Daily Kos

Why would any of the rich RWCM types care anything about Russia?  It is just a resource extraction country, the underground oil will still be there after the ground structures burn up.

Now a missing blonde cheerleader?  Or random celebrity cursing?  24/7 on that for sure!!!

Or a good source? I'm curious as to how severe this is compared to past occurrences.

Are the worst in a century but part of an increasing trend of severe storms and flooding in some areas ans increaing drought in others.

Please explain that.

We have no doubts it's related to global warming.  None. The progression is obvious.

They would have to have correspondents in Russia, they might have to have translators to interview people, they might have to do some research so it might cut into profits....that would be a no.  

relevant to ecology or science.

I like the term Corporatist Republican Accomodating Propaganda (CRAP) media. CRAP, all day, everyday, crap on every channel

focused on how most of the people were drowning because they were drunk, and the fires were started by careless smokers and barbecues. the heat wave was secondary.

as Americans, what more do we need to know? Now pass me the Cheez Whizz.

....our Earth is a small, life-supporting self contained spaceship in this infinitely vast universe.  Any thing affecting any part of spaceship Earth affects the entire ship.  

One thing about our atmosphere is it's lack of respect for national borders. Our air quality is greatly affected by the fires on the other side of our planet.  With the record continuing heat here we may be overdue for vast continental fires ourselves.

I hope that we haven't already gone over the point of no return in regard to global warming.  Humans may well be included among the species to become extinct in the coming mass extinction unless, by some miracle, people of all political and economic persuasions come to their senses NOW.

What this story needs in order to make it on TV over here, is cry-porn.  Mothers wailing over their dead sons, fathers sobbing over their dead daughters.  With close-ups of their faces.  

Ideally also a glimpse of a crispy corpse in the background, for extra titillation, but not more than a glimpse otherwise it might offend advertisers "good taste."  

Manhattan, according to some sources.

to care what goes on in Russia.

Looks like the Siberian permafrost is rapidly being converted to swamps, methane, and CO2.  A runaway freight train of positive feedback.

burning Peat-Bogs and Forest/Grass fires.

This is a question.  Ukraine?

You're next.
Anyone thinking they are immune to the "Russian disease" is in Dreamland.

http://wildfiremag.com/...

New cause of fire found

Wildfires were usually attributed to human negligence, careless agricultural burning and vandal ignitions of dry grass. But Russian forestry and emergency management officials found many forest fires were due to other causes.

The first identified cause is connected to the harvesting and selling of fern sprouts in the spring. Russia exports these sprouts to Japan and China. Fern sprouts often grow amidst grass, but fern pickers learned to remove the grass by burning it to make reaping easy.

The second identified cause relates to the extermination of a blood-sucking bug that may infect humans with encephalitis. In the spring, the forests of Siberia and the far eastern regions teem with these bugs, and considerable numbers of forest visitors have been hospitalized after being bitten. No economical way has been found to suppress this species without harming wildlife, so those people whose income depends on the accessibility of the forests sometimes burn the forest floor to kill encephalitis bugs.

But a more appalling cause of mass forest fires surfaced in this season: commercial arson. Police investigations have revealed that many ignitions in Eastern Siberia and the far eastern regions were organized by private logging companies to obtain cheap contracts for salvage logging of charred tree stands.

In these regions, many small logging companies are controlled by criminal organizations. They hire teenagers or vagabonds to set fire in valuable forest plots. In mid-May, three teenagers were caught by foresters while placing lighted matches on the forest floor in the Usolsky district of the Irkutsk region.
--------------
Somewhere else I read that sparks from the trains are setting off even more fires daily. That and people's careless tossing of cigarette butts, playing with firecrackers, and all the other things stupid people do.

One thing is for sure, the world should be helping put out these fires instead of ignoring them because we are ALL most likely going to be affected by the mass of smoke and toxic air. It's already being reported as hitting Oregon and the air in Central California today was hazy, too - don't know if that's Russian smoke or our own smog. Turkey is having sky-high temperatures because of it. We are all connected, folks. And that is going to become increasing clear, sadly, in the years ahead.

Once they get around to the floods in China and Pakistan.

You understand the implications of that phrase, right?

You could have one in DC, and still be miserable without risking life and health.

in a hurricane region is like building a nuclear power plant on or near an earthquake fault. Both insane. Both in existence.

Hundreds of people -- mostly young children and the elderly have died from extreme winter conditions (pneumonia).  I read about this last week from ROSE.  The Amazon rainforest was down below 40 degrees F, and regions have experienced very heavy snow.

Having said that, they tend to lose a lot of people in the mountain regions during their winters -- many of them are poor and not equipped for such conditions as well as a lack of medical care.  But it was the coldest in some regions down there in 46 years.

The bigger the dot, the greater the shift from normal. Red = hotter than normal, Blue = cooler.

Global warming science does not say there will be no areas that have cooler cools than normal, it simply says that the PLANET, OVERALL will be WARMER. And it IS. And it has been. And the trend lines over time show it accelerating.

So, yeah, Peru and a narrow band of other parts of S. America are a little (note the sizes of the dots) cooler than normal. The rest of the planet is ROASTING.

What now, are you going to ship Imhoffe's kids down to the WINTER region of the planet to build some igloos for a photo op?

Or are you going to grow up and stop shouting about dust motes when there's a log in your eye?

Is that complex situations have complex causes and complex events. Tv people like soundbites, and I think understanding this requires at least three paragraphs.

There were roughly five nearly simultaneous causes of fire in addition to natural normal causes, as far as I can make out. Some of them introduced fire in places where, I think, there had been natural barriers protecting underground deposits of flammable material. Once these barriers were breached, swathes of old growth instantly became fertile flame food.

The reasons people started fires range from actions with perfectly normal, good intent, such as protecting their children by killing encephalitic bugs, probably brought north by the changing climate, to bad things like corporate crime.

The convergence of these man-made acts with the natural burning, and the underground flammable stuff, plus changes in the atmosphere since the onset of man-made chemical dispersant, created the terrible conflagration in Russia.

Someone asked who would be next. You can see, based on the above, it would be difficult to tell-but I've gone over my third paragraph, and must fall silent.  

... of money.

Take a look at what their executives are paid.  

dollars their advertisers bring in order to turn a profit--if you do stories that might piss off your advertiser, you cut into your profit margin.

So no--we won't see too many stories like this in the corporate media...you certainly won't see them blame climate change.

is burning!!" stories.  Seems like fires fall into the "if it bleeds, it leads" category, but it's just a way to fill the screen with vivid imagery rather than to tell any bigger story.

Australia has been having terrible droughts for well over five years now.  In some cases entire towns lost their water supplies and had to be supplied from tankers until they could be moved.  

Drought and Heat Waves Batter Three Continents  

And this from a book published in 1995...

“The date is September 1998…..a severe drought…cut america’s grain harvest…in an unusual coincidence, droughts have also reduced grain harvest in Australia….the excess grain reserves of the eighties are a distant memory…Rapidly growing food demand…is outstripping supply….the prices of corn and wheat have tripled….in September a Class 5 hurricane slams into NYC…a week later a similar storm hits New Orleans….Early estimates place losses at $50 Billion….In mid October…The IPCC…130 leading climate scientists…message is simple and disturbing: advances in the atmospheric dynamics show that rising concentrations of carbon dioxide have increased the severity of catastrophic droughts and storms….The Prime Minister says that his government has concluded that coal-fired air pollution is causing so much damage within China that, for purely domestic reasons China will be better off following a different path…The next few months are extraordinarily hectic…binding carbon emission limits…burning coal is becoming as popular as cigarette smoking…GE make plans to invest billions in wind power manufacturing, while Siemens and Mitsubishi launch even larger efforts to expand their commitment to photovoltaic and solar thermal energy development….Amoco and Asea Brown Boveri declare that they are joining forces to build an array of hydrogen pipelines and fueling stations that will stretch from Los Angeles to Washington D.C… the world’s eight leading automakers announce plans to accelerate introduction of a new generation of hybrid-electric cars.
From “Power Surge, page 275” This book was published in 1995…:

No preventative action means remedial action, but how do you feed millions when their grain crop is so significantly impacted

it is part of the MSM discussion, so not completely out of place...

is wrong with the Presidential marriage?  I must have seen this on every channel.

The point of this diary, and my comment, is that the media focuses FAR too much attention on crap like Lindsey Lohan and not enough on stuff that REALLY MATTERS like the fires in Russia (or climate change, or the war in Afghanistan).

That's not to say there hasnt been coverage of the fires, there has been. But there hasnt been nearly enough. That's the point.

but thanks!

that have burned for decades and no way to put them out.

as well as practically every other bit of breaking news in my lifetime.

the line about remembering where you were when you heard a certain event had occurred?

i was listening to NPR.

far from perfect, but an incredible institution.

Yes, NBC Nightly News has something about the Russian fires and the Moscow smog nearly every night.  Of course probably not as thorough coverage as it should be.  No mention of global warming/climate change as I recall.

global warming is a myth created by Al Gore so that he can make money.

America in the 21st century.. stupidity rules and ignorance reigns.

America in the 22nd century.. doesn't exist.

fires of that size are not all that unusual here. However, there are bunches of them in Russia right now, not just a few, so that is indeed a lot of burning acreage.

companies make their money.

.... the "perpetual copyright" laws, that protect Mickey Mouse by enclosing the digital commons.  

If that doesn't make sense yet, keyword search "the enclosure acts" or go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/...

IMHO, Disney is pure evil wrapped up in a form that's "family friendly."  

Murdoch.

have been adamant about refusing any constraints on their industry.

Lets hope that President Medvedev and PM Putin put global climate change on their radar.

.... program, including becoming a world-class competitor in building wind turbines for export.  

China's planned energy mix for its electric grid is something like 40% wind to 60% nuclear, which is highly ambitious on the wind side, given European experience where wind is typically limited to 30% of the mix due to intermittency issues.  The use of small modular reactors to level out power production is probably the factor that enables China to plan for 40% wind.  

where most US pols and media don't:

[W]hat is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions in the past. This means that we need to change the way we work, change the methods that we used in the past."

http://climateprogress.org/...

Send us some money to offset the 150 years of carbon inventory you capitalist %#$@* made getting rich and we'll speed-up the clean energy investment which is already twice US spending with 1/5 of the percapita income and 1/4 the percapita CO2 emissions, including all the power consumed by American multinational who moved your dirty industry here so they could dump their shit on our land so you could turn around and point fingers.

Get a few facts and then let's have a rational discussion about this:

We're up to our necks in water this month thanks to your 150 years of coal burning that shows no signs of ending any day soon.

Want to debate the issues based on facts? I'm ready.

Hope to see Mr Stern in Tianjin in October with something more than "Kyoto is dead" on his lips.

BTW, it's the American public that doesn't believe in Global Warming while the rest of us deal with the consequences.

Very apt comparison.

These are pretty bad - and there's a good chance that, given how widespread they already are, they could easily surpass '72, especially since it doesn't look like the weather is going to cooperate.  I just wanted to point out that widespread fires are a fact of life there, much as it is for people who live, say, in Southern California.  

mostly about Moscow.  Take a look at international coverage: nearly every news story has focused, specifically, on the smoke hanging over Moscow.  

60 deaths is underestimating the mortality just as the number of deaths reported in '72 (well over a hundred, also due to the fires in the Moscow oblast') drastically underestimated them, too.  I'm not trying to pass it off as no big deal: I'm saying that our perspective on this is narrowed somewhat by the fact that the American media almost never covers Russia's perennial fires.  

The heat wave is hugely problematic, yes.  As is the drought.