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The fire that burned about 21 homes in Estes Park this summer, along High Drive, was according to news accounts caused by the incoming electric service of one of the residences, the wires having rubbed bare of insulation against an obstruction and thus sparking. As this is true, man-made.
The present Fern Lake Fire in RMNP is likely from a similar cause: a human. As far as I know there was no lightening at the time or other plausible natural cause. If reports are accurate, this wildfire was begun beyond the Fern Lake trailhead, being in a wilderness area accessed in that area by but one foot path.
Should one then presume that prudent practice is to remove all trees and other vegetation not only near all roads in RMNP, but also along all trails and anywhere else some idiot may go?
The very reason so many of the trees within RMNP are dead from a beetle natural to that ecosystem is due mankind's rapid introduction of greenhouse gases into this Earth's atmosphere since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, having had a major influence on otherwise natural cycles. In one manner or another the earth, air, water, and indeed fire within this park are negatively affected. If humans did not exist on this planet the ecosystem of RMNP and all of Colorado would be verdant and healthy. Begin with that, and then ask what our proper place within this planet should be.
The mandate of the National Park Service is to protect and preserve the treasured lands under their care for this and future generations. In just the case of RMNP, they are not doing so. In the cutting down of many live trees, for one. There is no excuse for that. Their mandate is to leave wilderness areas, being 95% of RMNP, untrammeled; that means untouched and left alone. If the NPS and members of the public cannot grasp that concept then they do not belong in such a place.
One might also question—beyond all their logging operations—why the "stewards" of RMNP do not take their mandate more seriously. Throughout the West and beyond many of these parks are in peril in various ways. In RMNP, with air and water pollution and in sum a situation which should have the keen interest of all who love these places. Yet the visitor receives half truths and equivocation even to direct questions asked about these very serious concerns. Those instructions surely come from Washington, D.C., and followed by public servants most interested in continuing employment towards a pension. But it in no way reflects the actions of any true steward. If as interested, they would leave no visitor in doubt to what they are witnessing in such a beautiful place as the most direct signs of what we have as a civilization have wrought—and should seek to change. There is no more sure sign, test, or clarion call than when even one of the most remote, pristine, treasured and protected places in our land is under assault and in dire trouble.
Beyond bureaucrats, the responsibility devolves to all members of the public as well. Ultimately these "rangers," these public servants answer to you. In what any of us witness do we remain silent, or determined in the affront of what is clearly wrong to learn what we might and seek some better way?
In answer at the moment is the state of the forest in RMNP, being only part of this equation, and that it is on fire when naturally this time of year it surely would not be.
The very reason so many of the trees within RMNP are dead from a beetle natural to that ecosystem is due mankind's rapid introduction of greenhouse gases into this Earth's atmosphere since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, having had a major influence on otherwise natural cycles. In one manner or another the earth, air, water, and indeed fire within this park are negatively affected. If humans did not exist on this planet the ecosystem of RMNP and all of Colorado would be verdant and healthy. Begin with that, and then ask what our proper place within this planet should be.
Pure, unadulterated tripe. Global warming and cooling cycles have been documented six ways from Sunday dating back far before man was even capable of building a campfire in front of his cave. Forest fires have been a fact of life since the arrival of the lightning bolt as a phenomena.
This garbage you are spewing is aberrant, self-flagellating eco-narcissm at its finest...the perverted idea that all the world's ills are man-made, and that nothing bad happens without the presence of homo sapiens.
Most of this hysterical malarkey you keep posting is just reposted bilge from elsewhere, woven together in typical conspiracy-theory form with little evidence of independent critical thought beyond the mechanics of cutting and pasting.
Last edited by Mike from back east; 10-28-2012 at 05:20 PM..
Pure, unadulterated tripe. Global warming and cooling cycles have been documented six ways from Sunday dating back far before man was even capable of building a campfire in front of his cave. Forest fires have been a fact of life since the arrival of the lightning bolt as a phenomena.
This garbage you are spewing is aberrant, self-flagellating eco-narcissm at its finest...the perverted idea that all the world's ills are man-made, and that nothing bad happens without the presence of homo sapiens.
Most of this hysterical malarkey you keep posting is just reposted bilge from elsewhere, woven together in typical conspiracy-theory form with little evidence of independent critical thought beyond the mechanics of cutting and pasting.
While Idunn does, perhaps, overstate man's influence on his surroundings, I would rather have a Homo sapien overstate it, than a Homo neanderthalensis understate it. I've traveled enough throughout North America and Southeast Asia to see gross examples of how man has polluted this planet. As a teenager, I grew up not that far from Love Canal near Niagara Falls; studied the Buffalo River (which once caught on fire); seen the open-pit coal mines and urban cave-ins of land underlain by burning coal mines in Pennsylvania; seen streams right here in Colorado that have red, yellow, and orange water; seen canals and rivers in Thailand with so much floating trash that the only thing more plentiful in the water was dead fish, visited a farm in Thailand where the farmers had been using cyanide as insecticide, known a man with black lung disease from his days as a miner, known another man who died from lung cancer and emphysema...not from smoking, but from graphite put into the air in the factory where he worked, ...well, I could go on, but if anything, most people have no idea just how badly we've treated this planet on which we depend.
Yes, there have been variations in the earth's climate over the centuries, sometimes causing glaciation, other times causing vastly melting glaciers...but that doesn't mean we have to make it worse.
We're all very impressed with your ability to put a sentence together such as: "This garbage you are spewing is aberrant, self-flagellating eco-narcissm at its finest". That's hyperbole at its best. Congratulations.
A big study was just released in England, concerning global warming. The study found that the global warming ended in 1996, and has not increased since then. It had risen from 1980 through 1996, after it had declined for 40 years.
A couple of years ago, there was an expose about how they were inflating the temperatures, by placing the devices that measured the temperature in areas they should not be, often near a heat source or over a black top parking lot that would give a higher than realistic reading.
Colorado lost a minimum of 259 homes this year, and according to the final analysis it was beetle killed trees that fueled the fires to make them as bad as they were.
"September 16, 2012 was a historic date. According to the statistics of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in the US, Arctic sea ice shrank to cover an area of just 3.41 million square kilometers (1.32 million square miles) on that day. It was the lowest coverage measured since the beginning of satellite observations in 1979 -- some 760,000 square kilometers lower than the previous record minimum in 2007. The extent of the shrinkage indicates that the Arctic is changing at a breathtaking pace; a new ocean is opening up." [1]
Estimates of how long sea ice in the Arctic has been perennial, with seasonal adjustments, is between 700,000 and 4,000,000 years. This sea ice is currently melting at an exponential rate, and as early as 2015 the Arctic could be ice-free from August to September, for the first time since then. Other forecasts have that more thirty to forty years out. But as with Greenland, this is all warming, and melting, quicker than even recent models predicted.
That is one indication. My understanding that this planet is currently in a cooling phase, or would be if left to her own devices. But that mankind has spewed so much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, at ever increasing rates, that this has significantly altered what this climate would otherwise do. This Earth will naturally do as she wishes, and as a matter of course has naturally cycled between periods of warming and cooling, either in that minor in a day or the epic of the ages. But as with all else in this universe, susceptible to all influences. One should not expect to toss a pebble into a pond without experiencing ripples across its surface; indeed depths below and above, even if less obvious. We do have an influence, and as that might be measured rather finely, the greater question towards what ends and how desirable that might be.
Closer to home, one need not visit the Arctic to observe the effects from this rapidly changing world. For those that will look, they are everywhere. With wildfire for instance, a force of nature which has always been present. So hardly accurate to suggest that RMNP, all of Colorado and elsewhere would never suffer as much, with fire no less than part of the natural order. However, the recent mega-wildfires in Colorado, and increasing escalation in this trend throughout the Rocky Mountain West, are the direct result of a rapidly warming climate with less precipitation in this region. They would not have occurred, or if so at less severity, save this. That the Fern Lake Fire in RMNP could have got such a foothold in October is surely due this as well, the situation helped in no way by all the trees killed by the mountain pine beetle. Someone else natural to this environment. But having been as rampant precisely due conditions which otherwise could not exist today save for the actions of mankind since the onset of the Industrial Revolution in 1750.
Those exercising independent critical thought may wish to examine such equations closely for themselves.
Colorado lost a minimum of 259 homes this year, and according to the final analysis it was beetle killed trees that fueled the fires to make them as bad as they were.
Where do you get your info? You are misinformed. 346 homes were lost in the Waldo Fire Canyon alone.
While Idunn does, perhaps, overstate man's influence on his surroundings, I would rather have a Homo sapien overstate it, than a Homo neanderthalensis understate it. I've traveled enough throughout North America and Southeast Asia to see gross examples of how man has polluted this planet. As a teenager, I grew up not that far from Love Canal near Niagara Falls; studied the Buffalo River (which once caught on fire); seen the open-pit coal mines and urban cave-ins of land underlain by burning coal mines in Pennsylvania; seen streams right here in Colorado that have red, yellow, and orange water; seen canals and rivers in Thailand with so much floating trash that the only thing more plentiful in the water was dead fish, visited a farm in Thailand where the farmers had been using cyanide as insecticide, known a man with black lung disease from his days as a miner, known another man who died from lung cancer and emphysema...not from smoking, but from graphite put into the air in the factory where he worked, ...well, I could go on, but if anything, most people have no idea just how badly we've treated this planet on which we depend.
Yes, there have been variations in the earth's climate over the centuries, sometimes causing glaciation, other times causing vastly melting glaciers...but that doesn't mean we have to make it worse.
We're all very impressed with your ability to put a sentence together such as: "This garbage you are spewing is aberrant, self-flagellating eco-narcissm at its finest". That's hyperbole at its best. Congratulations.
"Nooooooobody knows the trouble I've seen...la la laaaaaa la la"
You are conflating man-made pollution to man-made changes in climate. Two different discussions.
There still is no conclusive evidence that man has indeed made global warming "worse" any more than, say, the methane from trillions of dinosaur farts during the Mesozoic era. And there are lots of bad things associated with global cooling when it happens, too. And when the time comes for that, it will happen, regardless of what puny impact we may or may not make. It's truly the most pompous among us that can look up at the vastness of the universe and then look back down and conclude that we control our environs on a planetary scale.
... As a teenager, I grew up not that far from Love Canal near Niagara Falls;... seen the open-pit coal mines and urban cave-ins of land underlain by burning coal mines in Pennsylvania....
I live in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming. You may have heard of it, as somewhere around half the nation's coal is mined here. Guess how the Powder River got it's name. It was from all the coal ash and smoke in the air -- from underground coal fires -- when white man first came to this part of the country. There's no telling for how long they were burning but most certainly for tens of thousands of years. The CCC was sent here to put them out in the 30s, and they did a pretty good job. Some they couldn't extinguish, and they still burn today.
There are areas on the plains where cattle won't go near, and neither will the ranchers for fear of the ground swallowing them up into an inferno. A century ago, shortly after white man began settling here, young people used to grab a few raw steaks and head out to these underground coal fires for a bbq and picnic. They didn't need a bbq grill or charcoals, just a skillet placed over a crack in the ground.
Our fire department is still called to extinguish new coal seam fires every summer. They're started when lightening strikes a coal seam that's exposed (not uncommon here). From there it burns down, and if it's not stopped it just keeps going deeper and deeper. We have coal seams here that are a couple hundred feet thick, so if they're not extinguished soon they can become a real problem.
Maybe Pennsylvania's underground coal fires are man-made, but ours here in Wyoming are not. But it was man who extinguished many of them.
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The Arctic as RMNP
