This album kept coming to mind as I saw picture after picture of the skies in California this week. Old Conflicts, New Chapters, Available for everyone, funded by readers. In the strange light, the world around us looked ghostly, otherworldly, unnatural, unnerving, disturbing. All rights reserved. The sky was the muddy yellow of an old bruise at 7am in San Francisco on Wednesday, and by eight it was a dull orange and the darkness that felt like night was coming on. Here are the pictures and video f His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. Last modified on Tue 15 Sep 2020 12.56 BST. To try to explain the enormity and peril of climate change, he described the transition as though we had landed on a chaotic, hostile new planet he dubbed Eaarth. It is deeply exhausting.” And “Standard reporting/mapping procedures are essentially not capable of keeping pace with the unbelievable rates of spread now being observed on these fires – it is historically unprecedented.” The night before he had tweeted, “The wildfire situation in California and Oregon has now escalated to the point that I can no longer keep track of the countless massive, fast-moving, and potentially very dangerous fires.”, The toll takes many forms, from loss of life to loss of homes and communities to ... the dread and dismay of living in this whole new hell. His crops survived, but when I went to his booth Sunday he was hunched and avoiding eye contact, clearly stricken. An aerial photograph today would show California and Oregon mostly smothered under smoke, but politically, along with Washington, we are the blue wall of the United States, the solidly democratic region where state policy recognizes and responds to climate change. I really do feel like we’re running a marathon at sprint pace right now. Hide Caption 56 of 124 Often in summertime the rising heat inland sucks the cool air off the ocean in the form of fog, so that you can be eating soup in a sweater in a world without shadows and know that 10 miles east someone in shorts is sweating under a bright blue sky. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology. Some of the people facing evacuation or worse in the Oroville-area fire resettled there after their homes in Paradise burned down. The toll takes many forms from loss of life to loss of homes and communities to displacement and disruption to, even for those who are not technically impacted, the dread and dismay of living in this whole new hell. Blade Runner 2049 was trying to show a dystopia. The orange sky of September 9 was a meteorological fluke, the result of smoke that has been swirling across the state for weeks — from the Bear fire to the north, or the LNU lightning complex to the northeast, or the SCU lightning complex to the southeast, or the CZU lightning complex to the southwest (or all of the above) — getting caught above the marine layer blowing in from the Pacific. Rebecca Solnit is a US Guardian columnist. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels. This week, with snow throughout the intermountain west fast on the heels of a wave of record-breaking heat, firestorms up and down the west coast sending huge smoke plumes across state and national borders, and a hurricane-force windstorm knocking down thousands of trees in Salt Lake City, I have thought of his book and its premise often. Californians have loved their landscapes and many of us chose to live as close to wild places as we could; insurance costs and fire danger may take that option off the table for many of us; and cities are right now the safest place to be. Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com. Blade Runner 2049 was trying to show a dystopia. This prompted local public news station KQED to run a story with the headline, “How to Prepare for Power Shutoffs During a Heat Wave and a Pandemic.” The pandemic made us move a lot of life outdoors, but the fires create air so bad that staying indoors is safer. UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain, who tweets regularly about weather and climate said on Wednesday morning, “Everyone is so far beyond capacity right now, and there so much else going on, that I don’t think the collective bandwidth exists right now to process what it happening. California's dark, orange sky is the most unnerving sight I've ever woken up to This article is more than 1 month old. Shattering Traditional Notions of Laser Limits …, DARPA wants novel security technology to …, Disruption of the $10 trillion global construction industry, Exawatt pulsed lasers within ten years seems like a certainty and will enable breaking vacuum, Mass Genetic modification of most of the cells of adults as simple as vaccination injection, NASA Advanced Innovations funding for propellantless propulsion and more, Softbank Masayoshi betting on Unicorn startups becoming $500+ billion Whales, Tens of billions in funding will supercharge Quantum Technology. In Sonoma County people who had to evacuate in previous years are prepared to evacuate again. Of course for the homeless and the displaced, indoors is not so easy to come by, and during a pandemic providing emergency shelter is a far more complicated business. While not completely red, the reddish-orange hue of the sky was undeniable and eery. Near Oroville in northeastern California, a fire expanded by a quarter million acres in 24 hours, so far as the experts can tell. SOURCES- Youtube – Blade Runner 2049, Lord of the Rings, Local California News, My own picture out my front door There we check the AQI, the air quality index, or follow the fires online. Bejhan Razi, a senior building inspector in Mill Valley, California, checks out repairs on a lamp-post clock as the sky is illuminated by nearby wildfires. Ash was falling, the ash of trees, forests, homes, towns, dreams burning up. The Skies of Mordor in Lord of the Rings were smokey and orange as well.