WILDFIRES AND THE HOARY HOAX OF A BURNING PLANET:
As it happens, the same story is true with respect to wildfires like the current LA inferno. This has been the third category of natural disaster that the Climate Howlers have glommed onto. But in this case it’s the aforementioned bad forestry management, not man-made global warming, which has turned much of California into a dry wood fuel dump.
And don’t take our word for it. This quotation below comes from the George Soros-funded Pro Publica, which is not exactly a right-wing tin foil hat outfit. It points out that environmentalists have so shackled Federal and state forest management agencies that today’s tiny “controlled burns” are but an infinitesimal fraction of what Mother Nature herself accomplished before the helping hand of today’s purportedly enlightened political authorities arrived on the scene:
Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres. The state passed a few new laws in 2018 designed to facilitate more intentional burning. But few are optimistic this, alone, will lead to significant change.
We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire.
In short, if you don’t clear and burn out the deadwood, you build up nature-defying tinderboxes that then require only a lightning strike, a spark from an unrepaired power line, or human carelessness to ignite into a raging inferno. As one 40-year conservationist and expert summarized,
…There’s only one solution, the one we know yet still avoid. “We need to get good fire on the ground and whittle down some of that fuel load.”
The failure to do just such controlled burns is exactly what is behind the LA wildfire today. That is, a dramatically larger human footprint in the fire-prone shrublands and chaparral (dwarf trees) areas along the coasts has increased the risk residents will start fires, accidentally or otherwise. California’s population doubled from 1970 to 2020, from about 20 million people to nearly 40 million people, and nearly all of the gain was in the coastal areas.
Under those conditions, California’s strong, naturally-occurring winds, which crest periodically, as is occurring at the moment, are the main culprit which fuels and spreads the human-set blazes in the shrublands. The Diablo winds in the north of the state and the Santa Ana winds in the south can actually reach hurricane force, as has also been the case this week. As the winds move West over California mountains and down toward the coast, they compress, warm, and intensify.
These winds, in turn, blow flames and carry embers, spreading the fires quickly before they can be contained. And on top of that, the Santa Ana winds also function as Mother Nature’s blow dryer. As they come down the mountains toward the sea, the hot winds dry the surface vegetation and deadwood rapidly and powerfully, paving the way for the blowing embers to fuel the spread of wildfires down the slopes.
Among other proofs that industrialization and fossil fuels aren’t the culprit is the fact that researchers have shown that when California was occupied by indigenous communities, wildfires would burn up some 4.5 million acres a year. That’s nearly 6X the level experienced during the 2010-2019 period, when wildfires burned an average of just 775,000 acres annually in California.
Beyond the untoward clash of all of these natural forces of climate and ecology with misguided government forest and shrubland husbandry policies, there is actually an even more dispositive smoking gun, as it were.
To wit, the Climate Howlers have at least not yet embraced the patent absurdity that the planet’s purportedly rising temperatures have targeted the Blue State of California for special punishment. Yet when we look at the data for forest fires we find, alas, that unlike California and Oregon, the US as a whole experienced the weakest fire years in 2020 since 2010.
That’s right. As of August 24 each year, the 10-year average burn had been 5.114 million acres across the US, but in 2020 it was 28% lower at 3.714 million acres.
Trainer/host of The Biggest Loser Gillian Michaels confirmed that, saying that when her home was burned down by another regularly-scheduled disastrous wildfire years ago, it took her a full year just to get the permit to…
Bulldoze the wreckage of her destroyed home.
Not to rebuild the home. That would take another gauntlet of permit approvals.
But just to secure the right to bulldoze away the ruins of her home, she had to wait a year for the blessing of California’s oppressive government.
You think they’re going to just let people rebuild their homes or — the horrors! — even rebuild their homes with a somewhat different blueprint this time?
Oh no. Oh dear no.
Never let a crisis go to waste, to coin a phrase.