Vocal Voices

Like this...

I'm sparing a thought for them.

Yes ...

I spent six weeks on detachment at the Canadian air base at Cold lake, about 60 miles south of the fires. The area is pine forests as far as the eye can see and there is also a huge Indian reservation between the two.

Another big worry will be the Athabasca oil sands. An area of hundreds of square miles has been deforested to open up these oil rich sands to be 'mined'. They are slightly south west of the fires and if they catch it will be a global environmental disaster.

I was thinking that when I read it but nobody was talking about that part. They were talking about people "escaping to the safety of the tar sands"...

I'm sure they will get control of it should it get near there. Constant aerial bombardment with water planes, military as well as civilian, tends to do the job. Plus I'm sure they would put the Army in there to create firebreaks if it went that far.

The sad fact is the ordinary people and towns are not important enough to spend that kind of money or effort. The tar sands are.

This stuff has become more frequent and more violent as each decade has gone by. The impact. Someone always has another year which was worse or more burned or something. What they never see is the pattern. All of those years were massive exceptions with burn off for dead wood and exceptionally high conditions. In 15 years this will just be normal....

I have listened to a podcast on Global News where the man in charge said that the fire(s) were still out of control and that he was looking ahead over a two week rolling programme of action. That sounds very serious indeed.

When I was there the oil sands had not opened up and Ft McMurray was a relatively small outpost and not a city of 88,000 people. Fortunately the area in general is not heavily populated. Unfortunately at this time of year the night frosts have finished and the skies are wall-to-wall blue for weeks on end. Praying for rain is unlikely to work.

Everything needed to fight the fires will have to be transported in from all over Canada, and it is possible that international assistance could be required.

Regarding the possibility of the oil sands catching fire it would be similar to the peat bog fires we have on the moors and Scottish highlands. They are almost impossible to put out and can smoulder on underground for years and years.

Workingman wrote:Regarding the possibility of the oil sands catching fire it would be similar to the peat bog fires we have on the moors and Scottish highlands. They are almost impossible to put out and can smoulder on underground for years and years.

Same with Russia in 2010. The only way they could get them out, eventually, was to flood them. They had this in 1997 in Indonesia when their slash and burn got into the peat bogs and Asia choked for 3 months.

Neither situation is anything like the tar sands. Either in volatility nor sheer volume of carbon based fuel.

Suff wrote:Neither situation is anything like the tar sands. Either in volatility nor sheer volume of carbon based fuel.

My comparison was not with the volatility or volume it was with the difficult/impossible task of putting underground fires out.

Putting a tar sands fire out would need a new word as "impossible" is nowhere near.

In the words of Monty Python... "Run Away"....

Sadly we can' t run away from the planet.. Well most of us can't.

Today the Cryoshere Today gives more bad news for the Arctic....

This image is of yesterday's state of play. The big spikes are because the F17 sensor on the satellite is throwing odd high readings. We know it's high because the AMSR2 satellite is reporting the low correctly but not the high and it's functioning properly.



We are in new territory.

I do believe it's going to do a 2006 where it races ahead early only to stall and finish second. However that was followed by 2007 which was an explosive year. Ditto 2011 and 2012. Note the 5 year cycles.

Just to add a little more...

This is for April 2016.



I know it's El Nino and I know ML has a tendency to be impacted by the local volcanic area... But.... It still has a month of growth to go...

And this

Fort McMurray record[ed] a temperature of 32.6C earlier this week, which is significantly above the normal high temperature for early May of around 14C.

The article is not the best ever read, but the last few paragraphs are apposite.

I was there in '79 and the oil sands mining was in its infancy. Ft McMurray population was about 10,000. How quickly things change.