It is August, and parts of California
and Oregon are burning as has happened nearly every summer for the last 10
years, and in many parts of California last winter. We are being told this is the new
normal. It was also the old normal,
before we started watering with sprinklers, making it cooler, wetter and saving
our cities from wildfire.
Water moderates climate and tames
fire. At 1%-4% of the atmosphere, water
vapor is the most abundant greenhouse gas, holding heat by its sheer thermal
mass and the blanketing effect of clouds. Yet it also cools the air during the
day, by cloud shading; rain; evaporation; and transpiration through plants, which
can bring the air down to 40 degrees F, the temperature at which it starts
evaporating.
Evaporation is the first step in the
water cycle. That evaporation doesn’t
just come from large bodies of water. In
fact, water in a body doesn’t evaporate well, because of surface tension,
unless it is warm or whipped into spray by the wind. Being near a seashore with a prevailing breeze
blowing off the ocean doesn’t guarantee any rain will come of it, if the air
pressure is high and the ocean is cold.
It makes fog on the west side of the coast range. It takes either a lot
of heat rising from the land to pull it in from a warm sea, monsoon style,
making wet thunderstorms, or a low-pressure system with wind-whipped waves to
bring cooler ocean moisture onto land and make rain.
Inland, on the east side of the coast
range, ocean moisture doesn’t make it to Josephine county unless a strong
low-pressure system brings it in. It was
known as the Agate Desert before we started watering with sprinklers. Extreme heat, cold, fire and floods are
characteristic of deserts and drought.
When absolute humidity is closer to
4% than 1%, it is harder for fires to start and burn. When summer thunderstorms are given moisture
from sprinklers on almost all the properties in cities and the surrounding country,
they make rain, not dry lightning. This
is what happened in the ‘80s, a wet decade we are told, when practically
everybody in cities and country watered because water was cheap, and they wanted
their yards to be clean, green and safe.
That was also the decade when water
alarmists started telling us that we have to save fresh water, no matter the
locality or the conditions because only 2% of the water on Earth is fresh water,
and telling us that evaporation is waste.
California, and later Oregon, started instituting rationing by price,
oppressing the poor and middle class, many of whom stopped watering their yards. Many other cities around the world have done
the same, drying out their cities and the countryside around them, making the
world as a whole drier, hotter and more dangerous, as we saw in Greece this
summer.
Thousands of single family homes in a
single subdivision in Santa Rosa, California burned in Santa Anna winds last
winter, while thin strips of green grass and trees out front of those homes did
not. Their top water rate is $6.50 per 1000 gallons. 600 homes burned in Redding this summer, while
paying $1.425 for every 750 gallons. When
people can’t afford to water, many stop cutting their weeds, because no one
likes to maintain ugly. Those weeds
grow, spread their seeds, dry out, and can easily burn down their homes.
Published at
GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com. Like
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Gardening
is easy if you do it naturally. Litter
is tagging, marking the territory of the disorderly.
Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener 541-955-9040 rycke@gardener.com
