggest disinformation campaign which throws otherwise sensible people is ‘climate’. This has grown to have the character of an official religion and is becoming quite frightening. People have the need to reference it in terms of subjects which have little do do with whether the weather is up or down.
The worst are the people who become really upset and obsessed about it, like the end of the world is coming. The oceans are about to start boiling. It will be too hot to go outside.
I will suggest to Wildfire that she calm down about it and get back to earth. If that offends her, she can always cut me off and I can send the eight beans a month somewhere else.
Wildfire references the trope ‘dragon kings’, from Chinese mythology. Or precisely, the use of it made by a systems theorist to refer to the way complex systems can collapse when messed with by outside influences which do not know what they are doing. The earth’s ecology is a complex system and humans are messing with it.
The Dragon Kings are in fact real cool about the earth’s temperature. Dragons live a very long time. They remember that the world was hotter than at present during the nineteen thirties, way hotter in the medieval warm period, and during most of earth’s history.
Dragons do not make the weather. They know this is beyond their power. Weather and climate are generated by interactions of many natural cycles and systems.
The ultimate regulator of the earth’s climate are the solar cycles. They determine how much radiant energy from the sun, the earths only power source, reaches the earth. This decides what the overall temperature of earth will be.
Local weather can vary greatly from year to year. It can be a blazing hot summer in A this year, and a cool and wet one in B. The next year can be a hot one in B, and with rain and flooding in A.
The natural systems which determine all this are very complex. They are worth real scientific study. That is almost impossible these days due to the politicization of weather and climate to drive an evil agenda.
There are no real ‘Dragon Kings’ lurking within this system. Dragons, at least in Chinese mythology, are benevolent beings concerned with maintaining the harmony and stability of nature and human societies. Really complex systems have a way of stabilizing themselves.
So, Dragon Kings to not have to do much about the climate. They would be much more concerned about human political systems going off balance and spinning in self destructive ways. The kindly Dragon Kings may have to act to halt a crazy forced deindustrialization which would lead to massive immiseration in much of the world, and likely to war.
All the magic of the Dragon Kings may not be enough to stop a nuclear war. That of course would be a real climate altering event. It may take a very long time for natural cycles to reset themselves after that.
What is really bad about the climate mass delusion is that it misdirects people away from real threats to the living environments of humans, and to life generally. ‘Carbon’ has nothing at all to do with the earth’s temperature. It is what goes up the stack with the carbon dioxide which can have various harmful effects.
The other threat to the planet, besides nuclear war, is the contamination of the environment and the destruction of resources due to out of control capitalism. This is the thing that Dragon Kings may have to finally do something about. In the meantime, people talking ‘climate’ are propagating malicious nonsense, while those talking ‘environment’ are talking sense.
And in the meantime, the weather is not getting worse over all, but the hysteria is getting ever more extreme. More sensible people are seeing that the claim of a catastrophic warming does not make sense. It does not square with observed reality.
I live in Toronto, Canada. It is hot outside as I write, but not dangerously so. It has been a cool and rainy summer and last winter was cold. We have not had any really hot summers for awhile, like I remember when I first moved here.
What I hear from relatives on the Prairies of Canada is that it has been a cool year, though a little dry. The previous few years it had been very hot with drought in places, but the winters were cold. It is also interesting that, as I follow the Ukraine war, weather conditions in that land of war seem to have been wet and muddy this year, complicating military operations.
Yet I am told by various podcasters I follow that it is ‘the surface of the sun’ in Texas, and it is even too sunny in Spain. Then again, I have recently been seeing video of people in tropical Kenya walking around in wool hats and scarves, and light jackets, like we wear in autumn in Canada.
What seems to have really touched off Wildfire is the reports of wildfires all over the world. We have had them all over Canada this year, and they are having big problems with them in Italy and Greece. I have a somewhat different explanation for the wildfires than merely hot, dry weather.
My Uncle made a career in the forestry department of the Canadian province of Alberta. Much of his job was organizing and directing fire fighting operations. Of course this makes me an expert on the subject.
We are having a lot of wildfires in Canada this year. It is not clear why more fires got started this year. It is clear that a lot of them got out of control because the staff and resources were not there to catch them before they did.
Forest fire fighters have been very short handed this year. There have been needless casualties due to untrained and inexperienced people among the fire fighters. Canada has had to ask for help from abroad, even though we have been criticized in recent years for failing to respond to similar calls from other countries having bad fire years.
We even had people come up from South Africa to help out and to meet some Canadian grizzly bears.
Yet most Canadian urban dwellers have been little effected. Toronto had a few mildly smoky days. Most of it bypassed us and blew down to New York City, sending Americans into a panic.
I am blase about forest fire smoke. I grew up in Calgary, Alberta, near the Rocky Mountains. A few smoky days in spring were a normal occurrence.
People new to the city were often alarmed by this. They were told to get over it. It is just the forest service doing the annual controlled burns in the Kananaskis.
This is the way of forest fires. Forests need fires in order to regenerate. It burns away the dead wood, leaves, and other combustible material before it accumulates. It creates clearings where new trees can take root, and where the shoots and berries which forest animals feed on can grow.
Many types of forest plants need a fire in order to germinate. Spruce and pine cones only break open and release their seeds when singed. Other forest plants will only germinate once the soil has been heated by a fire.
When fires are prevented, fuel builds up on the forest floor. Then when a fire inevitably gets going, it burns too hot. It does not release pine seeds, but burns them up.
It burns the earth deep down, killing the seeds and useful insects within it. Where a large wildfire has passed, the ground can be sterile for many years after.
Before the palefaces arrived and screwed everything up, the aboriginals would fire off the forests every spring. Various nasty things were done to them to deter them from this practice. Soon white men were building watch towers in the forests to see fires before they got going and to direct large resources to the spot in order to douse them.
Finally, governments and their forest services listened to the aboriginals and the ecologists, and started managing the forests intelligently. Most fires far from settlements were left to burn themselves out. In critical areas, controlled burns kept the forests healthy.
Such policies always displeased certain types of powerful people. Logging companies with timber leases wanted governments to spend public money to preserve trees they wanted to harvest later for private profit. Tourism and resort businesses often found a even few smoky days each year to inconvenient.
The rise of neoliberalism ended proper woodland management. First of all, people were allowed to build things which do not belong in woodland areas. Then they demanded to be protected from fires, or evacuated, at public expense.
Fire watches and controlled burns became too expensive. The skilled staff to organize the burns, or to organize resources to douse wild fires, were sharply reduced. As is usual with neoliberalism, people were amazed when a dry year came, with perfect fire conditions, and the system for controlling wildfire broke down.
And of course, like everything else in this age of climate hysteria, it was blamed on ‘climate change’. It is not even unusually hot or dry in North Ontario, but there is an accumulation of deadwood. Conditions have been right for a lot of lightning strikes.
They are having wildfire troubles in Greece and Italy as well. Again, much of the problem seems to be government cutbacks and failure of land management. Things were built where they should not have been.
In Greece, it seems tourists from northern Europe are arriving in the areas effected by the fires, demanding to be able to take their holidays as usual. They want someone to make all the smoke go away. This is how it goes in the age of narcissism.
Of course all this is both problem and opportunity for the narcissists who are still running a large part of the world. On one hand it could lead to demands to build back government functions which they have “404ed” in recent years. On the other it could lead to permanent abandonment of entire areas, which suits the depopulation agenda.
The ‘climate change’ metatrope is the perfect response from their perspective. It misdirects public attention away from the real problem. It creates general acceptance of a collapse of living standards.
However, the Dragon Kings, who of course live mostly in China, are acting to cool things down. The malign forces driving climate hysteria live mostly in the Atlantic countries; Europe and North America. The rest of the world is throwing off their dominance with help from China.
Most of the world’s countries are demanding to be able to use their resources to develop their economies. They are starting to use their own currencies instead of the American dollar. American military power is being shown to be hollow.
All this is leading to a more rapid collapse than the rulers of the Atlantic empire expected, which they will not be able to control. That very complex system called civilization will expel them and rebalance. We will be able to do forestry again, and all sorts of other activities the narcissistic lords of earth have been getting in the way of.
The Dragon Kings foresee it.
Meanwhile I will keep on blogging in my own way. I am not going to validate other people’s delusions or hysterias. I will keep insisting that objective truth must adhered to, throughout the full spectrum of reality.