Low water stage marks on hunger stones: verification for the Elbe from 1616 to 2015
https://cp.copernicus.org/articles/16/1821/2020/
Fascinating. Thanks. I'd never heard of hunger stones.
>> "Wenn du mich siehst dann weine" (if you see me, you will weep)
I suppose we would be taking the current drought more seriously if we thought we were about to starve to death.
Here in NC, we accept any excuse for festivals and beer....
Fire in the Pines Festival returns with food, hay-rides and a chance to watch a controlled burn
https://foxwilmington.com/local-news/fire-in-the-pines-festival-returns-with-food-hay-rides-and-a-chance-to-watch-a-controlled-burn/
The fire managers here quit using the word "controlled burn" a long time ago. I think that's a term that properly speaking comes from rocketry, not wildfire... it's right there in the word. WILDfire.
They say that there is no such thing as a controlled burn. They use the terms "prescribed burn" or "management fire" which have very different connotations and expectations.
Americans are flocking to wildfire country
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/09/americans-are-flocking-to-wildfire-country.html
There are a lot of things that are changing with respect to fire. Some are driven by climate change leading to higher temperatures and dryer vegetation. Some are driven by a century of fire suppression leading to massive fuel buildups. But a huge factor is the massive development in the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI). This is the primary driver of the increased amount of property damage from fire.
I read that the Camp Fire, which destroyed much of the town of Paradise burned 1000 homes. A fire in the 1960s burned the same footprint but only destroyed a dozen homes. Why? Because there were only a dozen homes there.
We all got lulled into a false sense of security by the era of successful fire suppression (roughly 1930 to 2000 or, some would say, 2010, discounting the big year of 2002). We didn't know that we were about to revert to a fire pattern more like we had from 7000 BC to 1930. Now we have all been disabused of that false sense of security, but we also have towns and small communities like mine littered throughout the WUI.
If you think back 100 years, all the big, destructive fires were urban, like the San Francisco Fire (https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=The_Great_San_Francisco_Fire_of_1906) (1906), the Chicago Fire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chicago_Fire) (1871), the London Fire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fire_of_London) (1666) and many many others.
We did get better at fighting urban fires, but the main changes were changes in building and zoning codes. Many people say we need the same for rural areas now.
In the most radical vision, Zeke Lunder says we shouldn't fight fires anymore, there should be no restrictions on setting fires, and if you burn down and rebuild, there should be no insurance and no fire suppression effort for the next fire.
https://the-lookout.org/2022/07/21/pyrofiction-hopepunk-biketopia/
If you don't want to read it all, search on "dictator" to get to his juicy vision of a future relationship with fire if Zeke were "dictator of all forests." Note that Zeke is a bona fide fire authority, one of the best commentators on ongoing incidents and makes his living forecasting fire. A serious guy.