Water tames climate and fires

          

         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 Garden Grants Pass on Facebook

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