News roundup for Tue, Apr 12, 2022

I like the idea of practicing drills while traveling!

Hmm…brown fox? Check. Overly friendly? Check. 🤔

😂😂

As for Global temp / C02 / Methane issues, I think this extended time period bar chart is informative.

No Rabies in the UK thank heavens.

Yeah, thats why we vaccinate dogs and thats why rabies from dogs is mostly an issue in Africa or Asia.

I think the graph is accurate but:

1. The rate of change since 1800 is more important than actual temperature. We could live with very slow and gradual increases but not faster increases. The axes are not labeled in a way so that you can have a good idea of what the tangent lines would look like at a given point.
2. Agricultural civilization has only been around for a few thousand years during a period of relative temperature stability.
3. More people = more dependence on highly complex systems that might not be able to adapt to rapid changes.
4. Could people adapt/adjust to rapid increases in temperature? We don’t really know.

I don’t want to spend too much time “debunking” or arguing, but I think a lot of people aren’t well-informed about global warming and it’s gotten too politicized.

I’m in the PNW and we’ve thought a little about relocating, but honestly every location has its pros and cons. Sure we might have wildfires, drought, high crime in Metro areas, cascadia, volcanoes and the occasional wind storm or ice storm, but we don’t have hurricanes or devastating tornadoes. 🤷‍♀️😂 What we do have here is our community, our home, our family and lots of prep/planning for possible emergencies and that lets me sleep at night (mostly). 😊

We have winter, which is like summer 🙂  Bit warmer, Bit Colder, windier or less, raining a bit or less.  Get a few storms in the last 15 years though. Last propper winter where I live was in 2010.

That’s a good one! Bookmarked for myself. If we get more good links by the end of the day I might update the roundup with them.

Well in that case, here are more for ya!

• EWG’s Tap Water Database
• National Inventory of Dams
  • because Below Aging U.S. Dams, a Potential Toxic Calamity
• Wildfire Risk to Communities
• Flood Factor
• WANO Member World Map of nuclear reactors
  • nuclear power plants suffer accidents (and releases) frequently but even when they’re operating normally they leak toxic radioactivity into the environment nearby

Oh my, I thought I would get maybe 2 or 3 links, and not all at once hahaha 

Thank you for putting them together, they were all great. I’ve added them to the list as promised, but also redirected people to the comments, where this community truly shines 🙂 But now I think we’re good 😉 

Very interesting, Hardened. Thanks for sharing.

I just posted similar above before reading yours. Love my Willamette Valley! I have been looking into Washington areas if we decide to relocate. Climates in both states are very similar, but for now we have no reason to move. (Unless an affordable multi-family homestead appears like magic, but that is highly unlikely. Lol.)

A lot of the recent articles on climate-resilient regions within the U.S. have cited the PNW as well as the Upper Midwest. I’ve actually seen the PNW mentioned more than New England. And that seems right to me! I’d rather take my chances here than in the UM or NE, for the reasons you cite, Trace (the winters, the humidity, hurricanes, tornados— baseline conditions in a lot of the rest of the country really don’t seem too mild or desirable to me). Totally agree about Ashland as a poor comparison, too. It’s so dry— more like Lake County or Redding down in California than where you, me, or brekke are. Fires will get worse further north in OR as climate change worsens, but that doesn’t bother me too much: Some degree of fire exposure is inevitable in the West, but there are better and worse places to be within the greater region and you can mitigate your risk. Not every town is Paradise, CA.

I do respect the magnitude of the wallop a Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake will pack, but if you’re living the homestead life, you’re probably going to ride that out a lot better than those of us in the cities or suburbs, so I can see why it doesn’t register as a big “con”.

At the end of the day, as you say, there is no perfect place, and one could do a lot worse than the PNW. Plus, you can’t ruin your life in the name of protecting it; I’ve spent my whole life in the West and really have no interest in living anywhere else, even if you could convince me that doing so would be better from a preparedness standpoint. Given that constraint, OR/WA or far northern coastal CA are my picks.

With all this talk about the upper midwest being a desirable/safer place, I just wanted to point out that there is a “red flag warning” (=high wild fire danger) in central Iowa right now.  Ugh.

I think a lot of the western wildfire problem is being way oversold as climate change, when it can actually be traced to millions of acres of beetle-killed timber, which is almost certainly a result of forest mismanagement. Driving over the crest of the Cascade Range can be a heartbreaking experience. Mother Nature is cleaning up our trainwreck by burning it down and starting over.  Also, a lot of human property loss is the direct result of more and more people moving into dense forest areas. These are people who expect to be saved by services that don’t exist near them.  Sound familiar? People that live in the middle of a kindling box should probably not be surprised to find themselves in the middle of a wildfire, yet they are.  I think that a lot of natural systems, such as water cycles, were almost irreparably broken 150-200 years ago by the voracious overgrazing  of western rangeland that is so fragile it was never able to recover.  A relative of mine keeps blaming the California drought on government and environmentalists without considering that California is a desert to begin with, that supports a groaning overload of humanity on stolen water.  He has a miniscule understanding of water cycles and blames the “desertification” occurring there on shutting off the water to agriculture and leaving the ground unplowed.  Everybody blames cows for everything, but I believe that returning a few million acres to grassland and managed grazing could go a long way to restoring water cycles and ending droughts.

But of course everyone’s following the red herring.

I agree the PNW has its warts, and I honestly think that having a little homestead here is becoming an unattainable dream for many.  We’ve considered moving away from the Willamette Valley many times, and now, in retrospect, we are VERY glad we didn’t cave to that impulse.

@Dogpatch – I totally agree that forest management, development in the WUI, and beetle killed trees are a big part of the western wildfire story. There is a column of researchers who argue that climate change is simply reinstating historic fire regimes (so, the effects of climate change are now swamping the effects of fire suppression, bringing us to what was normal pre-Smokey the Bear, albeit by a different mechanism), but that research is controversial; another column of researchers think those folks are measuring the historic baseline incorrectly. Obviously hard to come up with good measures for how often something happened before written records were kept, so those researchers will probably all be arguing about this until the sun engulfs the earth. However, these people pretty much all agree that climate change and forest management are both contributing factors to the devastating fire behavior we’ve seen in the West of late. The bark beetle thing is also climate-linked: Warmer winters mean fewer beetles are killed during the winter months, then more outbreaks. It’s basically like all roads — fire suppression; fights among industry, enviros, and public lands managers; climate change; development in the WUI (which means more ignition sources but also more advocates for fire suppression on adjacent public land)— lead to… fire. More frequent, more intense, less predictable fire.

Thank you for fighting the good fight to help your friend understand that stopping water deliveries to agriculture in California (which is a relatively recent phenomenon!) doesn’t drive drought. You might mention that a lot of ag land in California has become unfarmable due to salinization caused by irrigated ag… not exactly desertification, but sort of similar. 

The climate threat posed by cows is real (because methane, which they burp, is such a potent greenhouse gas), but I’ve always felt that grazing can play an important role in Western grasslands, as well as in conservation, food security, and community self-sufficiency. (The ranchers I used to work with in Montana taught me a lot about beetle kill, incidentally— most of them were also, to some degree or another, engaged in forest management.)

EDIT: Not to say that forest management isn’t a factor in beetle kill, too. You can use forest management to mitigate beetle outbreaks… but warmer winters and drought stress are the big drivers of the problem, as I understand it.

It’s fascinating to hear all of these perspectives on good/bad places to live, and what you have taken into consideration. Thanks for sharing everyone.

The scary part is how similar rabies is to the fictional zombie disease. A disease that mixed the symptoms/severity of rabies with the infectiousness of COVID would be horrific.