The Science of Solar Ponds Challenges the Climate Crisis

 

This is the transcript to the video at https://youtu.be/wl3_YQ_Vufo

Welcome everyone.

Today I want to demonstrate how the science of solar ponds can provide useful inexpensive heating, without the need for exotic materials. Furthermore, an understanding the science of solar pond heating will profoundly change how you view climate crisis narratives. Despite air temperatures averaging 68F, solar ponds can fantastically almost triple temperatures in their bottom layer to over 190F.

There are 2 major ways to raise a solar ponds' temperature:

Radiative heating and Dynamical heating.

Radiative heating, increases the amount of light energy. Sunny days raise temperatures more than cloudy days. But high solar pond temperatures can peak without any change radiative heating due to dynamical heating. Dynamical heating happens by suppressing convection & cooling, so that heat accumulates and drives very high temperatures.

Solar pond dynamical heating suppresses cooling by creating a density gradient, with fresh water at the surface and dense salt water at the bottom. Because the dense salty bottom water is heavier, it doesn't rise to the surface, despite warming to 190F.

Bottom layer heat can only ventilate via its micron thick skin surface. Unable to rise to the skin surface, heat rapidly accumulates in the bottom layer.

Solar pond science is based primarily on an 8th grade understanding that things less dense than water will float and denser things will sink.

A pot of water on your stove first heats the bottom layer. Heating makes the bottom layer expand and become less dense. That causes a convection current with the warmer water rising and cooler denser water from the top sinking.

But that dynamic doesn’t happen in a salt pond, because the bottom water's high salt concentrations overcome any heating effect.

Typical density demonstrations for 8th grade science use colored water to visualize salinity effects and are available online. For example, on the left side of the container, the yellow water is fresh. The blue-green water with added salt, here measured at 35 parts per thousand, was added but immediately sank below the fresh water. To continue the demonstration, green water separated on the right side had only half the salt, 17 ppt. When the separator was removed, that water inserted between the fresher and denser layers.

Adults have embraced this science, making layered cocktails using liqueurs with different densities, such as this Patriot drink for the 4th of July. Hopefully, adults can extend that understanding to better understand our changing climate.

Here's a closer look at salt pond dynamics. Ponds are typically just 10.5 feet deep. An upper layer of fresh water must be maintained at a depth of 1.6 feet. Temperatures in this layer never get hot enough to be useful as it is constantly cooled by radiating heat away or by losing it via evaporation and contact with the air.

The pond's bottom half is nearly 5 feet thick and saturated with salt. That water is too dense to rise and mix with the fresh surface layer. So unable to convect upwards and cool, the heat accumulates.

The trapped hotter bottom water is then circulated to heat a building or a greenhouse. Or the near boiling temperatures can drive turbines that generate electricity. Although solar ponds can never solve all our energy needs, the most promising environmental application is desalinization. Ocean water provides an endless cheap supply of salty water. Producing fresh water for desalinization reduces water withdrawal from our streams and rivers, thus benefitting aquatic animals. Desalinization would also reduce ground water withdrawals that have caused many coastal cities to sink closer to and below sea level.

The same dynamical heating seen in solar ponds is ubiquitous throughout nature. Antarctica's Lake Vanda (highlighted by red rectangle and red dot in upper left), provides a testimonial to the power of dynamical heating. Despite brutal sub-freezing air temperatures averaging from -22F to 5 F, heat accumulates in its bottom layers and reaches room temperature, 70F.

That amplification of solar heating is more amazing when you consider Lake Vanda receives very little sunshine for half the year, receiving just 40% of the sunshine entering tropical waters. Furthermore, the sunlight that reaches the bottom layers is minimal, being at the depth limit of sunlight penetration.

Nor does greenhouse warming from CO2 contribute at all. Researchers have shown Antarctica gets so cold, that uniquely, greenhouse gases there have a cooling effect. Like the bottom layer of a salt pond, it is the salty bottom layer of Lake Vanda that accumulates heat.

Although short wave energy from the sun and longwave energy from greenhouse gases are all measured in W/m2, they affect water very differently! (For those unfamiliar with Watts, it is simply a measure of energy per second. More Watts simply indicate more energy). Using 260 W/m2 as the average shortwave solar energy entering the water, the uppermost layers absorb the most energy. Without a salinity effect the upper layers are the warmest. Solar penetration then declines with depth. In completely clear water, absorbed solar energy is reduced to near zero at a 100 meters depth.

The added red line approximates the typical solar pond depth of 10.5 feet. At that depth, enough heat is absorbed and accumulates quickly enough for efficient practical use of its heat, by raising temperatures to over 180F. Deeper ponds are avoided because as solar penetration declines, the average bottom temperatures also decline making it less efficient for any practical use.

The generalized temperature gradient in lakes and oceans is just the opposite of what is observed in solar ponds, or Lake Vanda or everywhere there is a salinity effect. Without a salty layer to trap subsurface heat, upper layers are always warmer than deeper layers. The upper layer can have a uniform temperature because the winds and convection constantly mix the water. Below 200 meters, the deep water uniformly averages 39°F (4°C)

However, the mixed layer's temperature is not completely uniform. The skin layer is almost always cooler than the warmer mixed layer below. The skin layer averages just a few microns deep. But any heat absorbed in the mixed layer of the ocean, or a salt pond, can only escape via that very shallow skin layer. The skin layer is cooler because it is constantly losing heat to the atmosphere.

The mixed layer is warmer because its heated water must first rise next to the skin layer, where heat is slowly transported via conduction and warms the skin layer. Only then can the mixed layer's absorbed solar heat be radiated away or be lost via evaporative cooling. That delay in cooling causes a daily temperature cycle with a warm solar-heated diurnal layer that cools during the night. Similarly deeper waters will accumulate heat during the summer and ventilate it during the winter.

In contrast to deep solar heating, longwave greenhouse energy behaves very differently. Although greenhouse energy supplies nearly twice the energy to the skin layer, that energy does not penetrate any deeper than a few microns. Thus, unlike the delayed cooling of deeper layers, absorbed greenhouse heat can be radiated back to space immediately.

A 2018 ocean study measured 410 W/m2 of greenhouse longwave energy entering the ocean's skin surface, while simultaneously the skin surface radiated away 470 W/m2. The skin layer almost immediately radiated the 410 W/m2 of greenhouse heat back to space plus an additional 60 W/m2 of radiation from the rising solar-heated layers. In addition, the skin surface lost latent heat (LH) via evaporation and sensible heat (SH) via contact with the atmosphere.

Like the dense salty layers of a solar pond that trap and accumulate heat, oceans naturally have salty Barrier Layers, trapping heat that affects climate and extreme weather. Ocean "Barrier Layers" were first detected just 30 years ago, but since then 100s of studies point out the importance Barrier Layer heating and the need for such dynamical heating to be included more realistically in global climate models.

While this 1992 diagram may seem a bit confusing at first glance, the science of a Barrier Layer isn't much more complex than concepts taught in 8th grade.

The black line shows how measured temperatures change with depth. The blue line shows salinity changes and the red line shows density changes. Based on density, in this study the ocean's upper 40 meters represents the ocean's well "mixed layer" where temperature and salinity are homogeneous.

The middle layer highlighted in orange, is the Barrier Layer between 40 & 80 meters depth. Despite declining solar penetration, the Barrier Layer contains warm water similar to the upper mixed layer. Below the Barrier Layer is the colder thermocline where temperatures rapidly cool as solar penetration declines.

The increasing salinity and density of the Barrier Layer minimizes both any upward mixing of colder thermocline waters while trapping heat much longer than possible in the mixed layer. Barrier Layers are often detected because that trapped heat raises temperature higher than the upper mixed layers.

Several studies have recently shown that understanding ocean Barrier Layers provides valuable knowledge for predicting intense deadly hurricanes and cyclones. Without a Barrier Layer, hurricanes rapidly pull cool thermocline waters into the mixed layer, weakening the heat supply that drives the storms. In contrast, a thick Barrier Layer helps a storm maintain its intensity by inhibiting that upward circulation of cooler water.

In contrast to media fear mongering, the international disaster database, shows climate-related deaths since the 1920s have plummeted from nearly 250 per million to less than 10. Our increasing ability to predict and prepare for devastating storms has largely been responsible for this success. And our increasing understanding of the effects of Barrier Layers is improving that knowledge.

Also, as illustrated by this study in England, the number of deaths, (represented by the vertical bars) increase, as temperatures decrease (represented by the curves). Peak deaths correlate with the coldest temperatures from December through February. The good news is, there is reason to believe that any accumulation of heat in our oceans' Barrier Layers could drive warmer & milder temperatures and reduce winter deaths.

The Pacific Warm Pool is the earth’s greatest example of a natural solar pond. The warm pool contains the earth's warmest body of ocean water averaging between 82F and 90F. Because the warm pool generates the earth's greatest amount of heat and moisture which then gets transported across the world and affects global climates, it is nicknamed the "earth's climate heat engine". The warm pool has been increasing since the end of the Little Ice Age, correlated with our 150 years of global warming. Warm pool warmth has also sustained the greatest diversity and abundance of coral reefs, giving the region another nickname "the Coral Triangle".

The size of the warm pool and its stored heat increases during La Nina-like conditions, and La Nina-like conditions have predominated over the past 150 years. During La Nina -like conditions the trade winds remove surface water heated in the eastern Pacific and sweeps it westward to the warm pool. There, with the assistance of a strong Barrier Layer, heat is stored as deep as 200 meters.

The removal of warm surface water results in a cooler eastern Pacific which reduces cloud cover. That increases solar heating and increases evaporation, producing saltier surface waters.

The red regions here represent the areas where ocean evaporation exceeds precipitation, increasing surface salinity. The trade winds then transport that warm salty water westward, where the higher salinity drives dynamical heating of the warm pool.

The warm pool's freshwater layer, required to create a natural solar pond, is provided by the Intertropical Convergence Zone, or ITCZ. The ITCZ produces 32% of all global rainfall.

In this December 28th, 2022, screen shot from a national weather service model, the lighter blue represents the regions with the most rainfall, and ITCZ’s location. The observed heaviest rainfall over the warm pool completes the conditions needed to accumulate the warm pool heat that powers our earth's heat engine. Despite solar pond dynamics, warm pool temperatures never reach the extreme levels observed in solar ponds.

Three major dynamics prevent such extreme warming. First, warmer ocean temperatures enable more intense atmospheric convection that removes heat via evaporation. The second factor is an El Nino. During an El Nino the warm water stored deeply in the warm pool migrates eastward towards the Americas. That brings deeply stored warm water closer to the surface where it can now ventilate and shifts heavy rainfall to the eastern Pacific.

During each El Nino event (represented here by the red arrows), the ventilation of stored ocean heat confusingly raises the global air temperature. The media incorrectly attributes such warmer air temperatures to global warming. But counter-intuitively the earth is really cooling because heat that had been stored in the warm pool for years is now being ventilated back to space.

Long term changes in the Pacific Warm Pool over thousands of years provide scientists with critical information about the most important factors controlling the world's heat engine and thus our weather today.

During the Holocene Optimum around 10,000 to 8,000 years ago, the thermocline at the bottom of the warm pool, was over 1F warmer than today. Since that time, its temperature has steadily declined. In contrast, most climate models erroneously simulate steadily rising temperatures in the warm pool over the past 10,000 years.

These modeling failures largely happen when warm pool temperatures are incorrectly assumed to be driven by rising CO2. Unfortunately, dynamical heating by the warm pool's Barrier Layers is not well modeled.

Ice cores find that CO2concentrations were at a low point 10,000 years ago and have increased throughout the Holocene. Despite all the evidence that the warm pool cooled while CO2 concentrations increased, insufficient climate models still suggest that rising CO2 will cause catastrophic ocean warming.

The declining Holocene warm pool temperatures are better explained by increasing El Nino events. 10,000 years ago, El Nino events were more rare and most researchers suggest the Pacific ocean was predominantly in a La Nina-like state. (Note that the timeline direction is reversed in this graph).

Changes in the sun's strength have also played a role. Based on carbon-14 dating, the coldest period of the Holocene, the Little Ice Age, coincides with a weaker sun and sunspot minimums. Despite higher CO2 concentrations than the Holocene Optimum, during the Little Ice Age, Arctic sea ice reached both its greatest extent and thickness in 10,000 years.

Most researchers have determined the Pacific Ocean was in an El Nino -like state during the little ice age. Although slightly lower solar output during sunspot minimums, would only slightly weaken radiative heating, lower solar heating does weaken the trade winds causing a much greater effect on dynamical heating of the warm pool.

Extreme warm pool temperatures are also prevented because its accumulated heat is constantly exported. The pathways of warm ocean currents emanating from the tropics and moving towards the poles are illustrated here in pink.

Satellite data reveal where more heat enters the ocean than leaves (shown in red). The location of the greatest heat entering the ocean is consistent with La Nina like conditions. Regions shown in blue represent regions where exported tropical heat is ventilated and warms the air in that region, warmer than local radiative heat would.

I'll end here with an extreme example demonstrating the enormous impact of exported heat from ocean warm pools and its effect on the earth's climate. When antarctica was part of a single continent called Pangea, Antarctica was insulated from ocean currents, and accordingly much of Antarctica was glaciated. During the Cretaceous period, 94 million years ago, the continents were separating, allowing warm waters from the tropics to reach Antarctica. Despite being centered over the south pole, warm ocean currents promoted a warm Antarctic climate where dinosaurs thrived. Thick coal producing forests survived after the dinosaur extinctions.

As the continents continued to spread, about 35 million years ago, Antarctica became an island surrounded by the Antarctic Circum-polar Current, and once again tropical heat was blocked from reaching Antarctica.

As a result, despite CO2 concentrations 4 times higher than today, glaciers began forming in Antarctica, and Antarctica has continued to became so cold that only one vertebrate species, the Emperor Penguin, can survive its winter.

So before adopting bizarre solutions by egomaniacs like Bill Gates, who is working to block the sun and cool the planet, please examine all the science.

Likewise before believing, we are plunging into a human-caused climate crisis, please ask:

• How does radiative and dynamical heating increase warm pool temperatures?

• How does greenhouse energy possibly heat below the skin surface?

• How does exported heat from warm pools affect our climate and what are the contributions of natural La Nina and El Nino-like conditions.

If you follow all the science undeniably affecting our climate, you just might sleep better tonight knowing there is no climate crisis.

Our democracy depends on a diverse array of good critical thinkers. So, please shun mindless group think. Instead embrace renowned scientist, Thomas Huxley’s advice:

“Skepticism is the highest of duties and blind faith the one unpardonable sin.”

so if you appreciate the science clearly presented here, science rarely presented by mainstream media then please click the like button, share and subscribe to this channel and leave a comment

CLIMATE FEAR MONGERING: BAD ANALYSES PRODUCE BAD REMEDIES

 This is the transcript to a presentation I am giving to a few local groups. The video seen at   

https://youtu.be/pZIlMwGIVCI

Thanks for having me here. First, I am not a climate scientist. I am an ecologist, and I humbly note ecology requires a higher degree of thinking to untangle the many contributing causes of complex problems.

While director of San Francisco State University's Sierra Nevada Field Campus, I was monitored 6 meadow systems in the Sierra Nevada for the Forest Service. One meadow began to dry, vegetation withered, and wildlife began disappearing. When I showed students and colleagues this meadow's deterioration, I was struck by their knee jerk response. Despite just a half-hour visit, most declared this was just what global warming theory predicted. Rising CO2 was making the land warmer, drier and causing animals to go extinct.

In contrast, as an ecologist I had to consider landscape changes, geological history, changes to hydrology, biological interactions, as well as weather and natural climate changes. And I had been observing those effects for 15 years.

Historical temperatures revealed maximum temperatures were warmer in the 1930s. I eventually determined it was the disruption of stream flows and the water table that caused all the problems.

We restored the streams, raised the water table and the meadow became more resilient during droughts and wildlife became more abundant. Lowering CO2 emissions would have had no impact.

In their defense, the misguided knee jerk response by students and colleagues is a function of the constant drone by the media that rising CO2 is heating and drying the land and threatening mass extinctions.

The media thrives on click bait stories that attract the public's attention. Fear sells and fires, floods, heatwaves, and droughts are scary. The media typically pushes only the scary scientific theories and ignores an abundance of more reasonable skeptical science.

I find it far more worrisome that we are generating hopelessness in our children with the constant ranting about a climate apocalypse and mass extinctions. There is a definite rise in depression among our kids that is certainly due in part to the media's end of the world stories.

It is even more scary that climate idiots like Bill Gates believes he can save the world, and that he is wealthy and powerful enough to fund foolish solutions like dimming the sunlight that reaches the earth by pumping more dust into the sky.

To reduce global warming, fear crazed politicians have pushed fertilizer restrictions that will dangerously reduce our food supply and raise our food costs. And inspired by reduced traffic during the covid lockdowns, there is an extreme group of fringe lunatics advocating climate lockdowns to save your life.

The media amplifies our fears by promoting unvetted scientific studies that argue climate change is linked to 5 million deaths a year. And it will cause 83 million excess deaths in 80 years.

But the data do not support such fear mongering. The International Disaster database reveals the climate related death risks per million people has dropped from about 250 to near zero since 1920.

When gross mortality is examined for each month, it is the cold months of December thru February with the greatest deaths, while the warmest months have the fewest.

And there has been no rising trend in the death rate since 1998. Us old farts battling diabetes and heart problems have the highest death rates (the pink line). So, I take comfort in knowing we are benefitting from slightly warmer temperatures.

Consider the fact that many elderlies flee the colder states of the north to settle in the warmer states of the south, for their health and longevity.

A person moving from New York to Florida will immediately experience a 20-degree Fahrenheit rise in average temperature. Yet the media and alarmist scientists claim just a 2.7-degree Fahrenheit rise over the last century due to climate change will cause millions of excess deaths. Such claims are simply dishonest fearmongering.

In contrast to climate crisis narratives, heat waves are typically balanced by cooler temperatures elsewhere. The common wavy jet stream pattern across the United States brings above average warming to the west and simultaneously cooling to the east.

Beneath a jet stream's ridge, high pressure systems form. The dry descending air in a high-pressure system promotes cloudless conditions and greater solar heating.

The descending air warms adiabatically and creates a heat dome by trapping heat at the surface. And the clockwise motion draws warm air up from the south. All these factors cause heat waves far more than greenhouse gases can.

A jet stream's trough creates a low-pressure system which causes air to rise and clouds to form and reducing solar heating. Its counterclockwise spin combines with the flow on the eastern side of an adjacent high-pressure to draw cold air down from the north. Such offsetting dynamics of warming and cooling are common outside the tropics.

Yet media outlets that want to scare you about climate change will cherry-pick just the regions experiencing the heat wave, as many did during the June 19, 2022, European heat wave.

In contrast, honest weather people interested in truly educating the public about weather will provide the bigger picture, that also shows the cooling to the east. It is impossible to blame global warming and a climate crisis for both a heat wave and simultaneous adjacent cold wave.

People get duped by climate change alarmists who constantly claim heat waves are getting worse. But again, EPA data does not support such claims. Heatwave frequency peaked in the 1930s, and the heat wave index today is like the 1900s.

Because weather causes temperatures to vary by several degrees just within a city's limits, a record high temperature may be observed in one city but not its neighboring cities. So, examining record high temperatures for the whole state is much more informative about how the global climate is changing.

California's record high was 134F measured on July 10, 1913. It is also the record high for the world.

Alarmists claim global warming will cause higher record temperatures. Yet despite being the USA’s warmest state, Florida’s record high is only 108F and set in 1931. The highest record temperatures are usually a function of dryness and atmospheric circulation patterns.

For example, much further north, states like Montana and North Dakota experienced much higher record temperatures of 117F and 120F, which were set in 1937 and 1936 respectively. Those higher temperatures in northern states are a function of the migrating jet stream's ridges that produce dry heat domes. Despite a period of much lower greenhouse gas emissions, 31 of the lower 48 states set their record high temperatures before 1940.

Cities amplify natural heating by reducing vegetation and drying out the land and rapidly shunting rainfall into sewer systems. Since 1950, the world's population increased by about 5 billion people. Many moved into flood plains, reclaiming wetlands, and expanding urban heat islands. People moving from the country to the city can experience a 5F to 6F increase in average temperature. Making urban populations more vulnerable to fearmongering about a warming climate crisis.

California's state climatologist published a study correlating each county's population with temperature change. Counties with over a million people experienced a rising temperature trend. While counties with under 100,000 experienced no trend, just the natural oscillations expected from El Nino/La Nina cycles.

NOAA's former director of the National Centers for Environmental Information published a 1996 study correlating temperatures with a city's population

For example, a city of 200,000 will increase weather station minimum temperatures by 0.87C (1.5F) compared to towns with only 2,000 people. Despite small drops in maximum temperatures, the rising minimum increased the average temperature by 0.75F, which gives the misleading impression that we are overheating.

The best solution for urban populations is to increase urban greenery and moisture. Reducing fossil fuels will never reduce oppressive urban heat island effects.

To add to the climate complexities, despite a homogenous blanket of increasing carbon dioxide, 34% of all the American weather stations with 70 + years of data have experienced cooling trends (colored blue). Cooling trends adjacent to neighboring warming trends suggest landscape differences that cause such opposite temperature trends.

The heavily populated regions of the east and west coasts show very few stations with cooling trends, just as urban heat islands would predict. In contrast, climate scientists designate the southeastern USA as a "warming hole" because cooling trends overwhelmingly dominate.

It's true, if you average all the weather stations, the average American temperature is warming. But such averaging mis-guides policy. Remedies to stop warming can never benefit regions that have been cooling. More likely, such policies will worsen the negative impacts of colder temperatures on human health and agriculture.

Using global averages totally misleads analyses of natural weather tragedies. For instance, politicians told us that the 2022 flooding in Kentucky (located in red circle) was intensified by global warming. Alarmist scientists inappropriately used the irrelevant factoid that warmer air can hold more moisture, so they could blame fossil fuel burning for amplifying the floods.

But it is dishonest, not scientific, to apply that factoid to a region experiencing a cooling trend.

Kentucky's location and topography make it prone to flooding. Steep slopes concentrate rainfall, flooding valley’s where people have unwisely built in natural flood plains.

Five of Louisville, Kentucky’s 10 worst floods happened before 1950. The worse flood was January 1937. Furthermore, nearly all the worse floods happened during the coldest months, when science tells us the atmosphere holds the least moisture. Alarmists ignore the fact that when moist air collides with colder air, it is the cold that forces more rain.

Still, to push a climate crisis agenda, President Biden, not known for his scientific prowess, blamed global warming for intensifying Kentucky’s flooding as did NPR, which now more commonly is called "national propaganda radio" for its biased reporting.

Recent California wildfires are dishonestly blamed on dryness attributed to global warming. But recent dryness is the result of another natural, sea-saw climate. La Ninas increase droughts in California but increase the monsoons and floods in Asia. Since 1999 the Pacific Ocean has primarily been in a negative Pacific Decadal Oscillation which makes La Ninas more common.

In contrast El Ninos amplify flood risks in California but droughts in southeast Asia. During a positive Pacific Decadal Oscillation there are more El Ninos, and it appears that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation will soon revert to a more El Nino like condition suggesting a coming reversal of California dryness. El Nino-like conditions frequently occurred during the Little Ice Age turning California’s Central Valley into a swamp land.

Instrumental data detect no trend in droughts across the USA. The most extreme dryness is concentrated in the 1930s contributing to the worst heatwaves.

Studies of California’s tree ring response to droughts find no trends in California. Severe drought, worse than 2014, have occurred about 4 times a century since 1300 AD.

It is more akin to criminal misinformation than science to suggest recent wildfires in California are due to CO2 warming and drying. In their attempt to scare the public, click bait media, politicians, and scientists with no integrity, focus public attention on trends starting in the 1970s when fire suppression policies were ending.

However, more honest scientist seeking connections between climate and wildfires understand they must examine fire frequencies and area burnt over the past centuries. In Oregon fire experts determined fires were much more frequent and burnt more area in the early 1900s before fire suppression policies were enacted.

Similarly, researcher found that fires were far more common during the cooler Little Ice Age throughout the American southwest.

Unfortunately, the public is easily duped when they do not understand the basics of wildfires. For instance, most people do not know what is meant by 1-hour fuels. Experts always consider the amount of one-hour fuels when determining fire danger. Consider that to start a campfire, people must first use paper or fine dead twigs, then add slightly larger kindling before adding larger logs.

One-hour fuels have a very thin diameter like paper and can dry out in just a matter of hours. One-hour fuels are the key ingredient for wildfires ignitions and become highly flammable on any sunny day no matter how the climate changes. In America’s northeast, public service warnings constantly tell people that dead grasses and leaf litter can impose a serious fire danger even if dead grass was just recently exposed from melting snow, or a yesterday’s rainfall.

No matter how the concentrations of CO2 change, it will not affect wildfires. Both preventing catastrophic forest fires and protecting your home require maintaining a mosaic of habitat and defensible spaces.

Large areas of shrubs and grassy ground cover and leaf litter that contain abundant 1- and 10-hour fuels, can carry fires to your house and across widespread forest habitats.

Minimizing ground fuels, maintaining well-spaced shrubs, and eliminating undergrowth that can carry fire into the treetops promoting far reaching embers helps maintain a home's defensible space as well as a resilient forest.

In neighborhoods with closely spaced houses, the whole neighborhood requires a defensible boundary that eliminates ground fuels. Once one house catches fire, it radiates enough heat to readily burn neighboring homes. I observed rows of homes demolished in the Paradise fire, yet the leaves and needles of the surrounding trees were unaffected.

Still the fear mongering media blamed climate change. However, like all northern California, maximum temperatures were higher in the 1930s. Climate change had no impact on a fire caused by a faulty electrical grid and the unnatural accumulation of ground fuels due to decades of fire suppression.

To see past all the media misinformation and build truly resilient environments we must embrace renowned scientist Thomas Huxley’s advice: 

 skepticism is the highest of duties blind faith the one unpardonable sin

 For those who are interested in the peer review papers from which the evidence from this presentation was gathered, just email me a specific request jsteele@sfsu.du and I’ll send you a pdf. 

 Thank you