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If this nonsense in SoCal continues much longer, there's not gonna be a California left. It'll be a pile of ash and rock. More than any other state, California needs some type of seawater-based fire suppression system with pipes that don't melt and a functionally limitless supply of water to draw from, when needed. Using PVC piping in homes is starting to look like a penny-wise pound foolish proposition. There's no pressure left in the mains after that plastic garbage melts. It's time to stop worrying about saving the snails and the whales, and to start focusing on saving the people while we still can. To all you tree-huggers out there, if you actually do love those trees, then some kind of forestry management practice beyond never touching the trees until they all burn down, desperately needs to be put in place. Whichever good idea fairy thought bringing eucalyptus trees to Cali was genius move... Those things don't burn in a fire, they explode.
This is nuts.
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Kbd512 is right. And Eucalyptus trees really do explode in forest fires, ask the Australians.
While there are folks worried about salt damage to the ecology, I notice in the news videos that the firefighters are using some seawater. Salt damage is preferable to total incineration, let's get some perspective here!
The sea water is being dropped from the Canadair 415 amphibious water-bomber aircraft, scooped out of the Pacific just offshore from the fires, because time is of the essence in firefighting. The other water bombers are converted jetliners, which cannot do that, they have to be loaded at an airport on land. Takes longer.
GW
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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Tbf, a lot of the parts that have burned shouldn't have much growing there anyway... it would be terrible and funny and not at all surprising if California just rebuilds exactly the same and regrows everything and ten years later it all burns down again.
Use what is abundant and build to last
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This topic will be free of emotional condemnation of other human beings.
The entire planet Earth is going to have to make massive investments to deal with the consequences of the burning of fossil fuels for centuries, and dealing with fire is just ONE of the concerns.
The long arc of Earth's history is wildly incongruent with the particularly baseless claim made by the religious dogma of our climate changers. There is no discernible increase in fires, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, or any other natural disasters, because temperature or atmospheric CO2 levels increased or decreased by some tiny amount. Such non-repeatable events were and are virtually unaffected by human activity. The impact to human lives can be imperceptible to very significant. Human perception of what actually happened is greatly affected by the number of people present, how many people died or were injured, how much "money" (a fictitious pure human brain construct) was "lost" by doing X vs Y. That said, no pseudo-scientific religious explanation is required to understand what has transpired in California. Non-existent forestry management practices, cutting local fire departments to the bone, bad design decisions for local homes, and a government apathetic to the plight of its own people created a confluence of unpreparedness, so when disaster struck, the outcome was worse than it could have otherwise been. The fires have precisely nothing to do with the climate changing or staying the same.
In the grand scheme of things, the sum total of all human activity from antiquity to the present day is roughly equivalent to ants building ant hills here versus there. The biomass of all insects is as much or more than all humans and our farm animals, for starters. The total effect of all of our nuclear weapons, if they were all detonated at the same time, pales in comparison to the effects produced by a number of historical asteroid impacts. As Main Belt asteroids go, Apophis is speck of dust. If it were to impact Earth, the force of impact would be equal to a 1,000MT nuclear detonation, or 1,000 1MT nuclear warheads. Asteroid strikes from larger celestial objects have had incomparably greater effects on Earth's climate than all the nuclear weapons in the world, as well as burning all the hydrocarbon fuels that we've ever burned.
It's a very popular past time to blame human activity on natural disasters, but the simple fact of the matter is that what we would call a natural disaster- a great fire or flood, would happen anyway, even if humans never existed, and the effects of a changing climate are contrivances compared to how the habitability of Earth is affected by one of those asteroid strikes. The mere fact that more of us are now present to witness what transpires, and we all carry a cell phone to record it, has zero effect on whether or not any particularly calamitous event befalls humanity.
History began long before humans started burning hydrocarbon fuels in quantities greater than what nature itself has been burning for many millions of years. When your religion of choice demands that you believe things that are historically factually incorrect, your religion is wrong, not history. Our climate changers are nothing more or less or different than our "Scientologists" and "Flat Earthers". Their religious teachings tell them the exact same kind of nonsense that Christianity or Judaism or Islam or any of the other traditional religions teach. In Christianity, plagues were blamed on "sin" or "god is angry with us", or other similarly ignorant ideas. Since the people that the religion was inflicted upon were too ignorant to know any better, they believed it. I don't know what excuses people who claim to "believe in science" have to offer, but thus far they appear remarkably similar to religious superstitions.
The climate change religion is merely a "new branch" of the Malthusian and communist dogma. It teaches hatred of other people, hatred of self, and blaming every calamity that ever befalls humanity on tiny increases in atmospheric CO2 or temperatures. It sure sounds "sciency" to the ignorant, especially when the screed is recited in our modern day madrasas by the high priests and priestesses of the religious order, and dutifully parroted back by "the believers", but it's another minor variation on ancient religious themes. This is why I utterly detest all forms of organized religion and refuse to imbibe in them.
This is the underlying problem with all of these new age religions, of which "climate change" is merely one example. Their converts are ignorant of history, or pretend that Earth's history doesn't predate their religious dogma (creationists, climate changers), such as the simple fact that massive fires are NOT caused by the boogeyman of their particular religion (hydrocarbon fuels, Hephaestus, etc), so they make wild claims and assertions which are provably false, that anyone with access to the internet can easily determine are false, but they persist with the facially absurd statements of belief because their religion demands it. They rely upon the general level of ignorance and incurious nature of their religious converts, in order to sustain their religions.
This article was written long before Saint Greta of Climate Change was born, but like so much of history, is either forgotten or was never known to those ignorant of history to begin with:
Sciece.org - Drought Struck First Colonists - 23 Apr 1998 - Science News Staff
Bad weather may have plagued the first English settlements in America. According to a new analysis of tree-ring climate data, the "Lost Colony" of Roanoke Island in North Carolina and the Jamestown colony in Virginia faced two of the worst droughts in the last 800 years. The discovery, reported in tomorrow's Science, suggests that the colonies' desperate struggles to survive had more to do with bad luck than bad planning.
All 117 settlers in the Roanoke Island colony disappeared sometime between 1587 and 1590; their fate remains uncertain. No such mystery surrounds Jamestown. The colonists there wrote of famine and bad water, and they repeatedly clashed with the neighboring Algonquian Indians. Only 38 of 104 original settlers survived the first year, and the mortality rate exceeded 50% in 3 of the first 4 years.
"The received wisdom among historians has been that these people were ill-prepared, profit-motivated, and startlingly indifferent to their own welfare," says archaeologist Dennis Blanton of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. But when he heard that climatologist David Stahle had records of tree rings taken from 800-year-old baldcypress trees in Virginia, he hounded him to figure out what the weather had been like. "We were astounded when the results came in," says Stahle.
The Roanoke Island colony coincided precisely with the worst 3-year drought in the climate record, and Jamestown coincided with the worst 7-year drought. In 1614, the year the drought ended, the mortality rate in Jamestown dropped by half, and the battles that historians term the "Anglo-Powhatan War" ended. To Blanton, the facts fit together like pieces of a puzzle. The colonists, who depended on trade with the Indians for food, were suspicious when the Indians said they didn't have enough--but the climate record suggests the Indians were telling the truth. And as the freshwater table dropped, brackish seawater would have probably filled the colonists' wells, Blanton says.
The climatic record doesn't change the fact that the English brought too many soldiers and not enough farmers or fishermen, says Frederick Fausz, a historian at the University of Missouri at St. Louis who has written about the Anglo-Indian wars. But it is time to retire the theory that they were victims only of their own foolishness, he says. "The best-laid plans couldn't have anticipated anything like this."
There was no coal being burned in any appreciable quantities when the Roanoke Island colony was founded. All of humanity didn't have one oil well to its name. The only natural gas being burned came from small amounts of animal dung. The only kinds of cars anyone was driving were carts drawn by teams of horses or oxen. Anyone present to observe Saint Greta's metally ill ancestors likely thought that "Loki" was playing tricks on their minds. For all I know, some of their offspring probably still do. The word "seratonin" didn't exist, because it wasn't discovered until 1935 by an Italian pharmacologist. Some of the more educated knew that mental illness was a brain disorder, but they were as likely to blame genetic defects on "god doesn't love thee" or "the devil's inside you", rather than "climate change".
We know from what the colonists wrote that there was a drought at the time their colony was founded, but nobody knew how historically bad it was relative to their own life experience with drought. Until 1998, some 411 years after the fact, we then come to know from looking at the growth rings of various 800 year old trees that the drought was the worst in 800 years. Even back then, the same "derpish" ideas about humans causing their own catastrophes was "a thing". For reasons known only to the faithful, these "religious halfwits" held sway over the beliefs of the common man and woman. Unsurprisingly, they also blamed "bad weather" on witches / the devil / some person or group of people they didn't like.
Mental illness and "magical thinking" is the reason for blaming bad weather on other people or human activities. It's a human behavioral pattern, but you have to be intellectually curious and honest enough with yourself to recognize mental illness for what it is. Every calamitous event that befalls some part of humanity cannot be summarily reduced to "the weather changed". Climate is merely averages of weather over time.
Fast forward to today, and now we have another group of religious extremists fixated on the weather, our climate changers, preaching that burning coal / oil / gas is making the weather disagreeable again. That is not a reason or root cause for the fires in California, it's merely an anti-intellectual excuse for barbarous behavior perpetrated upon people who need energy to thrive.
Need more examples?
The 1540 megadrought brought mass suffering to the continent, but European society quickly bounced back
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Occurring during a stretch of unusually warm summers in the midst of Europe’s “Little Ice Age,” a period of global cooling and extreme weather that affected the continent between the 14th and 19th centuries, the 1540 drought’s heat was so extreme that even state-of-the-art climate models could not predict it when fed nearly 1,200 years of climate data.The 1540 drought began much like today’s. “Northern Italy was extremely dry,” Pfister explains. “There was not a drop of rain during winter.” Italian chronicles say it was “like July” in December, with no rain falling for nearly 200 days in a row.
Soon, the drought that began in Italy spread to Germany, Poland, Switzerland, France and Czechia. In a 2014 paper that calls the drought a “worst case,” Pfister and his colleagues showed that rainfall was down by as much as 80 percent in some regions. Rivers like the Rhine, Elbe and Seine dried up to the point that people could wade across them on foot. The Thames was so low that the sea flowed inland and reversed the river’s direction.
...Away from the water, there was little silver lining. Farmers’ fields became so dry that giant cracks deep enough to swallow people’s legs appeared in the soil. That dried-up earth reflected even more heat into the atmosphere, feeding an unbearable heatwave that the Protestant reformer Martin Luther interpreted as a sign of the end times. Officials ordered clergy in Germany, Italy and England to beg God for forgiveness and pray for the deliverance of rain.
Instead of water, God delivered wine—some of the best ever created, according to some sources. The extreme heat meant that by the usual harvest time, grapes in Germany and France had dried almost to raisins. The resulting “late harvest,” or Spätlese, wine was deliciously sweet. A bottle of the 1540 vintage became so coveted that Swedish soldiers tore apart the German city of Würzburg looking for a barrel of it almost 100 years later; the previous inhabitants had hidden the wine in a wall. In 1540, however, the drink was cheap and abundant. Chronicler Hermann von Weinsberg, writing in Cologne, described people all over the city lying in the gutters, dead drunk, “like pigs.”
At the time, drinking wine was perhaps cheaper—and safer—than drinking water, which was often contaminated by human waste that could no longer be washed away. In some places, water was in such short supply that peasants were charged for well water and laundering of clothes was forbidden. “Everything stank terribly,” Pfister says. “People [in the chronicles] complained about this.”
An epidemic of dysentery, an intestinal infection that causes bloody diarrhea, soon ripped through the continent. Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist, a historian and physical geographer at the University of Stockholm, says the death toll from disease had “probably the highest impact of all” the miseries wrought by the 1540 drought. Experts are unsure of how many people died of dysentery and similar illnesses in 1540, but Ljungqvist estimates that half a million Europeans succumbed to diseases, most after drinking tainted water.
Food was in similarly short supply. With nowhere to pasture, cattle died of heat stroke and hunger, decimating Europe’s dairy supply. The price of bread skyrocketed, too, not because Europe’s grain crops were failing, but because there was no water to power the mills that made flour.
As if famine wasn’t enough, Europeans were also chased from their homes by forest and structural fires—the most in any peacetime year since at least 1000 C.E. One blaze reduced the entire German town of Einbeck “to ashes in a matter of hours,” causing as many as 500 deaths, wrote Pfister in 2017.
With tens of thousands left unhoused, unemployed and often diseased, local leaders quickly gave in to paranoia to explain the calamities. Authorities searched for the alleged secret symbols of mordbrenner, or organized arsonists, whom they blamed for setting fires.
“They needed scapegoats,” Pfister says, and they found them in religious opponents and climate refugees wandering between German towns. Resurrecting the methods of 15th-century witch hunts, officials rounded up and tortured migrants in hopes of eliciting confessions; figures as esteemed as Martin Luther gave credence to theories of a papal plot to incinerate Protestant towns. In the German region of Baden-Württemberg, a man and his wife were tortured five separate times after threatening to burn down a woman’s house in a moment of anger.
Despite the paranoia it inspired and its record-breaking temperatures, Pfister says the 1540 drought had “[almost] no long-term consequences.” European crops and communities seemingly bounced back from 1540 in a way they weren’t able to following unusually cold weather climate events just a few decades later.
That fact is itself a subject of interest among climate historians as they explore the connections between extreme weather events and social upheaval.
“The impacts of … extreme weather are always a function both of the actual weather … and also of social and political vulnerabilities,” says Samuel White, a climate historian at Ohio State University and the author of A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter With North America. In 1540, “we don’t see the kinds of political and economic conjunctures that would make the impact of losing one year’s harvest spiral into a larger crisis.”
The 1540 drought was only the latest in a series of worsening summer seasons that had ravaged Europe over the previous decade. “The 1530s might be one of the driest—if not the driest—decades in the past 500 years,” Ljungqvist explains.
According to one recent analysis, the summers of 1534 and 1535 were nearly as “disastrously dry” as 1540. They were accompanied by their own apocalyptic phenomena, including plagues of crop-devouring caterpillars.
In Transylvania, a 1535 famine caused by drought was so bad that dead bodies littered the roads, their mouths stuffed with grass. A 17th-century chronicle describes men and women in this period wandering naked, mad with hunger, and eating “unclean things”: cats, dogs and even—supposedly—other people.
But the historic droughts of the 1530s and ’40s may actually have been a respite from a more devastating climate phenomenon. “You had many years in this time with even worse harvests, due to wet and cold conditions,” says Ljungqvist.
The 16th century fell right in the middle of Europe’s Little Ice Age. “People were very sensitive to wet and cold summers,” which pushed back the arrival of seasons, infected crops with mold and made animals sick, creating widespread food scarcity and famines, says Pfister. “And if you had several [cold] summers in a sequence, that was absolutely the worst.”
That’s exactly what happened just a few decades after the 1540 drought, when a series of volcanic eruptions in the tropics produced cooler summers in Europe. “You have some of the most significant cooling of the past millennium in the Northern Hemisphere,” White says. “This produces not only severe harvest failures and real famines … but [also interacts] with growing political problems.”
White cites a multi-year famine that killed half of all livestock and worsened a 1590 rebellion in the Ottoman Empire. Pfister, meanwhile, points to the witch hunts of the 1560s, which saw religious puritans blame women for the continent’s bad weather. Other extreme weather effects during the period were less sinister but no less far reaching. The failure of Habsburg vineyards in 1595, for example, prompted a shift from wine to beer that holds true in Central Europe to this day.
The long-lasting consequences of these later decades’ cold spells are one reason White believes the 1540 drought isn’t viewed as so severe in retrospect, despite the remarkable suffering that accompanied it. “We tend to compare [the drought’s effects] to impacts in other stages of the Little Ice Age, which were much worse,” he says. “In comparison to those later events, those impacts really pale.”
...
Read the full article on The Smithsonian's website. Read more history if you think burning coal, oil, and gas is somehow making Earth uninhabitable. There's no historical evidence supporting that assertion.
We sure as hell weren't burning any oil or natural gas in the 1540s, very little coal, and mostly firewood, yet the Earth's weather / climate changed anyway, sometimes wildly, all without human influences of any significance. Therein lies the fallacy of the climate changer narrative. Millions of people died for lack of food, water, and basic sanitation services in the span of mere months, all of which are now incredibly abundant byproducts of using hydrocarbon fuels. Europeans didn't die by the millions because the temperatures went up or down by fractions of a degree over decades to centuries. They had no water because they had no power. They had no power because they had no cheap and abundant hydrocarbon fuel energy to supply the power.
Moving forward from medieval times to the present day, the very reason millions of people don't die from the same causes is that we now have oil-fueled combine harvesters and ships that can take food between continents in a week, or by kerosene-fueled aircraft in less than 24 hours if a real emergency arises. We use coal-fired water boilers that produce power 24/7 to keep people warm, electric pumping stations that supply clean water, and steel motor cars that protect us from the environment while taking us to our destinations at speeds no horse could ever manage. There are even a few atom smashers available to boil water. That is how and why humanity thrives today, even when the weather doesn't cooperate.
Whenever it gets too cold, after our climate changers have convinced their fellow anti-humanist Malthusians in government to restrict energy supplies to people who desperately need them, then and only then will many of our fellow humans most assuredly freeze to death. That's been the only end result of their religious dogma thus far- the use of public policy to make life progressively worse for increasingly marginal potential future benefit, presuming their assertions about what might happen a century from now will have a meaningful effect on humanity, all without evidence. Unless pointless human suffering is a virtue, the results of that dogma has produced little in the way of lasting value. All of their proposed solutions have wrought far more destruction upon both the natural environment and humanity than whatever problems their religion has yet to solve.
If anthropogenic climate change from burning hydrocarbon fuels wasn't the cause of historic changes to climate or weather-related calamities, which still happened anyway- all of them without burning significant amounts of hydrocarbon fuels, then it's probable that they also fail to provide a scientifically valid explanation for today's weather-related calamities. Humans are not causing weather events to change in any significant way, whether they burn fuels for energy or not. Burning fuel only determines how much in the way of resources and machinery they have to deal with any weather-related problems. Over time the build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere absolutely will increase the temperature, because it has to, but increasing CO2, beyond the first 200ppm or so, is a log function, which means the net effect greatly diminishes as CO2 content increases beyond that level.
Venus is so hot because it's 50% closer to the Sun than Earth is, its atmosphere is nearly pure CO2, and the mean atmospheric pressure at sea level is 93bar. Earth will never approach anything like the solar insolation / temperatures / pressures seen on Venus, purely for lack of fuel to burn. In short, this runaway climate change fallacy is just that, a fallacy. If it was ever possible to begin with, then it would've happened already. It did not, because it could not. Anyone repeating this unsubstantiated nonsense, as if it's gospel truth, is making profoundly unscientific statements of personal religious belief, backed by nothing but a dystopian fantasy that's wildly incongruent with both Earth's temperature and climatic records, as well as basic thermodynamics.
What then, is the role played by this climate change religious dogma which gets applied to every weather event which hurts humanity?
We have a new religious extremist group trying to blame whatever happens in the natural world on human activity, in order to vilify and dehumanize our fellow men and women. We didn't need climate change for that. We already had traditional religions blaming weather events on humanity. Why do we need another religion to do that? Were our traditional religions not applying enough "hellfire and brimstone"? I guess forming a religion around the weather makes about as much sense as forming a religion around anything else. We have multiple religions for omnipotent sky wizards, but those religions at least tell you to love your fellow believers. Where is the love for the people suffering in California?
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I don't think salt damage to ecosystems will be a big problem. This is a system that will be used only occasionally, maybe once every several decades in a particular area. Designing a system that can contain stagnant saline water is a bit more of a problem as it will corrode steel components. We could use concrete and plastic pipes in low pressure mains that supply booster pumps close to the point of use.
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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Salt contamination does stop the growth of a lot of grasses, shrubs, and trees, as well as most crops. Copious rainfall does wash it clean, at the risk of contaminating groundwater further down. That is usually not too serious. Dilution effect accounts for that.
You don't have to be a believer or a disbeliever in anthropogenic climate change to recognize that a very serious change is going on, in a direction of warming that also makes storms more severe, and even strengthens cold snaps. Doesn't matter what causes it, the real question is what can we do about it?
When I was young in high school, the average Arctic sea ice pack thickness was around 20-30 feet, too much for a sub to surface through it, they had to look for a lead where it was thin (5 feet or under). Atmospheric CO2 was 304 ppm, per the measurements made in Hawaii that make up the Keeling curve.
Today, subs can surface anywhere they want (and the pressure hulls are not a lot stronger), because the ice pack is only about 5 feet thick. In summer, the Arctic Ocean is ice free on the Siberian side. According to the Keeling curve data, atmospheric CO2 is now above 400 ppm, a 33% increase over about 60 years. There have not been that many more volcanoes erupting now than there were back then, but there has been a large increase in smokestack and tailpipe emissions that include copious CO2.
Disbelievers will say there is no connection, believers will say there is and that the Keeling data prove it. I dunno for sure, but I do know that a bell jar full of CO2 gets hotter out in the sun than a bell jar of air, so the infrared absorption effect of CO2 is quite real.
Believe what you want. Data is less likely to lie to you, though.
GW
Last edited by GW Johnson (2025-01-15 10:23:30)
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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I have never doubted that changing the composition of the atmosphere would have an effect on Earth's surface temperature. I think the reason some people are sceptical about it is that the atmosphere appears vast to an observer on Earth surface. Clouds can be seen stretching many miles into the sky. So to an uneducated observer, Earth's atmosphere appears to be a boundless ocean of air. But it is an optical illusion. Go up 33,000' in an aeroplane and you can see the bulk of Earth's atmosphere beneath you. A skin of fluid hugging the surface. At that height, just 6 miles up, some three quarters of the atmosphere is beneath you. In fact, if we could liquefy Earth's atmosphere such that it pools on the surface, it would form a layer some 10m (33') thick. That isn't much taller than a town house. Contrast that with the oceans, which average about 1 mile in depth. The atmosphere looks quite meagre when we think of it like that. Given the extensive changes that humanity has wrought on Earth's surface, why would it be hard to believe that we have changed the atmosphere too, especially given how pathetically thin it really is?
On the topic of salt management. Under normal conditions we could keep the mains filled with fresh water. Only in periods of high demand would sea water pumps need to be activated. Small fires can be extinguished by fresh water. It is only for the more occasional big ones that salt water pumps would be needed. The same thing applies on naval ships in the RN. Salt water firefighting is the method of last resort. But it is a method that needs to be reliably available for every fire that may endanger the ship.
Last edited by Calliban (2025-01-15 11:30:01)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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GW,
The sea level was rising long before humans started burning fuels for energy. We know this because we've kept records, and parts of nature keep records for us. There was never any option available to humanity where that would not continue to happen, except for the "snowball Earth" option where most existing life dies out from cold, because Earth's climate functions in cycles. That continuously happened for eons before humans ever existed and it will continue to happen even if the very last human goes extinct.
So, what if we did measurably "speed up" that natural warming process?
Well, that was always going to happen, regardless of anything that humans did or did not do. There was never an option where the Earth's climate or temperature remains exactly as it was, at some specific point in time.
How do we "know that"?
We have all of Earth's climatic history to study as a guide. Earth's climate naturally, as-in "no human activity required", oscillates between warmer and wetter and cooler and drier. That is a fact, it's not debatable, and in point of fact it happens every single year, even in the tropics. We used to call that "weather", rather than "climate change". The weather always changes over time, period.
Why did we choose to "speed up" that process?
Humans, as well as all other plants and animals if we're being honest with ourselves, function best with abundant energy supplies and warm temperatures. Polar bears hibernate during the winter because otherwise they'd die from lack of energy or temperatures so cold they'd freeze to death.
What can we realistically do about the climate changing?
Let's ask ourselves a very similar question that we inevitably have to answer, merely to survive from day-to-day:
What can we do about the fact that the temperatures are colder during the winter, quite often lethally cold without some protection?
1. You can put a coat on before you go outside to stay warm. You can also do a bit of exercise or manual labor to warm up, such as walking briskly. I did that this morning when my son and I walked to his school in the cold rain. We moved quickly, we wore jackets, and we used umbrellas. Wonder of wonders, it worked! I was no longer cold by the time I made it home and I even unzipped my jacket to cool off. I was also fully awake after a little exercise, so I was able to immediately focus on my work. I saw lots of other kids and adults doing the same thing, so apparently they also figured it out.
2. You can build a well-insulated house and then burn a log in your fireplace to keep warm inside your house.
3. You can hop on an airplane and fly to some part of the world where the temperatures are warmer, such as flying from New York to Florida. New Yorkers with disposable income do that every year to escape the bitter cold of New York winters. Native Floridians call them "snow birds".
4. You can move to some place where the temperatures are warmer so you don't have to travel to some place warmer during the winter.
5. You can stop fixating on the fact that the weather always changes, accept that it's simply a part of life on Earth, and adapt to it when necessary. All species of plants and animals that did not already go extinct did the exact same thing. In general, life on Earth has been exceptionally resilient. If the temperature going up or down by as much as 10 degrees was enough to make Earth uninhabitable, then all life would've already died off, because we see greater temperature deltas than that every single day.
The same things you can do about the weather changing every single year are also the very same things you can realistically do about the climate (weather over time) changing.
If the water rises, then you move to higher ground. If you're not smart enough to do that, then you either learn how to swim or you drown. I've never seen that work any other way. Oddly enough, most people seem to be able to figure it out. When you have 100 to 200 years to move to higher ground, you cannot call that an emergency. Emergencies happen over time spans measured in seconds to hours at most, not decades to centuries. Any process that plays out over centuries is something you learn to adapt to.
If you live in a flood zone where flood waters frequently wash away everything you've built, you can also stop rebuilding in places that flood out frequently. That's a crazy concept to be sure, but it also happens to work. We've been doing that for many thousands of years. As our energy supplies and technological sophistication increased, doing so became much easier over time. If we have fast moving flood waters that trap people in their homes, we now have kerosene-burning helicopters which can extract them from what might otherwise be a fatal event. Thanks to that "helicopter" technology enabled by hydrocarbon fuels, that which might otherwise be a fatal event is now more of an annoyance- a cause for concern to be sure, but one which has a realistic answer that works every time, unless the person being rescued is too stupid to accept that their "god" sent a guy in a helicopter to "save them" from the flood.
If there is no water, then you either don't live there or you pump it in from somewhere else that does have water. We call that "irrigation". It's been proven to work quite well. It's the reason we have golf courses in Arizona that are not 100% "sand trap". When you have energy, which hydrocarbon fuels have provided to us in abundance, doing this is not a major problem. If it was, then we wouldn't dump billions of gallons of fresh water on golf courses in the middle of deserts, but we routinely do that because it's not an insurmountable problem.
In short, if Earth gets a little warmer and wetter, we'll adapt. Ultimately, we never had a choice in that matter. It was always going to happen. So, if the sea level rises, I imagine we'll start moving people to higher ground. Even if all the ice melts, there will still be lots and lots of land above sea level. If we apply a modicum of uncommon sense and capture some of that fresh water for our own uses before it melts, even better.
You know what else humanity is not going to "collectively" accomplish?
Humanity is not going to stop that next ice age from coming, either. All magical thinking aside, at the present time we simply lack the tools and technologies required to do that. No amount of Chinese fire drill action is going to stop that from happening.
What I refuse to do is to imbibe in another religion that worships mentally ill children, like Saint Greta of Climate Change, and tells me they're "saving the planet" by buying things. I don't take public policy positions from the rants of mentally ill kids, and neither should anyone else who expects me to treat them as if they're an adult. I don't believe anyone who is buying something is "saving" much of anything, but they obviously are consuming something through their purchasing decisions. Believe it or not, other people who are not mentally ill will learn to adapt as well. We've already been doing that our entire lives. I've survived 44 winters and counting, all because my brain told me to wear a jacket when it gets cold outside. When it gets hot, I drink more water and wear a T-shirt.
Unfortunately, people who are mentally ill will choose to fixate on things they cannot stop from happening. I liken those people to the "doomsday preppers" that they routinely mock and deride. I will admit that some of them will have a very hard time accepting that everything changes over time, including the weather and climate, but change it will. Eventually, most of them will come around. Until they do, I look forward to seeing what creative but nutty silliness they come up with next.
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Now that we've adequately addressed what is clearly NOT responsible for the forest fires in California, let's start addressing real root causes:
“Please remember the words, very simple. Forest management. Please remember that,” said President Trump, in Sacramento on Monday for a meeting with Gov. Gavin Newsom. The president contended that brush and dead trees in California’s forests are “like a matchstick.” Gov. Newsom countered that “The hots are getting hotter, the dries are getting drier… something happened to the plumbing of the world. Climate change is real and exacerbating this.”
The governor’s natural resources secretary, Wade Crowfoot, told the president. “If we ignore that science and sort of put our head in the sand and think it’s all about vegetation management, we’re not going to succeed together protecting Californians.” Embattled Californians have cause to wonder.
Wade Crowfoot graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1996 with a degree in political science and in 2004 earned master’s in public policy from the London School of Economics. Crowfoot was deputy cabinet secretary to Gov. Jerry Brown and also served as west coast director for the Environmental Defense Fund. In the Monday meeting, Crowfoot did not spell out the science on climate change. That would require some presentation of hard data that had been submitted to others for replication.
While waiting for the political science grad to lay out the data, Californians might check out California Wildfires: Key Recommendations to Prevent Future Disasters, a 2019 briefing by Lawrence McQuillan, Haydeon Carol Park, Adam B. Summers and Katherine Dwyer. The authors find “Cal Fire and other state and federal agencies to be at fault for allowing fuel conditions to persist that enabled so many wildfires to reach epic proportions.” Their recommendations include: Emphasize proactive forest management and forest restoration; conduct more prescribed or controlled burns; Allow private-property owners to more easily remove trees and provide active forest management through forest thinning and the creation of breaks, especially near communities.
While blaming climate change for wildfires, state officials also ignore another potential cause: arson. As KION reported on September 11, Anita Esquivel has been arrested for intentionally starting fires near Highway 101 in Monterey County.
We know that Democrats are professional liars who think their own voters are stupid, because Presidential candidates, such as Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris have both said so. They both lost their bids for Presidential powers, and rightly so, but nearly everyone from the Democrat Party and most of the Republican Party are a class of cretins who prey upon the ignorant by deliberately lying to and gaslighting their supporters into believing the utter idiocy they spout off. Democrats, in particular, think that if they tell a lie often enough, and with enough theatrical gusto, that their lie becomes "the truth". This rhetoric is clearly unhelpful and painfully dumb, but it happens to work on low-information people more often than not.
Overview
California’s horrific wildfires of 2017 and 2018 caught most people off-guard, but they did not surprise astute observers of state wildfire policy and management. Critics had warned for many years that worsening conditions across the state were increasing the risk of a “perfect storm” of cataclysmic wildfires. The failure to heed those warnings has prompted the Independent Institute to award a group of public agencies—led by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire)—its eighth California Golden Fleece® Award, a dishonor given quarterly to California state or local agencies or government projects that swindle taxpayers or break the public trust. Although Cal Fire has blamed Pacific Gas & Electric Company for causing the state’s deadliest wildfire, we find Cal Fire and other state and federal agencies to be at fault for allowing fuel conditions to persist that enabled so many wildfires to reach epic proportions.
Multiple government officials and agencies contributed to the unprecedented destructiveness of the 2017 and 2018 wildfire seasons by pursuing, for decades, misguided priorities and perverse incentives. This includes impeding sensible and effective fire-prevention policies. Along with Cal Fire, these blameworthy parties include past California governors and state legislators, the U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, state and federal Environmental Protection Agencies, California Natural Resources Agency, California Air Resources Board (CARB) and its 35 local air-quality management districts, and various environmental organizations. While all share blame to varying degrees for the flawed public policies and their disastrous outcomes, Cal Fire and the U.S. Forest Service bear special responsibility, given their mandates to protect Californians from wildfires.
The deadly cumulative errors of the responsible parties are numerous, but some mistakes played an especially harmful role in California’s recent megafires. One fundamental cause is that public agencies and officials succumbed to pressure by environmental groups who pushed for fire-management policies that take a reactive posture (fire suppression), rather than a proactive stance (fire prevention and active management). Although the hope was to preserve land in its “natural state,” this approach set the stage for horrific wildfires by allowing excessive growth of fuels. Another fundamental policy failure that encouraged deadly megafires was the shifting of decision-making authority for wildfire management away from the local communities at risk. This resulted in delays and inaction, which helped fuel the megafires. At a more operational level, public agencies have failed to proactively adopt cutting-edge fire prevention and detection technologies as early as possible.
This California Golden Fleece® Award report examines the public policy failures that contributed to California’s recent wildfire disasters and addresses remaining problems by offering 26 recommendations to improve wildfire safety. These measures include emphasizing fire prevention over suppression; adopting innovative technologies and systems; and urging local, decentralized strategies over top-down control. To dramatically improve wildfire safety in California, new approaches must be implemented quickly; the longer the status quo prevails, the more Californians’ property and lives will be vulnerable to unnecessary risks.
With the publication of this report, the Independent Institute is reprising an early reproach of Cal Fire. In March 2017, it awarded Cal Fire a California Golden Fleece® Award for its expensive, inefficient, and ineffective fire management strategies. The agency received a failing grade for its misguided priorities, poor performance, and culture of corruption. Unfortunately, although the message generated attention in the media, fire policy reforms were too little and too late: 2017 and 2018 proved to be the worst years for wildfires in California’s history, and Cal Fire proved itself unable to solve the problems with its misguided approaches to forest management and the pervasive government ownership of California land. We hope this report will help bring to bear enough public pressure for positive change by Cal Fire and other responsible parties, thereby sparing Californians from further preventable wildfire disasters.
California’s Wildfires: Who Manages What?
To identify areas for improvement, we must first understand the parties most responsible for fire-management policy in California. Cal Fire has primary responsibility for fire prevention, suppression, and safety in the areas of California that are designated the State Responsibility Area (SRA), the land where the state government has primary financial responsibility for wildfire management. The SRA covers more than 31 million acres (a little more than 30 percent of California’s land area) and includes land that is privately owned, state owned, watershed, and rangeland. The SRA excludes federally owned land, as well as land that falls within city boundaries.
The federal government is responsible for land and fire management on more than 40 percent of California land, which it manages through the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and other agencies. About 46 percent of California’s 100 million acres of total land is owned by the federal government, while 48 percent is owned privately, and 6 percent is owned by the state government. Of the state’s 33 million acres of forestland, 57 percent is owned and managed by the federal government, 3 percent is owned by state and local agencies, and 40 percent is owned by families, family trusts, Native American tribes, or private companies.
California’s 2017 and 2018 Wildfires
California has a long history of major wildfires, but the destructiveness of the 2017 and 2018 wildfires was unprecedented. Anyone who watched the television news saw heartbreaking stories about wildfire death and destruction in the Golden State. The burned-out landscapes in and around cities, such as Santa Rosa and Redding, drew comparisons to post-apocalyptic wastelands. In 2017, nearly 9,000 wildfires ravaged California, burning 1.2 million acres of land, destroying more than 10,800 structures, and killing at least 46 people.
The 2018 wildfires were even more destructive. More than 1.8 million acres of California land burned. People lost 17,133 residential structures, 703 commercial/mixed residential structures, and 5,811 minor structures. 2018 was also California’s deadliest year for wildfires, with more than 100 people killed, including 86 fatalities from the Camp Fire in and around the town of Paradise in Butte County, where 90 percent of the town’s structures were destroyed. And millions of residents in Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay Area were shrouded for weeks in toxic haze resulting from the fires. Cal Fire spokesman Scott McLean called that wildfire season “the worst in recorded history.”
Early estimates by the California Insurance Commissioner’s Office concluded that just three 2018 wildfires—the Camp Fire, Hill Fire, and Woolsey Fire—caused more than $9 billion in damage from 28,500 insurance claims. In total, the wildfires of 2017 and 2018 caused $36 billion in total damages, according to Steven Weissman, a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy and an advisor to California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). Table 1 in the report’s appendix summarizes the largest California wildfires in 2017 and 2018.
Misplaced Priorities, Perverse Incentives, and Vicious Cycles
California’s deadly wildfires of 2017 and 2018 were historically unprecedented, but a fundamental cause was utterly mundane: perverse incentives that discouraged fire prevention and thereby increased the risks of future fires.
Cal Fire’s leadership knows that the department can increase its budget much more easily by focusing on suppression rather than prevention. This is partly because the agency has access to an emergency fund (e-fund) for annual suppression of major wildfires, allowing the agency to exceed its general fire-control budget, which funds smaller fire-control efforts. When the e-fund runs dry, Cal Fire can request that the California Department of Finance tap into budget reserves and transfer additional taxpayer funds to the e-fund. This has taken a heavy toll on fire prevention, which has proven to be superior to fire suppression at containing costs and limiting damage.
In the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2018, Cal Fire spent $947 million on fire suppression. Four years earlier, e-fund spending was only $242 million. Just two months into fiscal year 2019, it had already exhausted its 2019 e-fund budget of $443 million and asked for another $234 million. Ryan M. Yonk, a research fellow at the Independent Institute, and Devin Stein, a researcher at Syracuse University, explain that fire managers “face an incentive to focus on suppression where the budgets are larger . . . and the very act of suppressing wildfires is much more heroic than chopping dead trees and conducting prescribed burns.”
Only between 2 percent and 8 percent of Cal Fire’s total budget, however, goes to fire prevention activities, depending on what share of funding for Cal Fire’s Conservation Camps program, which primarily manages prison inmate crews, is assigned to prevention activities. Regardless of whether it is 2 percent or 8 percent or somewhere in between, prevention funding is a paltry amount of the total budget.
The U.S. Forest Service has also faced budgeting issues that have resulted in inadequate wildfire fuel reduction. Writing in Science in 2015, a group of researchers, including professors from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Davis, found that “perverse political incentives” stand in the way of a “more sensible wildfire policy.” In a process called “fire borrowing,” money has been raided from other budget lines, such as fire prevention or forest health, to pay for Forest Service firefighting costs during intense fire years.
The U.S. Forest Service, for example, gets dedicated annual appropriations from Congress to suppress wildfires, and this budget gets supplemented by emergency funding. But programs to thin out forests or set smaller prescribed fires are part of a more limited prevention fund—and this money often gets diverted during severe wildfires to pay for firefighting.
The Forest Service takes the lead on wildfire management on California forestland owned by the federal government and, here too, prevention has taken a backseat to suppression, which makes future fires more intense. Robert Bonnie, then-undersecretary at the U.S. Department of Agriculture who oversaw the Forest Service, summed it up in a 2015 interview: “Fire suppression is cannibalizing the Forest Service budget. Fewer people are doing research, restoration, range-land management.”
There is reason for hope that fire borrowing at the federal level will come to an end. The Forest Service’s budgeting practices will change in 2020 due to a federal omnibus budget bill enacted in March 2018 that created a separate emergency fund of $2 billion annually for Forest Service wildfire suppression. Meanwhile, California is now dealing with the results of excess fuels building up on federal land resulting from past raids on prevention funds for suppression activities. And, as proven by Cal Fire, dedicated suppression funds are no guarantee that adequate prevention activities will be undertaken, either because of inadequate funding, insufficient manpower, or environmental regulations that impede fire-prevention efforts.
Regarding insufficient manpower, the changing nature of California wildfires reduces prevention efforts due to a binding labor constraint. In the past, wildfires were suppressed in weeks, now it often takes months. Fire seasons were shorter as well. The combination of longer fires and expanded fire seasons leaves an insufficient number of Cal Fire workers to perform prevention activities. Prevention efforts used to be conducted during “down time” or the “off season,” but these are quickly disappearing with year-round fire seasons, according to some veteran firefighters.
This process creates a vicious cycle of destruction: Too few resources are available for fuel reduction and other fire-prevention efforts, resulting in costly fire-suppression efforts in future years, thereby reducing efforts to prevent wildfires. The perverse cycle repeats itself because this approach is reactive (focused on suppression), not proactive (focused on prevention). This explains why fiscal year 2019 will mark the seventh year out of the past 10 that Cal Fire has exceeded its e-fund budget.
The budgeting bias for suppression over prevention dovetails with the political agenda of many powerful environmental groups. Increasingly restrictive environmental regulations over many decades have impeded proper forest and land management. Stanford University environmental economist Terry Anderson notes that scientific forest management techniques to reduce dangerous fuel loads, including logging, prescribed burns, and thinning, are “continuously thwarted by environmental activists who want to let nature take her course.” Anderson said in a 2017 commentary, “Environmentalists use administrative procedures and litigation to stop projects that would reduce fuel loads, claiming that those projects are no substitute for natural processes and that they destroy habitat for endangered species.” The “nature-first” mindset leads to impediments that block sensible and needed prevention activities.
A 2015 study by the Bureau of Business and Economic Research at the University of Montana, conducted for the U.S. Forest Service, found that activist appeals and litigation encumbered 40 to 50 percent of the planned timber harvest and treatment acres in recent years in a region of the country hit hard by wildfires. And in the 2016 book Nature Unbound, authors Kenneth J. Sim, Randy T Simmons, and Ryan Yonk cite a regional forester for the U.S. Forest Service in Washington state who said that litigation repeatedly delays healthy forest management and “predispose ecosystems to unwanted wildfire.” Suppression, not prevention, continues to rule the day, as environmental groups impede proper forest and land management.
Budget maximization is also reinforced through the choice of firefighting tactics. U.S. Forest Service surveys have found that fire managers typically use more costly fire suppression tactics regardless of the expected success of their actions. Dropping fire retardant from an aircraft, for example, can cost more than $7,000 per hour, but some claim that it is used unnecessarily in many situations in order for politicians to show constituents that proper actions are being undertaken (insiders call it a “political air show”) or a show for the public and the media (insiders call these “CNN drops”).
Fighting wildfires should not be about putting on a public show, but a contract firefighter from Oakridge, Oregon, made a startling revelation when he said, “There’s a lot for show going on, in all of it. Sometimes we’re part of the show. They want to show people they’re responding. They’ll call too many resources.” Unfortunately, firefighting “for show” needlessly puts lives and property at risk and drives up costs. It is far more prudent for land managers to focus on preventing fire through vegetation management. Such work may be slow and monotonous, but it is precisely what California needs.
The focus on reactive suppression rather than proactive prevention is analogous to a doctor and patient who spend a small fortune to repeatedly remove a recurring cancerous tumor, instead of focusing earlier on lifestyle changes that might have prevented the malignancy from developing in the first place. Like relying on cancer surgery instead of first adopting various cancer-prevention treatments and lifestyle choices, wildfire suppression is far costlier in the long run than focusing on wildfire prevention.
Firefighters and policy researchers are not the only people to have identified perverse incentives afflicting state wildfire management policy. In 2018, John Barnell, CEO of the Society of American Foresters, concluded, “Since both the state and federal agencies have been devoting greater and greater resources to suppression to fight the immediate problem, the trickle down of that is less money for strategies on how to get in front of the fire problem.” This decades-long practice of deprioritizing prevention helped fuel the Mendocino Complex Fire in July 2018, the largest fire in California recorded history, and the Camp Fire in November 2018, the deadliest fire in California recorded history.
As California burned, record amounts of taxpayer money and record numbers of firefighting personnel were devoted to wildfire suppression, not prevention. Spending more money while seeing more death and destruction is not a sign of success but of misplaced priorities. It suggests that California taxpayers and residents have not received the best return on their taxpayer dollars for wildfire safety.
The bottom line is that, for decades, California authorities have underinvested in proactive wildfire prevention and relied too much on reactive wildfire tactics. Policymakers must dramatically shift their focus and resource allocation priorities if Californians are to become safer, and their property made more secure, from the risk of deadly and destructive wildfires. Reforms must be adopted to get in front of the fire problem—and these reforms must be implemented quickly. The state has entered the 2019 wildfire season after a winter of abundant precipitation, which has produced lush vegetation and, thus, excess fuels.
This California Golden Fleece® Award report makes 26 recommendations for improved wildfire safety. Although some of the reforms have to some extent been adopted in principle, we believe efforts thus far have been insufficient. Other reforms have yet to be adopted in California. The state needs a multi-pronged approach that emphasizes improved wildfire prevention and decentralized authority to act.
Recommendations for Prevention, Early Detection, and Rapid Suppression of California Wildfires
Under normal (non-emergency) circumstances, the top priority of any sustainable firefighting strategy is to prevent an unplanned major fire from ever beginning. The next highest priority should be the early detection of an unplanned fire in order to assess its threat and extinguish it quickly, if necessary. Another high priority should be the rapid suppression of any wildfire that grows into a significant threat. Once a fire reaches the scale of the 2018 Camp Fire, for example, firefighters have few tools to successfully combat it. Thankfully, there are many preventive measures that can be implemented or expanded in California that would reduce the probability and severity of wildfires. Here are 26 recommendations (we chose not to group them by categories such as prevention, detection, suppression, and institutional reform because many of these recommendations would provide multiple benefits that span those categories):
1. Emphasize proactive forest management and forest restoration
...2. Conduct more prescribed or controlled burns
...3. Allow low-intensity natural fires to burn
...4. Encourage more use of “fire breaks” and “fuel breaks”
...5. Allow private-property owners to more easily remove trees and provide active forest management through forest thinning and the creation of breaks, especially near communities
...6. Hire more private firefighters
...7. Inject competition and market discipline into electricity markets by ending the monopoly protections of utility companies, encouraging utilities to focus more on customer safety and less on the pet projects of politicians and regulators
...8. End California housing policies that encourage more people to live in fire-prone areas
...9. Stop government interference in the home insurance market in California
...10. Review investigative procedures and budgets to ensure legal accountability for people and companies who start wildfires
...11. Deploy more early-detection systems to quickly identify fires in California forests and in wildland-urban interfaces
...12. Deploy Internet of Things-connected sensors
...13. Use more artificial intelligence to analyze data and improve firefighting
...14. Improve wildfire alert systems
...15. Use steel poles to hold electricity lines
...16. Use new and improved fire retardant
...17. Deploy more firefighting robots such as Thermite
...18. Replicate Israel’s Matash system in California
...19. Encourage “home hardening” through the installation of exterior fire sprinklers and fireproofing of buildings
...20. Encourage the undergrounding of electrical lines in high-risk areas
...21. Enable fast, targeted cutoff of power lines during high-risk incidents to prevent electrical arcs or downed power lines from sparking wildfires
...22. Insulate power lines
Investigations have determined that PG&E’s equipment played a role in starting several California wildfires in recent years. On May 15, 2019, Cal Fire concluded that PG&E’s electrical power lines caused the devastating Camp Fire in 2018. Uninsulated power lines are the main culprits, according to U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup in San Francisco. Alsup cited power lines as the “single most recurring cause” of recent wildfires and wrote, “the power conductors are almost always uninsulated.”When uninsulated conductors are pushed together by a tree or limb in high wind, electrical sparks fall on vegetation below that, when dry, can ignite a wildfire. PG&E plans to install insulated power lines across 7,000 miles of the highest fire-risk areas over the next 10 years. The plan is expensive, but it would mitigate fire risk while limiting the inconvenience and potential safety hazards associated with preventive blackouts.
23. Use innovative technology on aircraft and satellites
...24. Invest in an overwhelming strike force to rapidly suppress large fires
One important lesson from the 2018 wildfires is that California lacks the technology, equipment, and personnel necessary to rapidly suppress large wildfires. California does not, for example, have sufficient fixed-wing air tanker support for firefighting. Its Vietnam War-era firefighting helicopters are outdated, lacking the technology required to fly at night. When the Ferguson Fire broke out in July 2018, the incident management team requested air support, but was told that none was available. One cause, reported by ABC News in Los Angeles, was a pilot shortage.In September 2018, Cal Fire’s air tanker force had 57 pilot positions for its 23 tankers and three pilot vacancies. This pilot shortage can take years to fix. “That is a very specific skill set to be an air tanker pilot,” said Chief Mike Mohler of Cal Fire. “We can’t just hire off the street. [Applicants] need to have hundreds of hours of training prior to even applying for a job.” And after being hired, it can take two years for a pilot to complete their training. Schedules obtained by the Sacramento Bee showed an unusually large number of grounded planes due to the pilot shortage during the peak wildfire season.
In addition to a pilot shortage, California does not have ready access to a “supertanker.” During the Camp Fire in November 2018, California received from Colorado the privately owned Global SuperTanker, a modified Boeing 747 that can carry 19,200 gallons of water, fire retardant, or suppressant, compared to 1,200 gallons by a normal-sized air tanker. Like the Global SuperTanker, air tankers in general tend to be privately owned and contracted for when needed. They, and the Global SuperTanker in particular, are also in great demand across the country and around the world. Unfortunately, bureaucratic red tape repeatedly delayed deployment of the Global SuperTanker in California, as the company had to wait for approvals from Cal Fire and the Forest Service. Because rapid suppression requires rapid deployment, government agencies must streamline their authorizations to enable quicker responses.
25. Use virtual reality simulations to improve firefighter training
26. Encourage more private stewardship of California land
Conclusion
In February 2019, Cal Fire released its Community Wildfire Prevention and Mitigation Report. As the title implies, the bulk of the 19 recommendations contained in the report focus on preventing future wildfires through fuel reduction, forest management, prescribed burns, and local action. Cal Fire wrote that multiple agencies must “begin systematically addressing community vulnerability and wildfire fuel buildup through rapid deployment of resources. Implementing several of these recommended actions is necessary to execute the priority fuel reduction projects referenced above. Other recommendations are intended to put the state on a path toward long-term community protection, wildfire prevention, and forest health.”Cal Fire has begun the process with 35 fast-tracked priority projects across the state involving 60,000 acres. Plans call for 10 new fuel-reduction crews under Cal Fire’s command. Many of the projects require waivers of state regulations such as CEQA. On its website, the California Natural Resources Agency states, “The [Governor’s] Emergency Proclamation provides the Secretary of the Natural Resources Agency (CNRA) and the Secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA) discretion to suspend state environmental permitting requirements on a case-by-case basis so that the 35 priority projects can get underway immediately, including suspending requirements of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).” The waivers for each project are listed here.
These waivers are the smoking gun, an admission by the governor and other state officials that environmental mandates have been impediments to sensible wildfire prevention activities in local communities and that the regulations must be suspended to get things done. It took an executive order by the governor to allow these local projects to proceed—an indictment of California’s environmental special interests and the amount of bureaucratic red tape created by their favored environmental regulations. It also screams for the need to allow local communities to handle their wildfire prevention activities without centralized, top-down barriers.
Although the Cal Fire recommendations do not go far enough, and do not include the variety of technology-focused recommendations contained in this Golden Fleece report, the Cal Fire report does represent growing awareness of the problem and a search for new approaches. Hopefully, Cal Fire will embrace this Golden Fleece report so that all needed changes are implemented.
In April 2019, Governor Newsom’s Strike Force released a 52-page report titled Wildfires and Climate Change: California’s Energy Future. The report recommends the steps that California needs to take in order to reduce the incidence and severity of wildfires while renewing its commitment to “clean energy” and holding utilities accountable for their role in past wildfires. The Strike Force recommends expanding fire prevention activity, making communities more resilient, investing in fire suppression and response, and calling on the federal government to better manage its forestlands. Further, it states, “The growing risk of catastrophic wildfires has created an imperative for the state to act urgently and swiftly to expand preemptive fire prevention and bolster wildfire response efforts to help protect vulnerable communities and reduce the severity of wildfires in our state. All levels of government, communities, utilities, and residents must share in this responsibility in order to better defend California from this devastating threat.”
As outlined in this California Golden Fleece® Award report, there are many actions that need to be taken in order to get ahead of the wildfire problem. Most of these actions require a change in culture to embrace innovation, new technology, new procedures, a focus on prevention, and vastly more local control. Simply throwing more taxpayer money at current practices is not the answer. Nor is the answer a temporary reallocation of resources that will revert back to old ways of doing things once politicians shift their focus away from fires to the next issue of the day. California must get beyond the status quo permanently. If not, more Californians will needlessly die, more homes will be destroyed, and more lives will be upended by out-of-control wildfires. Worst of all, much of this future destruction will have been preventable.
Now, then...
Any plan with that many different recommendations is quite clearly not a realistic and coherent strategy for fire prevention and control, it's a "wish list" of things to do about wildfires if money was unlimited or all of the money wasn't squandered on idiotic things like pretending to deploy "green energy" while actually stuffing wads of cash into the pockets of Democrat Party campaign donors.
Mind you, this list of recommendations came from researchers at UC Berkeley, and they've imbibed in far more of the climate change kool-aid than most other people. Nowhere in that list of recommendations does the word "climate change" ever appear, because back when people at least claimed to be intellectually honest, they knew damn good and well that fires in California have absolutely nothing to do with climate change.
In the comments section, we have some tree huggers from the Chaparral Institute claiming that "embers", rather than trees, are responsible for the uncontrolled wildfires in California. Where, pray tell, do these "embers" come from? Oh, that's right, they come from burning vegetation. They further claim that controlled burns are ineffective at preventing wildfires and that they result in land changes and introduction of invasive species (forests to grasslands, natural vegation to "weeds"- somehow "not natural", according to them), despite all available scientific evidence to the contrary.
Whenever one group (Libertarians in this instance) makes one claim while another group (we'll call these clowns the "Sh!t Libs", because that's who / what they are) makes the opposite claim, I then start looking at achieved results over time.
Since these "Sh!t Libs" now have a stranglehold on public policy out in California, we should be able to see how well their claims hold water by looking at places where some amount of forestry management has been applied versus almost none, which is in fact the case for much of California's wildlands that surround populated areas.
This article comes to us from Mother Jones, one of the sh!ttiest groups of Sh!t Libs there is, but somehow even they know what's up:
...
But in the 1880’s, the US Army began to administer Yellowstone, the first national park, and developed the idea of “fighting” fire. In 1910, wildfires in Idaho and Montana burned millions of acres, destroying communities and killing 86 people. The US Forest Service subsequently adopted a policy of putting out all blazes, which state and federal land management agencies mimicked in an effort to protect timber supplies and human lives. Under these policies, Indigenous people and ranchers alike could be fined for burning their own lands.
In 1968, the National Park Service lifted its fire ban after noticing a decline in giant sequoia trees, which depend on fire to grow. Over the next fifteen years, the Forest Service and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) gradually re-introduced fire to their landscapes. The Forest Service now admits that suppression backfired; excluding fire created an unnatural build-up of dry brush and overcrowding of trees that’s partly fueling today’s mega-fires. Scientists and policy makers increasingly agree that under the right conditions, intentionally burning away flammable vegetation is one of the most effective tools for reducing wildfire risk. And research shows that when wildfires do reach lands thinned by prescribed fire, far fewer trees die “even under extreme fire weather,” an effect that can last for up to 15-20 years.
...
The US Forestry Service and Bureau of Land Management know that our enviro-wackos (mentally ill Sh!t Libs who claim to "love nature", despite the fact that they really hate people and only "theatrically" care about the environment) out in California are dead wrong in their assertions, and they have the data to prove it. The data are not wrong. The nutty theories of our Sh!t Libs are why we have so many out-of-control fires in Cali.
The report has the words "climate change" 39 friggin times in just 55 pages of material, so all you religious fanatics can still read the report without immediately discarding what it states because it fails to recite the magical incantations of your religion:
A Statement of Common Ground Regarding the Role of Wildfire in Forested Landscapes of the Western United States
From the Report:
Global and regional climates vary over centuries, decades, and between years, including conspicuous oscillations between the relative dominance of warm-dry versus cool-moist weather patterns. As recently as the late 20th century, a sizable portion of the ecological literature assumed relative stationarity in climate, but increasingly abundant and diverse lines of evidence overwhelmingly demonstrate that the Earth’s climate, and that of its many ecoregions, has constantly varied over multiple time scales.
Oh my gosh...! "The weather", aka "the climate", changes over time. It always has and always will. It varied wildly before we started burning a lot of hydrocarbon fuels and afterwards it was still varying wildly.
What should we learn from this?
Perhaps atmospheric CO2 is not the plain and simple temperature control knob we thought it was?
Oh no! The religion falls apart if we accept that easy to deduce conclusion. It has some effect, because literally everything does, but maybe there is no "just right" amount of CO2. One thing is for sure, though. Without sufficient CO2, there is no plant life... Period!
Now that we've acknowledge the presence of the corny kernels of truth in what is otherwise a steam pile of corn-fed cow manure that we call "climate change", can we spend more time fixating on actual solutions to real world problems that we have the tools to solve?
Report taken from this website:
Common Ground on the Role of Wildfire in Forested Landscapes of the Western US
What key statements / claims does the report make?
1. Fire is a necessary part of ecosystem maintenance, so refusing to use fire as a tool in our forest maintenance toolkit is just dumb.
2. Fire and logging alone are not "silver bullets" (duh!). A multi-varied approach is required to maintain the landscape, more or less "as-is". This means a total "don't do anything at all to the precious land" approach is equally stupid and shall have the exact opposite of the desired effect of reducing damaging fires that hurt both humans and ecosystems. Some kind of more sensible policy than the extremes of "no touchy" and "let the logging companies chop down all the trees" needs to be applied. This requires those in positions of power to apply more uncommon sense than overly common religious dogma.
3. There is in fact NOT a scientific consensus on the degree to which the role of "climate change", in both the ecology of our forest wildlands as well as the incidence of seriously damaging fires, actually plays. There are fewer fires when the fuel source is wet vs dry, which the report acknowledges. However, when there's no overly-abundant fuel source present because some basic land management practices are applied, there is also no overly-abundant fires. And yet, I was told by the mass media clown show that "the science is settled", as it relates to climate change. Apparently, someone forgot to inform all of our actual scientists that "the science" was already settled.
In the face of actual science, all their wild theories about ecology failed to produce the desired results, unless the desired result was complete destruction of the environment, in which case it worked flawlessly. If you're like me, you probably think the results of playing their stupid games is "winning" stupid prizes. I don't want any more stupid prizes.
My take on this is that we have allowed arrogant ideologically motivated people to blindly pursue their non-working "solutions" because equally arrogant and ideologically motivated voters gave these scientologists the power to apply their ideology at a grand scale, which is precisely why we now suffer repeated grand scale natural disasters. Let's apply the same forestry management practices that the Indians applied for centuries before the white Sh!t Libs showed up, and see if we get a better result. If we do suffer fewer fires, then we can chalk up their environmentalism / climate changing practices to ideology gone awry. Sometimes the cost of continuing human civilization is making hamburgers out of the sacred cows of people who have no intention of cooperating with others for the benefit of everyone, rather than one group's beliefs.
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The article at the link below is about the long term effects of sea water on the environment. The author is a scientist who has been studying the effect of sea level rise.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/fire … wtab-en-us
I came away from this article thinking that a solution is to kill off all growing things in fire prone areas using sea water for the killing agent. Once all normal vegetation is gone, fresh water vegetation can be re-introduced in concrete enclosures which can quickly be doused with fresh water from a reservoir right next to (or perhaps under) the plant.
It seems likely to me that changes will occur in how this region deals with the unique California cycle of excessive water followed by excessive draught. This topic appears to be as good a place as any to report the changes that are coming, as well as the consequences down the line.
(th)
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All I want to know is, "Will we learn anything from this catastrophe and take a different courses of action going forward, or are we still stuck on stupid because we're beholden to the self-destructive dogma of the climate religion?"
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