Since the fall of 2023 I’ve been publishing the Infowar Irregulars Bulletin v2.0 on Substack using my personal domain, rauhauser.net
if you were looking for climate, or food & water security, that’s most likely to turn up in the Geocyber section. I gave up on finding solutions years ago, what is there now are observations about where, when, and how conflicts are going to emerge.
I have been using WordPress for about the last decade but today that relationship comes to an end. As near as I can tell, the company has been watching the rise of Wix as a hosting platform, and this compelled them to mimic Wix’s simple, yet bloated and invasive user interface.
The block editor here is just atrocious. It is visibly busy, insisting on putting controls above each block, and providing no way to disable this egregious misfeature. There are times where editing a block with an image near it requires one to scroll back and forth from text to the top of the post to access controls. This might have some benefit in onboarding a brand new user, but it does so at the expense of pissing off everyone who is not a total n00b.
I am not sure precisely what happened today, but the already bad editing experience went to completely infuriating as I was working on Wine, Hardship & Thou. Although the block editor attempts to look like an actual word processing program, it doesn’t act like one. Selecting something to relocate or remove should involve no more than pressing shift and employing the arrow keys. This fails more often than it works, and for whatever mysterious reason, a couple of toggles between block editor and code, so I could actually do these basic functions, resulted in the editor completely wedging in block mode.
So I finished that article in code mode, grinding my teeth at having to spend more time with the unpleasantness of working around a janky editor than the enjoyment I get from writing.
And I deserve better. So best of luck to you, WordPress, in your quest to suck as badly as Wix does. When I find a venue for writing that doesn’t compel me to beta test a misfeatured dumpster fire of an editor, I’ll come back here and provide a link to the new location. (Success, amazingly enough, in late November of 2022 with another Automaticc service – Tumblr. They’ll let you have a custom domain gratis so rauhauser.net is the place to be.)
Four of every five bottles of wine produced in the country come from California. I found this glorious wine regions map and I was surprised at how widespread production is. As a relative newcomer to the state I know that “wine country” is Napa and Sonoma counties, but it really is a state wide industry.
My last sip of wine was at least thirty years ago, so the details are pretty academic for me, but I know that a wine’s flavor has to do with the variety of grape, the soil of the vineyard, the rains of the given production year, and how the grapes are handled post harvest.
And from the 2017 Wine Country Fires I know that smoke tainted grapes are the end of a vineyard’s crop. The whole state is 99.8 million acres and we crossed the 1% burned mark for the first time in 1999. But things changed in 2017 – 1.55 million acres, then 1.97 million, a wet year in 2019, and then 4.22 million acres burned in 2020.
This year is hotter and drier than 2020, but that only increases the potential for fire. 2020 was so crazy due to a single monsoon driven lightning event that hit everywhere north of the Bay Area. We’ve had more acres burned in 2021 than we had at this time in 2020, but there is no way to predict the final results.
Just as in yesterday’s Elective Deaths & Economic Decline, vineyards have a multifaceted threat. Drought can decimate a harvest, but so can wildfire smoke in an otherwise wet year. And that’s without factoring in smoke and/or pandemic closing restaurants and eliminating the tourism that drives the wine country economy. Our total economy is $3.2 trillion, agriculture is around $42 billion, and “farm gate” value of wine grapes is $3.24 billion.
Losing 0.1% of economic output in a distributed fashion would normally pass unnoticed, but I don’t think that will be the case for the wine industry. There is too much economic activity that follows from the grapes at the farm gate, and there’s a perception issue as well. The wine country vacation is a thing for singles, couples without kids, and empty nesters. Losing that changes the whole California vibe.
I stopped last night to inquire of others and I’m low key furious. Do any of the following categories fit you?
The person in my life who is waiting on an elective procedure held up by our political inability to deal with the COVID19 pandemic is …
By the time I reached a handful of daily contacts I’d covered all but one. My associates have children from infants to young adults and none of them are in hover mode, waiting for an outpatient procedure. But there are colonoscopies and kidney stones and jaw joints and knee replacements and all those other things that need to be inspected and/or repaired as one gets on in years.
All of us are either impacted directly or by a person near and dear to us being in discomfort and doubt. But there is no doubt as to why this is the case. Look at what the last sixty days have brought us.
I went back two days on the Washington Post’s case count because there is a tiny bit of delay in final figures arriving. Thanks to Delta there is a 12.1x increase in the weekly average cases and today features a 14.1x increase in reported cases. The curve is still trending steeply upward and it seems likely that this fourth wave, which is purely elective, is going to be worse than the third.
The party of personal freedom was once upon a time the party of personal responsibility. We have reached the point where we’re going to triage. Those who are unvaccinated should be sent to hospice care, leaving our ICUs free for those who have acute medical problems that they could not have easily avoided.
Tahoe’s Rear Guard Defense post from yesterday is now echoed by Fire official warns massive California wildfire is ‘knocking on the door’ to Lake Tahoe area. I get no foresight points on this, Cal Fire announced yesterday that halting the Caldor Fire’s forward motion was their top priority. This blaze is contained south of highway 50, which is closed just east of Placerville, and it is well within the bounds of the alternative route of highway 88.
The combination of the closure of highway 50, which is built to handle volumes of traffic, and then terrible air quality, have turned South Lake Tahoe into a ghost town. This is from yesterday and the black rings around the markets indicate that these are indoor air quality index numbers.
Sacramento KCRA provided a direct view into what things are like there today. I just checked the Purple Air map and PM2.5 is down to around fifty for everywhere west of the Sierra foothills. The Central Valley and points west are catching a break due to cool onshore winds.
I grew up in a place where tornadoes can wipe out entire towns in a matter of minutes and every winter brought at least one errant Alberta clipper, trapping us inside with howling winds, a foot of powder snow, and temperatures sixty degrees below freezing. I’ve lived and worked in places where hurricanes and their northerly cousins, the Nor’easters, can produce a season of waiting and watching and preparing.
Wildfire is just … different. Pandemic has made it worse in some ways, but I arrived in NorCal in time for the game changing 2017 fire season. I’m struggling to make a coherent paragraph, so much so I’m going to throw out some bullet points instead. Wildfires are …
But there is a quality to the wildfire season experience that is like nowhere else. I don’t need a sensor to tell me when PM2.5 AQI reads higher than fifty, because the physical sensations of being exposed to that are like the first hints of a panic attack. I am sensibly wary of bad weather in other regions, but I am … afraid … of wildfire. But it’s nothing like the fear in the faces and voices of those restaurant and shop owners of California’s evacuated mountain towns. I can turn on a couple HEPA filters, take a leisurely hot shower, and when I emerge my inside air quality is perfectly acceptable. Those business owners can’t do the same for their revenue streams, they have to sit and wait and hope that an atmospheric river puts a stop to the fires..
Even if we get a proper NorCal winter that’s not going to resolve the pandemic, this is catastrophe polyphony. Like John Bonham’s drum work in Fool In The Rain, there are two separate complimentary rhythms at work here, and not all of us have the moves to come through it in a graceful fashion.
Cal Fire has a simple set of mission guidelines.
The lives of the first responders come first. Unlike the deadly disinformation problem the medical field is facing, we can “debate” climate change, but when it comes down to it, nobody will pause to shout some incoherent conspiracy theory when thundering Diablo winds send a wall of flame their direction. You get a mandatory evacuation order and you go, because they will not order deputies and firemen into harm’s way to save your dumb ass. There are regular reports of heroics by all flavors of the men and women who turn out for wild land fires, but they tend to do these things against the direction of the dispatcher.
I already covered the big picture in Climate & COVID19 but I found more interesting maps today, and they are often the seed crystals for new posts here. A month ago the entire northern hemisphere got baked under a series of heat domes.
California had two million acres burn two fire seasons ago, four million the last fire season, and 2021/2022 is ahead of where the prior season was at this time. The Dixie fire, at 726k acres, is double the size of the next largest single fire. Given conditions it has the potential to eclipse the August Complex’s 1,030k acre record. The fire getting the most attention right now is Caldor, which is edging towards the Lake Tahoe basin.
Highway 50 is closed for a fifty mile stretch. The bulk of the Caldor fire is to the south of it, but there is a 200 acre spot fire to the north which they quickly contained. This road being closed cuts a million dollars a day out of South Lake Tahoe’s economy.
Not that anyone is heading for Tahoe given air conditions like this. The Sierras are facing smoke to the level of reducing visibility on both highway 50 and interstate 80.
We did get an onshore wind that chased much of the smoke from the Central Valley as well as clearing the foothills, but the numbers around Tahoe, Truckee, and Reno are just miserable.
The poor air quality can not be understated – the black rings around the numbers indicate these readings are the indoor sensors in the area. Any building that doesn’t have HEPA machines with premium grade filters would be absolutely unbearable.
Dialing back to a whole world view, we’re going to have to factor wet bulb temperatures into any prognostication. WaPo’s Beyond Human Endurance explains it in detail, but basically we cool by sweating, human skin temperature averages around 98.2F, and by the time a thermometer with a damp bulb exceeds 90F that’s the danger zone.
Today the fire fighters near Strawberry will experience less than 80F and 25% humidity. There was a day earlier this year where we hit 105F … and humidity of about 7%(!) Humans with an adequate water supply can be active in triple digit temperatures, but those heat domes exceeded the bounds of safety. No one was cutting fire lines in Lytton, Canada the day it hit 121F.
This year we’ve had two small towns burned over – Greenville and Grizzly Flats. Thanks to the painful lesson of 85 dead in 2018’s Camp Fire, casualties have been light. But from where we are now it’s possible to envision a heat dome sufficient to keep fire crews off the lines. Retardant drops like this are impressive, but a VLAT’s role is creating a defensible line for the guys on the ground. If there’s wind involved, fire will hop an undefended retardant line.
The rear guard defense of Tahoe is likely to succeed … this time.
But the trends are clear. Wild land fire acreage doubled, then doubled again, and this year is running at even a faster rate. Heat domes are producing Death Valley temperatures in Canadian boreal forests. There will come a day where we’ll call it a success if we can just manage to get out of Mother Nature’s way when she’s in the mood to rearrange the world around us.
As a resident of East BARTistan, I live at the point where there may be pleasant Bay Area breezes one day, and blistering California Delta heat the next. The potentially deadly hazards here are earthquakes, floods, and wildfire. We’re far enough from the Bay that our earthquakes are quarterly shakers under a 4.0 but wildfire has been a problem since I arrived. I watched the 2017 Atlas fire’s pyrocumulus cloud out my window for a week after thirty minutes of Diablo winds triggered a fifty mile long fire line up through Napa county. But our 2017 flood scare was the sort of thing that could have permanently wrecked the state.
Evacuations from the Oroville spillway crisis put 180,000 Californians on the road when it was thought that the combination of spillway damage and emergency overflow might cut deep enough to cause a complete failure. This would have meant the permanent removal of 812 megawatts of generating capacity, the loss of the source of 75% of the water that is sent to SoCal, and perhaps breeches of levees on the islands in the Delta. There is a nonzero chance of a salt water intrusion if enough levees let go at once, which would also endanger drinking water for thirty million.
But this summer Lake Oroville is at historic lows, the Feather River watershed that feeds it is burning, and we’re otherwise desiccated. Tennessee, on the other hand, is coping with getting seventeen inches of rain in a day. There are twenty two dead and more than double that number missing.
Rhode Island took a direct hit from tropical storm Henri and New York’s Central Park concert audience was sent scrambling for cover.
There are a couple of new phrases that have entered our lexicon in the last few years:
Heat Dome …
Polar Vortex …
Bomb Cyclone …
All three of those have to do with the jet stream wandering much further south than it has historically, which is an effect of decreasing sea ice in the Arctic. The first dries the west while the other two provide more intense precipitation events, and they tend to happen in east of the Rockies. Most of the water will exit via the Mississippi river and that puts the focus on the Morganza spillway and the Old River Control Structure. The footage here is low resolution but it’s a great introduction to the civil engineering that has kept the Mississippi exiting at New Orleans. Like Oroville, these things nearly failed in catastrophic fashion back in 2011.
The world is now hotter than our species has ever experienced. This bakes the southwest quarter of the country even more than is normal and this year we got introduced to those conditions covering the entire Pacific Northwest. The rest of the country can dry, but it can also experience Arctic cold and torrential downpours.
Like the ending of hydroelectric output from Oroville which happened this month, like the inevitable ending of hydropower production via the Hoover dam when Lake Mead shrinks below the minimum, there will come a day when the combination of blizzards and downpours overruns the existing civil engineering. The Mississippi basin has discharged via New Orleans the entire time that Europeans have been in North America, but the Atchafalaya distributary is primed to take over as the highest volume outlet. When this happens the reduced flow and silting will put the ports of New Orleans and Baton Rogue on notice.
The people who live in this area are wise to the ways of their river and periodic floods. The “deadly” in this case is less likely to be acute, like what just happened in Tennessee. Instead, it will be the slow grind of economic decline as those displaced by the new flow mingle with those from further east whose prospects are lessened by the changed route.
We are finally going to have Infrastructure Week after four years of chatter and inactivity. Any building in this area will be heavily influenced by the status quo. Mother Nature cares not one bit about that, so I hope our expenditures prove to be wise over the long haul.
This image is a 2.5PM AQI map from PurpleAir at 0400 on Sunday, August 22nd, 2021.
The body of water at the lower left is Folsom lake, the larger one at the right is Lake Tahoe. Prevailing winds have swept the worst of the smoke out of the Central Valley but the numbers around Lake Tahoe and Truckee, the city just to its north, are disastrous. Some 60% of the local economy is tourism based and particulates at those levels, combined with eighteen months of COVID19 constraints, mean that most businesses there are badly degraded. There is no foot traffic when those numbers are four or five times the danger level.
There are endless COVID19 stats and none of them really fit for areas with heavy tourism – the result there are seen more as economic statistics rather than in direct case counts, but Nevada is in the unhappy top ten in terms of hospitalization.
The fire situation in 2021 is unprecedented. The Dixie fire to the north is over 1,100 square miles and just one third contained. The Caldor fire, responsible for the Tahoe air quality problem, is about one seventh the size but it’s in rough country.
The fires are exacerbated by this year’s record shattering heat domes. Lytton, Canada, in the middle of that lavender spot, beat the 117F all time high in Las Vegas by a truly shocking four degrees … and one day after reaching 121F it burned to the ground.
If these summer companions to the polar vortex sweeping south continue to appear the net result will be a replacement of the coastal forests that start just north of San Francisco with chaparral stretching from the Mexican border to the Canadian …
The smoke from these events is not a regional problem, it’s global. Here’s just the U.S. slice from late July of 2021. Fires in California, Oregon, Idaho, Washington, and British Columbia fouled the air as far away as New England.
The smoke and the COVID19 are not separate issues, we now know: Wildfire smoke linked to higher COVID-19 death rates.
We’ve known about climate change for decades, but much of that time was spent with knuckleheads yapping about record snowfalls resulting in them having to shovel lots of “global warming” off their driveways. President Bush heard the message on pandemic hazards in 2005 and put some things in place to counter the threat. The Obama administration left detailed plans. The Trump administration fired our eyes and ears in China, then treated COVID19 as a rhetorical rather than operational problem.
So here we are, baking, burning, and facing a neuroinvasive pandemic disease that is liable to become endemic due to aforementioned knuckleheads. Unlike the four existing endemic corona virii, which leave us sniffling for a week, long haul COVID is going to swell disability rolls as between 10% and 30% of victims find themselves with lingering effects.
The political forces that blocked climate change remediation are also blocking pandemic remediation, while they struggle mightily to make these problems even worse by dragging us into an ethnosectarian civil conflict.
If anyone you know attempts the ol’ “nobody could have predicted”, you have my permission to knock some sense into them.
Longtime readers will recall that I follow global wheat production, as it makes a fairly good proxy for overall food security. Back in 2010 production took a hit due to fires in Russia, Pakistan’s summer cereal crops were wiped out by flooding, and I called troubles in North Africa in August. Arab Spring kicked off four months later …
I just decided to take a look at this area again after a couple of years off and I am not at all surprised to find USDA slashes global wheat production. Heat domes have affected both the U.S. and Canada, Australia has been facing previously unseen levels of wildfire, it’s obvious there’s going to be some trouble in this area. Three of the major produces have serious drought, the largest and fifth largest exporters are in a war, and I don’t know that Argentina and France are OK, I’ve just not looked that far yet.
Who is affected by wheat prices? This global food insecurity map provides an idea of where troubles would begin, but it’s not entirely accurate. Japan is the oddball in this set – they must import the majority of their calories, but as a global manufacturing center they can afford to do so. As in 2010, the area of concern is again the Maghreb and the Saudi peninsula. Libya and Yemen are already internally disordered, and Tunisia is struggling. The one I focus on is Egypt, which has just decided to raise the price of their famously subsidized bread.
Wheat is a food commodity but it can also been seen as a metric of virtual water transfer. North America is the top producer and China is the top consumer. Pakistan is the oddball here – their major exports include textiles, and cotton is a thirsty crop. I think this map reflects finished goods and it misses the origin – the nearby former Soviet union stans produce cotton.
There’s another item that’s been lurking in my maps folder, this infographic on China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Direct rail to Europe will be a tremendous advantage in shipping time. Rail to the Pakistani port of Gwadar will dramatically cut time to the Persian Gulf and east Africa. The sea routes shown cross the three global choke points – the strait of Malacca, the Suez canal, and the Panama canal. Shipping pressures on the strait of Malacca are such that the proposed Kra Isthmus Canal seems to be lurching forward.
Wheat is a fungible commodity – there are a couple of different types and there are grades based on protein content, but in general you wouldn’t know the origin. The only thing that differentiates sources there is transportation cost. Wheat moves over land in freight trains that may stretch to a couple miles in length. Sea travel is via dry those dry bulk carriers that are tracked via the Baltic Dry Index. Like wheat as a proxy for food security, the BDI is a proxy for global economic activity and it often leads economic news by weeks to months. The current BDI chart is … a bit disconcerting.
What we are seeing there is the pandemic hit in 2020, followed by a backlog of things needing to ship, and not yet registering the Delta variant COVID19 wave. The fundamentals are different than the ones driving the activity that lead to the 2008 crash, but the high price must be heeded as an analytical input.
There are companies out there with literal legions of analysts and programmers who live and die by factoring in every data feed they can obtain in order to better predict what happens next. But I’ve found that a multidisciplinary approach with just a few key metrics like the ones shown here, combined with geopolitical observation, can provide insight well in advance of breaking news.
This evening as I strolled to the store the PM2.5 AQI made the moon a sort of dirty orange red. The air for the entire Bay Area is unhealthy, at best, and mostly downright dangerous. We have months of this ahead of us.
The other awful infographic requires a comparison – in this case California vs. Alabama.
We already know that wildfire smoke enhances the COVID19 threat. California is struggling under 25% of the case load it had during the January peak. Alabama is now exceeding its worst and the line still seems inclined steeply upward. It is neither the best nor the worst among the Gulf Coast states; I picked it because it was first on the list and its been in the news recently.
Regarding federal tax dollars, the blue states more than hold their own, the red are on constant life support, spending the surplus from the more productive areas.
So the areas … that were already less economically capable than their peers … are also the places where vaccination rates are low and anti-mask polices are the norm. There are three demographic drivers at play here.
Fewer professional jobs in rural America hit the tax base directly, when it’s medical care that impacts everyone’s quality of life. The newly disabled are going to appear in negative relationship to areas the masked and vaccinated, putting states there were already not pulling their own weight at a further disadvantage. Those mobile fire weary professionals are going to pick the more functional states, driving up property values, and excluding those from rural areas who would have otherwise moved as well.
I’m still in California, but all of my pilot projects are now in a telecom bunker. I wrangled a VMware ESXi license and a rack mount to host it, which means prototypes can move as well, as soon as that machine is commissioned. I can’t be as mobile as I was when I first started dealing with Lyme disease, what I do any more requires a hefty workstation and a 4k monitor, but there is nothing keeping me here.
I am likely to become part of this climate and culture induced migration, but I can’t really see where I’d want to go. I’ve been to every state but the Carolinas, I’ve lived close enough to enjoy the transit services in Boston, Chicago, D.C., Manhattan, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. I need affordable housing and access to medical care. I want to be close enough that it’s not an epic journey to get on a train going into a big city, and all else being equal I really don’t miss shoveling snow at all.
Which I guess is another way of admitting that I’ll continue to make do in California, at least for a while. But so many others have reached a breaking point. This shift is beginning. And I’m not sure the United States remains intact through this.
There is a thing creeping up on us at a national level that is just starting to break into general conversation. California’s precarious water situation could go sideways in a statewide fashion. The Central Valley is ground zero and that is where one third of daily and vegetables are produced, as well as two thirds of fruit and nuts, for the entire nation. This is not a black swan event – we know the hazard exists, but the effect will be unprecedented.
Those are three undeniable forces at work in the United States today. Do a little personal creative visualization on how things will look in another ten years given these facts … ugly, isn’t it?
Afghanistan is quite rightly known as the Graveyard of Empires, having defeated the British in 1919, the Soviet Union in 1989, and the United States in 2021. These lands are a country not in the sense of Westphalian sovereignty, but more an entity that exists where the remit of neighboring governments ends. There’s a late 19th century British fantasy called the Durand Line that defines the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. This artificial imperial construct bisects the territory of the Pashtun tribe.
There isn’t really an Afghan national identity – the people in the far north that have borders with countries bearing their tribal names identify as such – a Turkmen, Tajik, or Uzbek would introduce themselves as such, with their relationship to these western lines on maps coming in a very distant second. There is a Balochistan unification movement that is occasionally violent. The Pashtun don’t actively pine for a unified homeland, they’ve existed for centuries as a sort of interstitial fluid between their better defined neighbors.
I love, collect, and modify maps made by Michael Izady and I just discovered this fine map of ethnic groups in Afghanistan. That first map is where tribes and nation states meet. This one is bound by the international borders of Afghanistan, but it does a much better job of conveying the reality of those lands.
The human geography there must bend to fit the topography. I found this glorious geological map that dates back to 1969, a more stable time when such things were produced locally.
Afghanistan isn’t really a country, it’s more a geopolitical “junk drawer”, full of things that are too challenging, conflicted, and distant for the neighboring countries to feel the need to expand their remit there.
So what in the world was the United States doing there for the last twenty years? We could not let the 9/11 attack go unanswered, but there was an equally important issue lurking in the background. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 marked the end of the Cold War and with it the defense contractor feeding trough on Capitol Hill was emptied and overturned. The Global War on Terror was precisely what was needed to revive their revenue streams.
The periods of time when Afghanistan gets it together enough to look like a nation state are always mediated by external forces rather than internal cohesion. Beyond our security concerns, beyond the burning desire for payback, the twenty years and two trillion dollars we poured into this project was an attempt at building a monument to American Exceptionalism. And it failed miserably.
The British got the Durand Line done in 1919, but they faded dramatically, a global superpower when coal was the prime mover for ships, but a junior partner in the dawning age of oil. The Soviet Union withdrew in 1989 after a decade of fruitless attempts to back a communist government, then collapsed entirely two years later.
The United States, intentionally lured into Afghanistan by Osama bin Ladin, is going to complete the Afghan’s imperial dissolution hat trick. Like the British empire, we depend on an energy source that is not renewable and Mother Nature is sternly urging us to find alternatives. We have internal divisions, not so serious as the Soviet Union’s, but enough to lead to a breakup, an angle which Russia and other disinformation players are working vigorously.
Pax Americana had a good long run. The sun is setting on the Monroe Doctrine. The United Nations is a construct of Westphalian sovereignty and it will fade with it in parallel. Our jealously guarded natural rights, foremost among them free association, assembly, and speech, have been weaponized against us. We’re about to enter a period of intense blamestorming over this month’s undeniable visit of objective reality. There was never going to be a happily ever after for Afghanistan, the only question left is who gets to hold the bag for the bugout from Kabul.
Neal Rauhauser 