Tim Smith

High Park fire now at 118 square miles near Ft. Collins. Containment has slipped to 45%. Fire in Estes Park Colorado took 21 homes yesterday. Colorado Springs fire forced the evacuation of 11,000 homes, has burned 200 acres and is currently out of control.

There's really not much point in talking to you about alternative energy, Jeb. Your understandings about why it is important are based on bad information and as OB points out, a complete misunderstanding about science. Talking to you with the approach you're taking to alternative energy would be like talking to the short kid on the Jr. High basketball team about how to palm the ball when they dunk. You're not ready for it yet. You try to characterize as "religion" what over 30 years of careful climate research has worked toward over the years to attain. You ridicule the term "climate change" as if that's some kind of concession to your point when in fact the data are clear that the climate is warming and it shouldn't matter what the process were called. You talk about "consensus science" as if that were a bad thing. Scientists are trained to reflexively disagree with and qualify what other scientists discover. Once 97% of climatologists and every national academy of science in the world accepts something as fact it's past time to put the basics of the discussion to bed and get real. And your web sites about debunking global warming don't have a point in them that hasn't been addressed (probably even on this web site) and debunked. Ridicule you? No. Disagree with you? Completely. Wish you would change your TV channels once in a while? Please. Soon.

Well apparently their options were to cut everything down or drive everyone out so no, I am quite sure they could not have made everyone happy. When you're in charge, it's your job to be the scapegoat. Much of that pertains here. By the way, there is currently a bill in the Colorado legislature (introduced by Mark Udall, Democrat) to subsidize the mitigation of beetle killed trees (primarily by cutting them down). I'm curious why these supposedly highly valuable trees the logging industry gladly would have taken off our hands suddenly needs a 200 million dollar subsidy to harvest.... ...I suppose the rotten ones are only good for fuel...and CO2 emissions...now.

Yes if you're selective with the numbers you can twist a contradiction out of them. The break even point where I live is 8 years for a 50% offset. If you want to stretch that number out to 20 you can definitely do that. I suppose you could bury the whole solar industry if you based your projections on the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest. 120,000 windmills? You do realize that there are already over 100 wind generation sites in the US. Most of the highly desirable sites are located in the Great Plains and many of the future sites are projected to go offshore. I find it interesting how suddenly wind and solar impacts are so horrific compared to everything else. Hmmm...blight on the land...seems to me I remember something about blights on the land... http://throughagreenlens.com/2011/01/10/oil-still-fouls-louisiana-marshes/

Most of the PNW looks like a mangled checkerboard of clear cuts. But because of climate differences the fires there are not nearly the problem there that they are in the intermountain west. The High Park fire is now past 100 square miles and still going strong with highs projected in the 100s on the Front Range today. We've been getting fires in the mountains since March this year, and longer fire seasons have been the trend. And the point was made that somehow that's all the government's fault because they inhibit logging...yet logging is increasing, according to Wayne on private land, where "normal logging practices" have continued unabated and fires are most common. So if you're trying to say that somehow this is another free market/government issue, that's just a red herring and no, it doesn't belong in this discussion about drought.

Jeb. Not everything can be judged on short term profit. To approach these issues from that perspective cripples the whole process. I think Al and Eric have pointed out most of my concerns about your posts. In general you don't accept the human role in climate change...which sort of makes your other positions easier to understand. You don't think CO2 emissions are pollution so you write off an previous experience with pollution. So of course you criticize alternative energies. Except that you are at odds with quite a few people who seem to know what they are talking about. Your idea that alternative energies are too expensive to install can be directly investigated here: http://solarpoweraut...com/calculator/ Your idea that alternative energy is not currently viable is contradicted here: http://www.dailytech...rticle24970.htm According to NREL, 80% of our electricity could be produced by existing alternative sources by 2050 if we made the choice to do so. The idea that the environmental costs of solar energy are greater than carbon based sources is contradicted here: http://wiki.answers....ng_solar_energy As long as you're stuck with your short term profit oriented thinking, you'll not make a positive contribution here.

It is a vast, sad distortion to say government does not make money. It's this kind of free market fundamentalism that makes this kind of discussion so difficult. Most of the relevant research that has led to our current technologies was sponsored by the government. You want a bang for the buck? How about fusion, fission, super-conductors, the internet, most biological understandings of how biology and medicine works, and the ag research done in the land grant universities. Scientific pioneers work for the government. Heisenburg, Watson and Crick, JJ Thompson, Rotgen, Rutherford, Plank, Bohr, Einstein, Linus Pauling and just about every scientist who discovered the modern foundations science that make modern technology possible were supported by government. Rarely does the private sector do more than take the discoveries of others and put them in the form of a product. The profit motive simply does not have the courage to do much basic research without an immediate pay-off on the horizon... ...and the same applies to environmental issues.

This part I think makes good sense. There is a law (which I believe I understand correctly) which forces the utility companies to buy back solar generated power from individual homes. The solar companies sell the units for a discount and then recoup their costs selling the extra energy. That works in Colorado because we have 300 days of sun a year.

Clearly, incremental steps are warranted (including more R and D) and the free market has to be able to make profits with whatever new energy sources we have in the future...we agree there. But to reject a government role for an environmental issue ignores a long history of environmental success. A fishing forum should be deeply aware of some of those successes. The Clean Water Act saved rivers from being open sewers and made them available for fishing all over the country. That never would have happened unless government stood up and said you MUST avoid harm to our rivers. Most of the businesses that were doing the polluting never would have cooperated to allow that to happen (and still wouldn't) unless they were forced to do so. Your call for cooperation is more or less a non issue. Marketeers aren't interested in cooperation that doesn't generate profit. If your central point is correct (and I believe it is) that the markets will decide what energy sources we use there is no internal mechanism in the markets to guide us toward less harmful energy sources. As long as shareholders are getting their profits, they simply won't care. They never have... ...until penalties are applied or incentives are available. Good government sets limits on the reach of the market. The energy market's right to swing their fist should stop at the end of my children's nose.

I don't want to buy Middle Eastern oil, but it doesn't help anyone to leave those countries impoverished. Aside from the humanitarian issues, it's the poor and desperate who are most easily radicalized. The notion that the profit motive will somehow solve this problem runs contrary to almost every conservation issue that we've ever solved. The profit motive's job it to create profit, nothing more. At the moment, the profit to find and drill carbon based energy is colossal and there is little motivation in the free market (if you look at it from the perspective of financial investments) to do anything else. I would greatly prefer that the market decisions be made for the general good, but they are not. Pollution is something industry fixes because someone forces them to do it. There's no profit in doing the right thing unless someone is calling you to task. Just as we created the infrastructure for the auto industry to succeed, we can create the infrastructure for new energy sources to succeed, beginning with research and extending to incentives. And why should oil and coal compete equally with alternative energies for incentive? Carbon based energy sources are the ones causing the problem. They playing field is already tilted in their favor. That's the point of the incentives. If the oil companies want to work on alternative energy (actually work and not put up window dressing) that's great. But the whole point of incentives is to move past this form of energy use.

Many thanks. That carp article seems to attract a lot of hits. Great sport fish but it's scary to think about people wanting to stock them and make them even MORE abundant. Stop by any time.

Awesome pics and an awesome trip. I passed on a smallmouth trip in Illinois this weekend and now I'm kicking myself. It's hard to get a bass thumb from a trout...I miss that.

Thank you, sir.

Government wind farmers no doubt.

Back hair. That's the government's fault too. The timber industry has virtually unlimited leverage in the Forest Service. There's not much light between them. And it's funny that timber harvest ever got rolled into this discussion at all. Timber harvest has been increasing over the years. http://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/documnts/fplrp/fpl_rp653.pdf

Well put, Al.

The farm where I've seen the data has virtually no bird or bat kill. Put it on top of a mountain pass or a flyway and you get hawk sausage. Put in in the middle of an arid plain and there are no problems at all. It all depends on siting. And yes, in a lot of cases wind farming has virtually no impact.

The economic issue is the one that will confront us most heavily, yes. The extinctions and loss of habitat are not a minor thing but it does seem likely there will be something left...hopefully not stripped entirely of its diversity...once the planet warms. Natural gas may be an inevitable next step but it is a temporary one, lasting a few decades at best before we have to reboot. There's no reason not to keep working on alternative sources in the meantime. The complaints against wind chopping up birds are highly sight dependent. Some of those installations rarely kill anything. With proper siting away from flyways, the impacts are almost non-existent.

Some good biology here from leading biologists in the field. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/2012/06/14/cougars-returning-midwest-after-more-than-100-years/

Almost none of the current fires in CO are in pine beetle forest until yesterday when the High Park fire jumped the Poudre River. I don't know how much tree removal was resisted by environmentalists, but there are a heck of a lot of beetle killed trees cut around places like Breckinridge.

It's all a question of balance. The soils at the Hayman fire are going to prevent recovery for 1000 years. The current problem is that the fire season is longer with more intense fires. Fire is part of the system but too much and too much of the wrong kind is a problem.

For you? Special price.

True. Once the trees are all cut down the risk of forest fire becomes pretty low...except that fires and disease are most closely associated with clear cuts and "normal logging practices". http://yeoldeconscio...e.com/art6.html

Since you think one cold day in one spot on the globe is in anyway relevant to a discussion about climate, that's not surprising. I know some swampland in Belize you might want to buy.

I've had some chances to get the Canon and the underwater camera outdoors a bit recently. http://brooksmith.bl...appreciate.html