From the Washington Times, idiocy only bureaucrats could muster:
“Since man first rubbed a pair of sticks together to make a fire, we’ve gathered around a campfire to cook food, enjoy good company and bask in the warmth of the glowing embers. Now the green spoilsports in Southern California want to take that all way, sending beach ring fire pits the way of the caveman.The South Coast Air Quality Management District will decide this summer whether to order the removal of 850 bonfire pits from Los Angeles and Orange county beaches on the pretense that fire is bad for the environment. To support its position, the agency concocted a study concluding that an evening beach fire creates as much particulate matter pollution as a diesel truck driving 564 miles
Man’s taming of fire enabled him to cook his food, bring light to the darkness, make stronger tools and survive the harshest of winters. It’s the one discovery upon which all civilizations are built. The assault on bonfires, fireplaces and stoves undermines one of the cornerstones of society. It’s what happens when government gets big enough to snuff out man’s greatest achievement.”
EDITORIAL: California to ban fire – Washington Times
OMG, as much as one diesel truck driving 564 miles.
Lessee, its about 700 miles from the California-Oregon border on Interstate 5 to the beach in Orange County.
Why not simply turn back one Orange County bound diesel truck a day at the California border agricultural inspection station to achieve that goal?
Oh, wait, that would be stupid.
More here: http://www.presstelegram.com/news/ci_23274978/wood-fire-pits-could-pose-health-problems-beach
One of the areas of rationale for the smoke police is the supposed rash of COPD. Of course, no one would dare comment on the percentage of COPD that is self inflicted by cancer stick usage.
Pass the smokeless logs please
To Zeke Hausfather:
Congratulations on your engagement, sir.
What a pity that during our roughly 200,000 years using fire, we never developed a capacity to tolerate moderate smoke and particulate levels.
(/sarc, for the clueless)
Albert Einstein has helped me deal with some of the big questions over the years. Latterly i find myself resorting to the following quote more and more,”Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the the universe.”
Does anyone know exactly how much “particulate matter” a diesel truck puts out? Somehow, I suspect it’s not as bad as it’s made out to be.
As an Australian I used to wonder why there were so many jokes about California.
I’m sorry John Howard is no longer our leader. He’d send our SAS to liberate California from its version of the Taliban.
Why don’t they just come clean and admit they just want to turn the entire state into a country club?
Better idea, ban the wacky baccy the Greens are growing in their backyards. Doubly good for the environment as will stop them releasing all that polluting smoke, and will stop them coming up with such crazy ideas.
The bonfire gets lit using a few trowels of coal from the BBQ, which are carefully placed inside the teepee of wood. Up it goes and pretty soon half of the crowd – the fire people – drag their garden chairs towards it and form a semicircle, settling in and getting good position around the fire. They’ll spend the evening, and some of them the whole night, feeding pallets to the fire, watching them burning, sipping their drinks and talking. They take turns for each other doing booze resupply runs to the kitchen, where cans, bottles and wine boxes are all piled up on every flat surface, including the floor.
Over the years, they’ve learnt to feed it one pallet at a time, rather than in the bad old days when they stacked them five deep, producing a towering inferno of such epic proportions, it could easily have been mistaken by a satellite for what those NORAD guys under Cheyenne mountain call a launch bloom.
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2013/05/24/birthday-bash/
Pointman
TonyG,
The answer about how bad is diesel truck particulate matter is basically this: If you have a room filled with particulates to the point where they completely displace all air in the room, any people in this room will suffocate. From this, we find an approximation of the point at which the pollution is 100% fatal. If all the people of CA were in that room, they’d all die. Now, draw a line from this concentration down to zero concentration and assume this linear relationship exists, between zero fatalities at zero concentration and the entire population at 100% concentration.
Now, the smoke from every diesel truck in CA would still be very close to the zero point of this graph and probably wouldn’t hurt anybody. But, if you take that extremely small concentration and find the number at the axis of your graph corresponding to that concentration and multiply that number by the entire population of CA, you get a non-zero number of fatalities from the smoke. Fictitious, but non-zero. We must, therefore, ban all particulate producing activities.
So.. the Los Angelus marathon… if we count the number who completed it in 2013 (22,361 finishers), @150 grams of CO2 per runner per mile(26.2) miles it is the SAME as 1318 (give or take a few) campfires.
Clearly it we should ban marathons……
Oh good God…
One of the reasons I live so close to the beach in Orange County is because we never, ever have any smog. We’re next to the freaking Pacific ocean! I can count on one hand the days where the air was anything less then perfect, and they were all due to raging fires in LA or in nearby wilderness areas.
Thanks a lot AQM. Thank you from saving me from that horrible beach fire smoke which is dispersed by air moving in from the largest ocean on Earth. I don’t know what I would do without you AQM, you raving idiots.
*Los Angeles.. In my defense spell check said it was right…. and I didn’t have a teleprompter.
564 miles eh? Not 563 or 565?
It has invariably been my experience that excessive precision in such results is a sure sign they are plucked out of thin air.
As most people should be able to figure out, this has nothing to do with the health effects of a little bit of smoke and everything to do with a bunch of wealthy people with connected friends that don’t want a bunch of riffraff hanging around “their” beach at night.
Elizabeth says:
May 24, 2013 at 10:24 am
In Australia you cannot have a barbeque in your own backyard because the smoke may bother your neighbours. That ‘s one of the many reasons why I left Australia 4 years ago.
Pray tell, where did you go that you determined was ‘better’ Elisabeth?
Now, who exactly number themselves amongst the august ‘South Coast Air Quality Management District’? Who are the elected(?) members of the committee that make this decision? What are their names? Where do they live?
Ensure these individuals own the decisions they make. Citing ‘them’ as ‘THEY’ merely releases ‘them’ from the painful hook of responsibility and ownership well associated with leadership BUT NOT WITH BUREAUCRACY. The impersonal anonymous safe world of ‘they’ is NOT an option for these toxic, humanity eroding Green clowns.
Increment by increment, the leftists are progressing towards their socialist green utopia. They are winning and we are losing.
Hey, ya know what? I haven’t received a WUWT “New Post” in my Inbox since 0956 today. I think A-th-y was serious!
Have a great weekend (life?), A-th-y, wherever you are!
The greenies are like a plague of locusts who, while not actually killing ‘real’ people, ‘sting’ them with all these anti-human restrictions, and all the while not wanting the harm the grass of the earth or any green plant or any tree. Ref…Rev.9:4
People that get these positions overseeing this kind of regulation are all the types who went to college not to learn but to prove they were smarter than everyone else and lord it over others. In short they’re killjoys.
Further to my last comment, the Air Quality Management Plan Advisory Group – 2015 AQMP contains all the usual culprits, a real MOWEK (Ministry of We Know Best) available individually for direct contact from details supplied in the provided link:
Current AQMP Advisory Group Members (PDF, 332k).
http://www.aqmd.gov/gb_comit/aqmpadvgrp/aqmpadvgrp.html
The individual members of the AQMD Governing Board may be found here: http://www.aqmd.gov/hb/gb.html
Who cares what the Californians do to themselves.. Its their State and if they want to gather around a solar powered light bulb let them..
Here in Ontario we have fire bans when its to dry (smart) and have to gather around a stinking light bulb.. It sucks, everybody is in bed by 10.. After a week of that I have no desire to ever go to the trouble and expense of camping again..
Fire + booze + good conversation = fun
its one of the few practices where young and old can sit down and bond.. A common practice that brings us closer together.. Its no wonder the big government leftists want to do away with it..
A crying shame they have to power to do so..
For those of you who are ready to leave California over the banning of beach fires….
FWIW…My Great Grandfather arrived in Sacramento in the fall of 1849. My Grandparents met in a stage coach stop which is now the Washoe House restaurant at 2840 Stony Point Rd, Petaluma. My parents met in the old Santa Rosa Hotel, which was destroyed in the 1964 earthquake. The point is that my family had a lot of time invested in California, nevertheless…
We left the Evil Empire (California) just after Gray Davis was elected. I refuse to contribute my tax dollars to a state of fools who would elect Boxer, Feinstein, and Davis. We now run a half-way house here in Texas for refugees from California. It requires serious re-education, somewhat akin to recovering children from a cult, but it is doable. When I meet a California refugees, they are shocked to find out that Texas is SO liberal that not only Blacks, Jews, and Hispanics can own a belt fed machine gun, but even lesbians! In the fascist city of San Francisco lesbians are prohibited from owning them. Imagine a place where the money you earn is YOURS and not only are you allowed to have the means of your own defense, but it is encouraged! (Only part of the above is hyperbole!)
By way of an example, one of the more beloved state wide elected officials is the Land Commissioner, Jerry Patterson. He handily won his last election. Here is one of his radio commercials:
And here is our Governor at the NRA Convention is Houston.
And if you want a real hoot, here is a Judge from New York, Janine Pirro.
Hey All Y’all (that’s plural)! When you can no longer stand the insanity of California, come on down and visit us in Texas. We can shoot guns, drink beer, eat BBQ, and go to a good bible thumping Baptist church service! All the things that you people on the coasts believe us Red Necks in fly-over country do. After all, the movie Deliverance is a docudrama on what southern people are like isn’t it??
(If you are a liberal, please stay in California. See the video clips above: you will not be happy here. Besides, you are the ones who made California the way it is. Stay there.)
Regards,
Steamboat Jack (Jon Jewett’s evil twin)
How very very sad!