Environmental Journalist Bill McKibben on the Links Between Global Warming & the CA Wild Fires

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/23/1412206

On Dem. Now! today~

Environmental Journalist Bill McKibben on the Links Between Global Warming & the CA Wild Fires

"This is the kind of disaster we see more and more of as we begin to change the basic physics and chemistry of the planet we live on," says McKibben, who is organizing the Nov. 3 Step It Up National Day of Climate Action. What does global warming have to do with the fires ranging in southern California? More than 500,000 people in San Diego County have been ordered to evacuate. Over 900 homes have already been destroyed. At least one person has died in the fires. Another 37 people have been reported injured including 17 firefighters. The fires extend from the Mexican border to Santa Barbara. The most devastating fires were in San Diego County. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has declared a state of emergency.

* Bill McKibben, leading environmentalist and one of the leading forces behind Step It Up. In 1989, he wrote the book “The End of Nature”, one of the first books to describe global warming as an emerging environmental crisis. His latest book is “Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future.”

so cal has always had these hot dry winds, there have always been fires, just now more opportunity for man made causes like downed power lines and arson, and man made causes far outnumber the frequency of natural causes. Over population is responsible for the increased rate, no link whatsoever between "global warming" and these fires. nothing new here at all.

Msongs

of carbon dioxide in to the atmosphere on top of what nature already puts out every day, that is a man made cause. I suppose it's normal to drink a glass of water, water after all is not only normal but necessary, but you can still drown in it if you have too much. The Earth is drowning in carbon dioxide and as result running a fever, should it continue to the point of the perma frost melting releasing huge quantities of frozen methane in to the atmosphere, we will have an entirely different definition of what normal is.

Sixty Minutes covered the fire fighters efforts this past Sunday, these people have been fighting fires from 15 to 30 years, and apparently they believe global warming climate change is having a magnifying adverse affect on what has been normal to them.

And you put "global warming" in quotes "why"? The last person I was aware of who I imagine used "global warming" in quotes was a "person" who sent me a nasty letter in the mail after I had an LTTE published on the topic. With all the recent "news" on this topic plus the IPCC report, I suspect that even that person has awakened from his slumber.

"As" is the best we can do without engaging in all kinds of yucky probabilities and issues of causality. And then, for the most part, we're left with little stronger.