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It certainly feels like the need for climate change adaptation that's been foretold for years is starting to happen. There’s quite a bit of blame being thrown a

by czhu12 2y ago

It certainly feels like the need for climate change adaptation that's been foretold for years is starting to happen. There’s quite a bit of blame being thrown around regarding details like how much water was in the reservoir and the DEI stance of the fire chief, but does any of that really provide a sustainable solution? Maybe it’s time to confront the fact that people can’t continue to live in those areas without substantial changes in the build environment. The tragic reality of climate change is that despite well informed and well meaning people, no one actually wants to meaningfully change their own lifestyle to adjust to the consequences. Clear cutting trees for instance, can be a preventative measure, but I'm sure home owners in the area would protest the environmental impact, the loss of privacy, the change in their lifestyle. California has always been a state that, on paper, acknowledges the severity of climate change, but thus far, has been fighting tooth and nail to keep homes in wildfire prone areas. What I worry about is that California chooses to create a public option for homeowners insurance that is tax payer funded to subsidize at risk homes, increasing costs for everyone else. To me this would just be another form of climate change denial.

fliglr 2y ago
Zoom out: >But in gauging the longer-term trend of what’s really happening with the fires, it’s necessary to go back much further. Data derived from written records from Cal Fire and the U.S. Forest Service dating back to 1919 show that wildfires, far from increasing, have actually declined over the last 100 years. And in fact the website of the National Interagency Fire Center previously noted that fires were at their very worst a century ago. (See data, research, and methodology for this article.) >The data on the overall, century-long trend suggest that most of the 20th century represented an unusually low amount of fire, and what we’re seeing now is a return to the “normal” levels of fire of the early 1900s. https://future.com/why-california-burns-the-facts-behind-the-flames/ https://future.com/why-california-burns-the-facts-behind-the...
- Amezarak 2y ago
  Thanks for that link. The data also shows that, over a longer (millennia) timescale, California is currently in a wet period. Context is very important. Climate change is a critical issue, but solving it doesn't help California stop burning.
  - bcrosby95 2y ago
    California leaving a wet period will make it burn less. The problem isn't a lack of water. It's that we get a ton of water for a year or two. A bunch of stuff grows. Then we get no water for many years. All that stuff that grew in the wet years dries out. Eventually it burns. If we just enter a dry period, there is only 1 step: no water, nothing grows. No more fires.
    - Amezarak 2y ago
      Yes, once it's fully into the dry period. The transition period involves a lot of fire.
scarab92 2y ago
Climate change is real, but people are vastly overstating the magnitude of its effect. This is simply a fire prone region, and this was inevitably going to occur at some point, with or without climate change. The government should have been more prepared for that.
- 01100011 2y ago
  This. Fire is an integral part of CA ecosystems and the native plant communities are dependent upon it. It does burn more frequently thanks to man, but citing climate change as a reason for the fires only makes you sound smart to the ill-informed.
bsimpson 2y ago
I'm from a swing state, where you get used to smart people having conflicting opinions. The people I know who don't embrace climate fear, recycling, etc. always cite hypocrisy as their most salient motivation. They see people like Al Gore and Leo di Caprio talking a big game about a climate catastrophy and then using as much energy as a whole village. They see their friends nitpick composting and then buy single MPG trucks to go camping in. They see cities rolling out fines for recycling badly and then everything going into the same truck when the garbagemen come by. I don't think environmental activists realize the damage they do to their case by not living by what they preach relentlessly about. By being loudly critical of others without changing their own behavior, they give denialism space to entrench. "It can't be that bad if even the people who are mad don't seem to actually care."
- dullcrisp 2y ago
  > I don't think environmental activists realize the damage they do to their case by not living by what they preach relentlessly about. The ones who do that probably don’t care about their cause so much as having a cause.
- AshamedCaptain 2y ago
  Ah, the millennia old argument of "you cannot successfully proselytize donating money to the poor unless you live like a monk yourself".
  - daveguy 2y ago
    I am very in favor of climate change mitigations through careful legislation and believe we are doing nowhere near enough. But I think a closer analogy is "proselytizing donating money without donating any money yourself" or in the extreme of making the problem worse -- "proselytizing donating money while robbing from the poor." That proselytizing while making the problem worse is more a problem with the proselytizer than the critic. But the worst of all is making it worse and actively fighting against remediation.
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    More like the decades old argument that if you keep getting caught fucking men in toilet stalls being gay can't be all that bad.
hindsightbias 2y ago
Support in CA for rebuilding is really county based. Butte County is fine with you making the same mistake over again. Sonomas cities are helpful by not rezoning to the fire codes they really should be. Napa is happy to let you keep a camper on your burned site for as long as it takes you to realize how you can’t afford to rebuild to 7A code. Malibu was marked 7A years back and those folks can afford it.
robomartin 2y ago
> The tragic reality of climate change Oh, please. I am so sick of this being shoved in front of people's faces as an indisputable cause for, well, everything. Might as well bring Odin and Zeus into it as causes...because they are just as valid. I have lived in the Los Angeles area for nearly 40 years. The Santa Ana winds happen every year, multiple times per year. It never fails. The winds are strong and mostly directionally constant. Some years are worse than others. Average speeds are not monotonically increasing. Guess what? Strong wind + a small fire + lots of fuel = massive fire. It's that simple. So please, pretty please, with sugar on top, stop with the nonsense. This was a case of bad governance, bad decision-making, misplaced priorities, complete lack of preparedness and, yes, some bad luck. Here's a simple example of that: Why is it that we have to rent firefighting aircraft from Canada every year? Seriously? I understand costs. Well, I look around Los Angeles today and it is easy to call that argument to be criminally demented. We should OWN a large fleet of these planes and have them ready to deploy en-masse as needed. Again, it isn't like these winds surprise us! Brush and vegetation (fuel) management are crucial. In our neighborhood, a few months ago, we received a notice from the fire department saying they were going to come around and inspect for overgrown vegetation. In this letter they said that the requirement was to not have trees or large bushes/plants within about 6 feet (~2 m) from the property line. NOBODY CAME! The inspections were not done at all, or, if they were conducted, they were done at an almost invisible scale. I have always been very responsible about this. I do not have large trees anywhere on my property. We live in a fire hazard zone with serious winds multiple times per year. My entire backyard is non flammable and my back fence is concrete block. My neighbors, on the other hand, they have massive highly flammable trees almost touching the fence we share and covering their entire property. Every other year massive branches break off due to strong winds. I have advised them that, if we ever have a fire, their trees are going to become massive ember manufacturing machines. They either don't understand, don't care or a combination of both. The point is: The fire department could have come around and enforced some kind of a reasonable safety standard. They have not. Ever. And so, if a massive fire takes out the entire neighborhood, this lack of bad governance is what is going to result in a high cost in property and lives. This isn't about climate change. That's ridiculous. This is about incompetence and misplaced priorities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Ana_winds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Ana_winds
golemiprague 2y ago
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TacticalCoder 2y ago
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by czhu12 2y ago

fliglr 2y ago

Zoom out: >But in gauging the longer-term trend of what’s really happening with the fires, it’s necessary to go back much further. Data derived from written records from Cal Fire and the U.S. Forest Service dating back to 1919 show that wildfires, far from increasing, have actually declined over the last 100 years. And in fact the website of the National Interagency Fire Center previously noted that fires were at their very worst a century ago. (See data, research, and methodology for this article.) >The data on the overall, century-long trend suggest that most of the 20th century represented an unusually low amount of fire, and what we’re seeing now is a return to the “normal” levels of fire of the early 1900s. https://future.com/why-california-burns-the-facts-behind-the-flames/ https://future.com/why-california-burns-the-facts-behind-the...

Amezarak 2y ago
Thanks for that link. The data also shows that, over a longer (millennia) timescale, California is currently in a wet period. Context is very important. Climate change is a critical issue, but solving it doesn't help California stop burning.
- bcrosby95 2y ago
  California leaving a wet period will make it burn less. The problem isn't a lack of water. It's that we get a ton of water for a year or two. A bunch of stuff grows. Then we get no water for many years. All that stuff that grew in the wet years dries out. Eventually it burns. If we just enter a dry period, there is only 1 step: no water, nothing grows. No more fires.
  - Amezarak 2y ago
    Yes, once it's fully into the dry period. The transition period involves a lot of fire.

scarab92 2y ago

Climate change is real, but people are vastly overstating the magnitude of its effect. This is simply a fire prone region, and this was inevitably going to occur at some point, with or without climate change. The government should have been more prepared for that.

01100011 2y ago
This. Fire is an integral part of CA ecosystems and the native plant communities are dependent upon it. It does burn more frequently thanks to man, but citing climate change as a reason for the fires only makes you sound smart to the ill-informed.

bsimpson 2y ago

I'm from a swing state, where you get used to smart people having conflicting opinions. The people I know who don't embrace climate fear, recycling, etc. always cite hypocrisy as their most salient motivation. They see people like Al Gore and Leo di Caprio talking a big game about a climate catastrophy and then using as much energy as a whole village. They see their friends nitpick composting and then buy single MPG trucks to go camping in. They see cities rolling out fines for recycling badly and then everything going into the same truck when the garbagemen come by. I don't think environmental activists realize the damage they do to their case by not living by what they preach relentlessly about. By being loudly critical of others without changing their own behavior, they give denialism space to entrench. "It can't be that bad if even the people who are mad don't seem to actually care."

dullcrisp 2y ago
> I don't think environmental activists realize the damage they do to their case by not living by what they preach relentlessly about. The ones who do that probably don’t care about their cause so much as having a cause.
AshamedCaptain 2y ago
Ah, the millennia old argument of "you cannot successfully proselytize donating money to the poor unless you live like a monk yourself".
- daveguy 2y ago
  I am very in favor of climate change mitigations through careful legislation and believe we are doing nowhere near enough. But I think a closer analogy is "proselytizing donating money without donating any money yourself" or in the extreme of making the problem worse -- "proselytizing donating money while robbing from the poor." That proselytizing while making the problem worse is more a problem with the proselytizer than the critic. But the worst of all is making it worse and actively fighting against remediation.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  More like the decades old argument that if you keep getting caught fucking men in toilet stalls being gay can't be all that bad.

hindsightbias 2y ago

Support in CA for rebuilding is really county based. Butte County is fine with you making the same mistake over again. Sonomas cities are helpful by not rezoning to the fire codes they really should be. Napa is happy to let you keep a camper on your burned site for as long as it takes you to realize how you can’t afford to rebuild to 7A code. Malibu was marked 7A years back and those folks can afford it.

robomartin 2y ago

> The tragic reality of climate change Oh, please. I am so sick of this being shoved in front of people's faces as an indisputable cause for, well, everything. Might as well bring Odin and Zeus into it as causes...because they are just as valid. I have lived in the Los Angeles area for nearly 40 years. The Santa Ana winds happen every year, multiple times per year. It never fails. The winds are strong and mostly directionally constant. Some years are worse than others. Average speeds are not monotonically increasing. Guess what? Strong wind + a small fire + lots of fuel = massive fire. It's that simple. So please, pretty please, with sugar on top, stop with the nonsense. This was a case of bad governance, bad decision-making, misplaced priorities, complete lack of preparedness and, yes, some bad luck. Here's a simple example of that: Why is it that we have to rent firefighting aircraft from Canada every year? Seriously? I understand costs. Well, I look around Los Angeles today and it is easy to call that argument to be criminally demented. We should OWN a large fleet of these planes and have them ready to deploy en-masse as needed. Again, it isn't like these winds surprise us! Brush and vegetation (fuel) management are crucial. In our neighborhood, a few months ago, we received a notice from the fire department saying they were going to come around and inspect for overgrown vegetation. In this letter they said that the requirement was to not have trees or large bushes/plants within about 6 feet (~2 m) from the property line. NOBODY CAME! The inspections were not done at all, or, if they were conducted, they were done at an almost invisible scale. I have always been very responsible about this. I do not have large trees anywhere on my property. We live in a fire hazard zone with serious winds multiple times per year. My entire backyard is non flammable and my back fence is concrete block. My neighbors, on the other hand, they have massive highly flammable trees almost touching the fence we share and covering their entire property. Every other year massive branches break off due to strong winds. I have advised them that, if we ever have a fire, their trees are going to become massive ember manufacturing machines. They either don't understand, don't care or a combination of both. The point is: The fire department could have come around and enforced some kind of a reasonable safety standard. They have not. Ever. And so, if a massive fire takes out the entire neighborhood, this lack of bad governance is what is going to result in a high cost in property and lives. This isn't about climate change. That's ridiculous. This is about incompetence and misplaced priorities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Ana_winds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Ana_winds

golemiprague 2y ago

[dead]

TacticalCoder 2y ago

[dead]