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Originally Posted by Kirk  About 30 lightning-sparked wildfires in Butte County, where Paradise and Concow are located, have charred 47,000 acres in recent weeks and was about 40 percent contained, officials said.
Fire crews across the state have been trying to cover hundreds of active California wildfires, many of which were ignited by a lightning storm more than two weeks ago. Some 1,450 fires had been contained late Tuesday, but more than 320 were still active, authorities said.
At a fire east of Bakersfield on Tuesday, wind gusts caused flames to jump fire lines and destroy or damage five residences and four more outbuildings in the Sequoia National Forest.
A blaze threatening the small coastal community of Big Sur let up just enough to allow hundreds of people to check on their homes Tuesday. Authorities announced that more residents would be allowed to return Wednesday morning.
At least 23 homes and 25 other structures have been destroyed in Big Sur as flames marched over more than 125 square miles of land since June 21.
Although that fire is far from controlled - the rugged terrain has kept containment at 23 percent into the fire's third week - authorities lifted the mandatory evacuation order issued for 25 miles of the 31-mile stretch along the Pacific Coast Highway that had been closed.
Many of the 1,500 evacuated residents of Big Sur headed home Tuesday morning through smoke and ash, anxious to gauge the damage. Officials, however, cautioned that the lifted evacuation orders did not mean conditions had drastically improved.
A wildfire in the Los Padres National Forest near Santa Barbara grew slightly to 9,785 acres, or about 15 square miles, but the number of homes threatened dropped sharply Tuesday as crews secured fire lines near populated areas.
The blaze continues to threaten about 250 homes, down from a peak of more than 3,000. The fire is 55 percent contained, said U.S. Forest Service spokeswoman Debbie Becker.
"It's going according to plan," Becker said "They've really got a good hold on this fire but there's still a lot of potential to get worse."
The expected heat wave raised not only the fire danger, but also concerns about heat illness among firefighters worn down by the long fight against blazes that have consumed more than 985 square miles in California since late June.
"We do have a lot of fatigue because of the low numbers of resources in the state," said Thom Walsh, a Forest Service resource unit leader.
Crews took rest breaks in refrigerated trailers with bunk beds before returning to the field, but heat stroke was a worry, Walsh said.
Highs are likely to be in the triple digits across much of the northern half of the state until at least Friday, National Weather Service forecaster Christine Riley said.
Temperature records for the date were broken in five cities Tuesday. Among them were Sacramento, where the temperature reached 108, breaking the previous high of 104 degrees set in 1997. Stockton recorded 105 and Modesto 107, both breaking records for July 8 set in 2006. |
I thought you might enjoy this article but wait don't tell me the newspaper is funded by Exxon.
Our leaders are in carbon-cloud cuckoo land - Telegraph
The second reason why this infatuation with cutting carbon emissions is beginning to look extraordinarily reckless is that the whole scientific theory on which it is based now appears distinctly questionable.
The orthodox global-warming thesis, accepted by pretty well every politician in the Western world, but not by a growing number of scientists, is that, as CO2 levels in the atmosphere continue to rise, so too should global temperatures. Unless we can drastically reduce those CO2 levels, the world is thus threatened with catastrophe.
In the past year or two, however, evidence has been piling up to suggest that there may be a fundamental flaw in this theory. Even though atmospheric CO2 has continued to rise to levels not seen since the distant geological past, temperatures have not been following suit.
After 2000 the global temperature curve flattened out at a level significantly lower than the freak year 1998, and in recent months temperatures have dropped to levels not seen since the early 1980s.
Despite the best efforts of the global-warming lobby to keep the scare going, the northern hemisphere enjoyed its coldest winter for decades, and this summer has shown the curve sinking even lower.
Even the warmists are having to find excuses for the fact that their theory doesn't exactly seem to be holding up, conceding that the next 10 years may see a period of global cooling, before the "underlying warming trend" returns worse than ever.
Other scientists point out that, rather than look to CO2 for an explanation of global temperatures, a much more convincing link can be seen in the activity of the sun, with current sunspot levels having dramatically fallen to levels associated with historic periods of global cooling recorded in the past.
Yet just when such huge question marks are being raised over the "CO2 equals warming" theory, our politicians have swallowed it whole, as an act of blind faith - using it to justify such massive costs to our economy that our whole way of life seems destined to change significantly for the worse.