The Fires Sweeping Across Texas Offer a Terrifying Warning

I'm actually quite curious to see how the whole conservative anti migrant/don't mess with Texas/protect our border/secede/states rights/fuck the feds/bravado attitude changes over time as the state becomes increasingly uninhabitable:

Will their propensity for being difficult people force them to continue defending the wasteland from Mexicans, or will they be too busy trying to displace other Americans in more habitable states?

My earnest advice is to listen to climate scientists, to meteorologists, to fire officials. They are trying to save your lives. And if you see fire on the horizon, don’t fixate on the flames, pay attention to the wind: If it’s blowing toward you, the embers are, too, and you better get ready to go.

I'm a retired volunteer firefighter on the prairies. Grass fires are no joke. They can move fast! They can move fast enough that the equipment literally cannot keep pace with the flame front. And all bets are off if it gets into a standing crop near harvest.

To make matters worse, the vast majority of research and training has been on forest fires.

What is happening in North America is not a regional aberration; it’s part of a global departure — what climate scientists call a phase shift. The past year has seen virtually every metric of planetary distress lurch into uncharted territory: sea surface temperature, air temperature, polar ice loss, fire intensity — you name it, it is off the charts. It was 72 degrees Fahrenheit in Wisconsin on Tuesday, and 110 degrees Fahrenheit in Paraguay; large portions of the North Pacific and the South Atlantic are running more than five degrees Fahrenheit above normal.

Thomas Smith, an environmental geographer at the London School of Economics, summed it up this way for the BBC in July, “I’m not aware of a similar period when all parts of the climate system were in record-breaking or abnormal territory.” And with these extremes comes lethality: More than 130 souls perished last month in wildfires outside Valparaiso, Chile — more than the number of dead in the Maui fire last August or the Paradise, Calif., fire in 2018 — making them the world’s deadliest since Australia’s Black Saturday fires in 2009.

Damn. That’s depressing.

I'm cool with just letting that one burn.