
The Crisis in the Skies of San Francisco - fortran77
https://www.newyorker.com/news/california-chronicles/the-crisis-in-the-skies-of-san-francisco
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colechristensen
The current smoke situation is i think going to be one of the final straws
witch breaks me for living in California. Why am I here? The weather isn’t
nice, the air is poison for weeks every year. Threats of water scarcity a few
years ago, electricity scarcity now, terrible social problems, expensive
everything, inability to really do anything with anyone... I’ve spent hundreds
of thousands of dollars to live here over the last several years and couldn’t
start to justify myself as to what i got out of the experience.

~~~
shuckles
Even with the fires, the Bay Area has had one of the nicest climates for
living in the last half decade out of any place in the United States. In the
inner Bay Area, PG&E went out for maybe a day during last year’s red flag.
Water for consumption is never scarce, most use is agricultural which will be
cut far before people are impacted. Certainly there are infrastructure
construction concerns (also almost universal in the US), but it’s been one of
the safest regions in the coronavirus crisis so even ability to do things
seems underestimated.

You may be overreacting to the evidence.

~~~
rsj_hn
The problem is the quality of life expectations are quite high when you pay
$3000 for 1 bedroom.

While air quality/electricity concerns may only last a few weeks per year, and
maybe covid is just 6 months (but 1 year is more likely) you then have a city
overrun with homeless, walk outside your apartment to see someone sleeping on
your stoop, accidentally step on human feces regularly, the BART escalators
and most of Market Street stinks of urine, cars are broken into, people are
regularly walking into stores, grabbing stuff, and running away with the
cashiers screaming at them.

Then you look at your friends in the rest of the country that have already
bought a house, and the consolation that you may only be able to rent but it's
in a great city -- it starts to wear a bit thin.

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e40
_The problem is the quality of life expectations are quite high when you pay
$3000 for 1 bedroom._

Relative to what you make, is that a lot, compared to what you'd make/pay in
Kansas City?

Do you realize that the AQI is terrible for literally a third of the US right
now?

If climate change is going to ruin CA, then it will also ruin a LOT of other
places. Relatively speaking, the Bay Area will be nicer still, albeit much
more expensive, than other places.

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itake
Idk about your job but my job would is willing to pay me a bonus to leave SF
and will only cut my salary by 10%. Definitely seems worth it to me.
Especially factoring in not needing to pay cali income or sales tax.

The bay areas has never been nice in the last 5 years. I can live in a more
comfortable house where I don’t have to work 3ft from where I sleep in almost
any other city.

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moonka
>job would is willing to pay me a bonus to leave SF and will only cut my
salary by 10%.

How many years worth of a cut salary would the bonus be? I might be missing
something (if you are factoring the tax differences I get it).

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pbourke
> How many years worth of a cut salary would the bonus be?

Who gives a shit? You’re still making good money. What’s your life worth?

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moonka
Taking this comment on good faith, I'm just asking for my own edification.
I've lived in Seattle, downtown adjacent, for 10+ years, and really love it,
even with COVID, outside of the few weeks where we've had bad smoke. Obviously
if half the year is going to be like this, I'm leaving regardless of the
salary ramifications, but if we are talking a week or so every couple years,
it might be a different story. I moved to Seattle to escape other problematic
issues where I used to live, and I suspect the same is true for lots of folks.

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DevKoala
Considering the amount of media about San Francisco and red skies, you’d think
that was the place that burned.

Any actual coverage of the fires and their real impact, lost of natural
habitat, sinks into irrelevancy.

If a place burns and San Francisco doesn’t notice, do we still talk about it?

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intuitionist
California has fairly hot, dry summers and a lot of trees; fires are going to
happen fairly regularly. Everything in the ecosystem has evolved to deal with
periodic fire, except for the humans and their trillion-dollar companies and
multimillion-dollar houses. The fire isn’t the threat to the ecosystem; the
humans are.

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adrianN
It is my understanding that the fires are unusually intense and a threat even
to fire-adapted ecosystems.

~~~
_jahh
in large part because the high fuel load from aggressive suppression efforts
(some contribution from anthro temperature forcing)

indigenous fire management kept underbrush under control results in cooler
fires.

The main issue is people think it's pretty to live in places that normally
burn.

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seaish
As someone who experienced the orange, this article doesn't do it justice.
This was an extremely strange day.

The air quality was decent relative to the past month of wildfires. The air
felt and smelled like normal fog: cool and slightly wet. We've had days in
past years and many recently where the smoke would make the sun a slightly
warmer color, but it was always close enough to normal that you could
compensate for it in your mind.

September 9th was completely different. The world looked like a sepia-tone
photograph. While the orange light was dimmer than normal, basically no blue
light made it to the ground. You can't compensate for a complete lack of the
higher wavelengths. When looking at the night sky, astronomers often
illuminate their sky charts with red light so that their night vision isn't
ruined. The same thing happened here, which made white lights extremely
bright. And because the brain has some capacity to correct white balance,
white lights were also blue. Being the only blue in the world, you could see
all the places they were reflected. Blue was on a different layer from
everything else.

It was basically night by 4pm, but what surprised me most was that seeing blue
was an emotional experience. You know those videos where they give a
colorblind person those glasses that let them see what they've been missing?
That's what seeing blue was like. It was like seeing ultraviolet. It almost
made you cry.

The only thing you could do was look up at the sky, and the only reaction you
could have was emotional. There's a certain feeling you get when you know
everyone has the same thing on their mind. It reminded me of 9/11: not as sad
but just as pervasive. It was like every conversation was preceded by the
unspoken lines, "The sky looks crazy today, doesn't it?" and "Never seen
anything like it."

For more pictures and reactions, this twitter thread does a good job:
[https://twitter.com/EricaJoy/status/1303711062512943105](https://twitter.com/EricaJoy/status/1303711062512943105)

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Balgair
I'm curious, where did you grow up? Wildfires of this magnitude are rare, but
the optical effects are not unheard of in the West.

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choward
What's the point of this article? I just read it and got nothing out of it.

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hijinks
title to get you to click so they get ad venue

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misja111
I'm from Europe and I'm confused about the cause of these recent big fires.
Some news articles say it's because climate change, some other say it's due to
bad forest maintenance.

Why are there so many of these fires lately?

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briga
Both are true. Fires are a natural part of the environment. When you
constantly put out fires around urban areas a lot of the excess brush just
builds up, inevitably causing the mega-fires we see today. Huge fires are not
as common in Europe mainly because Europe doesn't have as many forests as the
west coast of the US.

But there's also a ton of evidence that we've had some of the warmest years on
record in the past decade. The fires around the Bay area were started by a
record-breaking heatwave. And temperatures in the interior of California
regularly get above 40 C during the summer, so that combined with no rainfall
means a lot of fires every year

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axk
[https://archive.is/WlT2a](https://archive.is/WlT2a)

