Slightly warm at a cool 88-degrees this late-afternoon Thursday here in California’s Central Valley, and we’re still clear of smoke from our rampant wildfire war being waged up and down the state.
Although there are some big ones burning up north, smoke off the Caldor Fire near Lake Tahoe, about three-and-a-half hours northeast of where I’m located, most-likely created our Mars-like air last month. Recent wind shifts changed the environment back to normal, whatever be ‘normal’ nowadays.

Smoke is now flowing away from us, toward the northeast of Tahoe (or at least as of Tuesday):

Yesterday, the #GOESWest satellite captured this imagery of the large #CaldorFire burning near #LakeTahoe. At last report, the fire has consumed more than 191,000 acres and is only 16% contained.

More info: https://t.co/AzxmK3ePQk pic.twitter.com/oNODfEsrpO

— NOAA Satellites (@NOAASatellites) August 31, 2021

Another good view from NASA via Space.com.

Update on the situation via NBC News this afternoon:

Calmer winds and moderate humidity assisted firefighters Thursday in their efforts to slow down the wildfire that began on Aug. 14.
The Caldor Fire is considered California’s 15th largest in state history, spanning about 210,000 acres, officials said. The fire was 25-percent contained as of Thursday afternoon.

Orders were lifted in seven areas in El Dorado County on Thursday, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known as Cal Fire.
Three more areas in the county had evacuation orders downgraded to evacuation warnings, officials said.

Only a few days earlier on Monday, mandatory evacuation orders hit residents and tourists of South Lake Tahoe, a resort city of about 22,000.
There were no changes to that order on Thursday.

Pushed by strong winds, the fire had crossed two major highways and burned mountain cabins as it swept down slopes into the Tahoe Basin, NBC Bay Area reported.
Nearly two dozen helicopters and three air tankers dumped thousands of gallons of water and retardant on it earlier this week, officials said.

Disaster might be the new normal. Yet hope for the Caldor Fire (CNN)): ‘“The issues and conditions that weather was causing, especially for the last couple of days, are going to be mitigated by much lighter winds across the fire,” Incident Meteorologist Jim Dudley said in an update.‘

Sad-strange local side note: About an hour from where I live, a terribly weird story has caught the interest of national news  — a couple, along with their baby, including the family dog, all were found dead on a hiking trail in the foothills last month without rhyme or reason.  Authorities still don’t know what killed them, and have closed the trail.
From the Guardian this morning:

Officials found the bodies of the family, who had reportedly gone out for a hike, on 17 August after a family friend reported them missing. With no signs of the cause of death immediately clear, the Mariposa county sheriff’s office briefly treated the area as a hazmat site.
Investigators initially explored whether carbon monoxide, exposure to gas from mines in the area or toxic algae could have been responsible for the deaths.

Before the tragedy officials had warned hikers of harmful algae blooms along the south fork of the Merced River, and a water test in the area was positive for toxic algae, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
The state water board and independent labs are also testing water the family had with them.
…
The sheriff’s office announced last week it had ruled out guns or any other types of weapons and any chemical hazards along the trail as causes of death. Autopsies on the family have been completed, but officials are awaiting toxicology results.

“We know the family and friends of John and Ellen are desperate for answers; our team of detectives are working round the clock. Cases like this require us to be methodical and thorough while also reaching out to every resource we can find to help us bring those answers to them as quickly as we can,” Jeremy Briese, the county sheriff, said.this.

WTF!

Meanwhile, back to wildfires and climate change. Although there’s been no written, direct words in this post about the Caldor Fire and climate change, that shitty situation was most-certainly a given, especially to the three people who regularly read this blog.
Anyway, fires are currently raging bigger due to the influence of our warming environment.
And not just with wildfires here in California, but other natural calamities, like first-time flooding of New York City as an impact off Hurricane Ida. A storm, by the global-warming way, had gathered its power and strength from the way-warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico and swirled its way up to near-drown the Big Apple.
In turn, allowed an iPhone screen view of climate change in real-time:

An armed insurrection, a pandemic, wildfires, and, last night, Hurricane Ida—the onslaught of visual horrors are now almost routine.https://t.co/p1B1z7ZigD

— VANITY FAIR (@VanityFair) September 2, 2021

Insight into disaster witnessing, I came across this piece by Delia Cai at Vanity Fair today on the draw of Twitter videos/photos of a flooded New York, which presented our climate-change future in sync with the right now.
A pop-art, confessional read on the personal, up-close view of our future:

It is a position of enormous geographic, economic, and vertically housed privilege to experience a historic weather event through the screen-protected pane of your phone, and that’s where countless Twitter users found ourselves last night as we witnessed the remnants of Hurricane Ida turn into New York’s very own local climate tipping point in real time.
For all the doomscrolling we’d almost begun accepting as part of our baseline through the Trump administration, an armed insurrection, a pandemic, and a number of wildfires, hurricanes, and derechos — and that’s just in this calendar year — nothing quite prepared those of us in the New York area for the shock of our city’s first flash flood emergency in history, as documented via a steady barrage of video snippets: of the glassy pool inside Newark Airport, of the half-submerged bus, of the truck, of the rat, of the hookah guy, of the “car wash,” of the food-delivery worker carefully walking an e-bike through waist-deep water.
For a city accustomed to seeing itself as the public imagination’s go-to disaster-movie set, it was somehow exactly what we’d pictured all along.

I first came across the videos during a casual evening Twitter check; I’d walked home from dinner with a friend and was discussing with a colleague whether we’d try to make it to the office in the morning. I was aware of how rain before Tropical Storm Elsa had flooded parts of the Bronx and Manhattan earlier this summer, but I was also thinking of Hurricane Henri’s anticlimax from last week, so I took my colleague’s comment about potential flooding as a joke.
The first video I saw depicted a literal cascade of floodwater pouring onto a Manhattan subway station.
Next, an aerial view of a block near my neighborhood, which I’d just walked through a few hours ago.

As more videos filled up my timeline, I found myself obsessively watching them all, then checking local news accounts, the usually useless trending-topics bar, and random hashtags for more …

And a seemingly near-casual reflection:

And in a way the flood videos offered something almost like validation: After carrying the psychic burden of a past year spent terrified of unseen air particles and intracellular mysteries; of the sanctioned unraveling of fundamental rights behind closed doors; of the systemic racism and abuse baked into the structure of our society; of increasingly imminent planetary deadlines, the ability to witness the arrival of such a visual horror was almost a change in routine.
You could see the waters rising up in real time.

Go read the whole thing, it’s well worth it.

Weird-ass world right now, huh?

And once again, here we are…

(Illustration out front: ‘A Break in Reality’ by Xetobyte, found here).