Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Dayz of Summer

Aerosols World Wide

Key:

• blue - sea salt (storms)
• red - carbon (fires)
• purple - dust

A couple of days ago about 10 in the morning I went outside and looked at the sun. It was so dim and red I could look directly at it. Shows you how much smoke is in the air.  Started looking around, trying to figure what was going on in the forest fire department, and what I found is politics. There are several big outfits all pushing their own agenda, and since big money is involved they are pushing pretty hard. I did find a couple of things. One is that the federal government has given the Forest Service some money to pay for fighting fires, so the Forest Service no longer has to steal money from their operating funds to pay for fire suppression. This is good because because the fire fighting business had gotten go big that it was pretty much consuming their entire operating budget.

Another was that something 75 out of a hundred and some forest projects have been hamstrung by environmentalist lawsuits. Seems the environmentalists want to let nature take its course which means letting these fires burn.

The last was that fire season has grown from lasting a couple of months 30 years ago to where it now lasts upwards of six months, mostly due to warmer weather.

Our natural response (actually not natural, conditioned is more accurate) is that fires are bad and should be put out. But that leads to an accumulation of fuel which leads to bigger conflagrations which is why the air is full of smoke.

Eventually all this surplus wood should burn and then things should go back to normal, whatever that is.

All this talk about haze and summer prompted my recollection of this song, though I don't think I've ever heard the whole thing before.


Nat King Cole - Those Lazy-Hazy-Crazy Days of Summer