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California burning

15 Jan 2025 | News Roundup

The deadly and highly destructive wildfires in the Los Angeles area, including wealthy Pacific Palisades, have the vultures circling and hissing, grunting and yapping. David Gelles of the New York Times “Climate Forward” hissed “As humans continue pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, temperatures around the world are rising, extreme wildfires are getting more frequent and more intense, and fires are spreading faster, too.” Joe Biden’s “senior advisor for international climate policy”, John Podesta, yapped “As the unfolding disaster in California demonstrates, ‘these challenges from extreme weather events that are induced by climate change are just getting worse and worse’.” The Economist grunted “Until recently, January wouldn’t have been considered part of fire season. But planet-warming greenhouse-gas emissions have also increased the number of days each year with fire-starter weather conditions.” And the Los Angeles Times hissed “Intensifying climate whiplash set the stage for devastating California fires”. But California has always had fires. Lots of them. Year-round. And the government’s own data shows December has been getting wetter in recent decades. The only reason these fires are doing more damage is that there was more stuff to damage, including more valuable stuff owned by rich and famous celebrities who voted in fools who put woke ideology above competence.

The starting point for blaming the fires on humans, or more precisely on made-made climate change, is that due to greenhouse gas-driven something or other it hadn’t rained enough in California lately. Just as a few years ago when there were floods man-made climate change made it rain too much, after a period of drought when man-made climate change made it not rain enough. We won’t waste much space on the predictable swamp-dwellers blaming Israel because of CO2 from bombs dropped on Gaza. (Evidently bombs set off by Islamists are carbon-neutral or something.) But the supposed reputable figures blaming a climate-driven drop in rainfall around Los Angeles aren’t much better intellectually.

For instance Bloomberg “Opinion editor and columnist covering #climate”, Mark Gongloff, armed with a BA in Journalism from the University of South Carolina in case anyone’s still doing that “not a climate scientist” sneer about skeptics, made a video that started by linking Donald Trump’s views on water management and poor forest management to kooky ideas about space lasers, and you can’t go wrong with a certain audience taking that tack. But then he said:

“But make no mistake, these blazes had a lot to do with the heating planet, including a side effect called hydroclimate whiplash.”

Boo whiplash! Then he gave a very scientifical explanation of the sky being like a sponge, complete with exceptionally cheesy graphics about how when it rains and snows a lot of water comes from on high and when it doesn’t very little falls. But um wasn’t the sky always like a sponge? Or was it a rubber boot or a big blue tarpaulin or some sort of god or a lot of mixed gasses until the dreaded climate change came along?

Whether the moon is a balloon or the sky is, what has fallen in the last century is a lot of data about weather in the United States including on, oh, say, rainfall in Los Angeles in December. For instance NOAA, which is all-in on climate change, shows that um uh what’s this? Rainfall in Los Angeles in December has been trending up, significantly, in the last 80 years:

Another source, a paper by Ross McKitrick and John Christy on precipitation trends in the U.S. Southeast and Pacific Coast, looked all the way back to 1878 in the case of downtown LA and found that it flatlined. So yes, 2024 was low. But not because of a trend of any sort, let alone a man-made one.

Thus Michael Shellenberger Xed out:

“Some reporters and scientists are blaming climate change for the lack of rain in LA. It’s ridiculous. There’s no trend in annual rainfall from 1877 to 2024. We have wet years and dry years. Climate change isn’t responsible for the LA fires. Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass are.”

Despite which the Bloomberg piece insists manmade CO2 is the problem:

“The rise of massive wildfires in the state over the last several years has been exacerbated by climate change. Droughts have become more frequent as temperatures rise. The Los Angeles area has had no meaningful rain for many months, despite the fact that winter is usually the rainy season.”

So if this account is to be believed, climate change has hit California “over the last several years”, a remarkably precise piece of targeting. Michael Mann agrees, citing:

“the synergy between that natural occurrence, the Santa Anna winds, that immediate factor, and the underlying dry conditions that are definitely related to a trend of dryer conditions in California and the western US caused by human caused warmings due primarily to the burning of fossil fuels”.

But as Matthew Wielicki responded tartly, this claim of “dwindling precipitation” is flatly contradicted by a chart of “L.A.’s Rainfall by Season – Last 20 Years” showing that while the trend line is flat, 2022-23 and 2023-24 were both well above average, the highest in fact since 2004-05.

Here our historical instincts kick in. The truth is that California has always been prone to massive fires, and by “always” we mean going back to pre-European settlement days, with Portuguese explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo naming what is now San Pedro Bay “Bahia de los Fumos” or “Bay of Smokes” when he encountered it on October 8, 1542. Indeed, these so-called “chaparral fires” have been happening for at least 20 million years, which is before humans even existed, let alone reached the Americas. Not on us.

Pretty much the entire land surface of the Earth has been a frequent site of wildfires since the invention of the tree. California itself is certainly prone to fires for obvious reasons like being at once quite fertile and largely desert. We have already noted the way opportunistic vultures claimed California flooding was overwhelming evidence of climate change, yet now they say drought is too.

Some alarmists were admitting that California always had fires, then insisting that these were different because they were in winter. But Tony Heller went into the archives, as so often, and found that a massive fire destroyed Pacific Palisades in 1938, forcing Will Rogers to flee and possibly Mary Astor and W.C. Fields as well… and did so in late November. Oh, not winter. Just, you know, really late fall. To be fair, the massive 1961 fire he also unearthed that struck, of all places, Pacific Palisades was in early November.

Speaking of human-caused wildfire disaster, what we really have here, in large measure is massive government failure. California’s frequent wildfires have not previously come so close to a massive modern urban agglomeration mostly because we didn’t have such until recently. But the authorities should have foreseen it, especially those obsessed with the notion that climate change is making extreme weather events including fires both more common and more severe.

Instead between a focus on DEI and an obsession with climate and some secondary environmental issues, they conspicuously failed to prepare, from filling reservoirs to planning evacuation. And it didn’t help that the mayor of Los Angeles flew to Ghana, a decision that got her ripped by outlets as far afield as India for joining “a presidential delegation attending the inauguration of Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama” as the fire crisis intensified and “Her absence, coupled with concerns about the city’s emergency preparedness, has sparked backlash from political opponents, residents, and commentators.” In response she boldly lost the power of speech.

One Bloomberg story reported that “Los Angeles authorities said their municipal water systems were working effectively but they were designed for an urban environment, not for tackling wildfires.” And NBC predictably ran interference for the bungled response, as did the New York Times “The Morning” by saying “It may seem hard to understand why the combined resources of the federal government, California and Los Angeles haven’t been able to defeat the wildfires after a week of fighting them” but quickly assuring us “The winds are a major reason.” But if your urban environment is in an environment infamous for major wildfires, and winds, and you believe climate change is making the weather worse including such fires, why didn’t you give some thought to how you might fight one? Including, say, controlled burns?

Remember, California is one of the richest places on Earth at a period when humans are, for all their whining, far wealthier than at any time in our previous history. How can its infrastructure be so inadequate unless state authorities are at once profligate, inept, and unfocused that they not only flubbed intended controlled burns but then lied about it?

More and more people, including some legacy media outlets and left-leaning celebrities who just lost their homes, are recognizing that whatever the meteorological and geographic situation, the response to the danger and the actual fire was feeble. Including, for instance, the mayor or her staff finding time to delete an online memo in which fire chief Kristin Crowley, herself a vocal devotee of DEI over more traditional concerns (and who contrary to online rumours was not fired by the mayor, at least as of our press time), nevertheless begged for more resources for her fire department to, in its spare time, fight fires. An elite with failed policies that considers exposure of its failures the true scandal has been caught badly off-base by this truly person-made catastrophe.

In one of the most telling sidenotes to this disaster, a 2019 video surfaced of Crowley’s conspicuously physically unfit Deputy Chief and head of the Equity and Human Rights Bureau of the L.A. Fire Department responding to concerns about female firefighters not being able to carry a man out of a burning building with an insouciant “he got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire”, a classic piece of victim-blaming that encapsulated the whole progressive approach to practical matters that failed so badly and so complacently here. Imagine the outrage from these very people if a male firefighter said it of a woman trapped in a blaze for any reason, let alone due to his inability to meet sensible job standards.

Indeed, the fires may represent a significant inflection point. Not because the mass of humanity caused them by having lives, but because the favoured policies of those who claim to be saving us from the dreaded climate change actually contributed to our vulnerability to bad weather in ways that cannot be ignored and hit influential progressives especially hard.

P.S. Yaps, hisses and grunts really are the noises vultures make, in case you’ve never had them circling you personally.

13 comments on “California burning”

  1. So looking forward to President Trump pulling out of the Paris Accord again, the climate loonies will go into absolute meltdown.
    Bring it on

  2. Appears that an illegal walking around with a blow torch has nothing to do with it. Also 3 or 4 have been charged with arson.

  3. I am not sure that having Karen Bass in LA at the start of the fires, instead of visiting Ghana, would have made any difference at all to the outcome we are now witnessing. It appears that they are all on the build back better wagon and so what better way to do that than from a razed landscape? As horrible as that sounds to any sane person.

  4. Attribution to climate change avoids artribution to humans, which could be inconvenient. Who wants to know who was at fault? How could that help? Especially if Trump identified the risk years ago? Even better reason to turn to the wall and hum "la, la, la...". It's only lives, after all.

  5. That's one more reason why most U-hauls you see in California are travelling east not west.There's a slow-motion exodus of people out of woke,dysfunctional California.Usually heading for Red states.And a Fire Dept. that has a "Equity and Human rights Bureau"???WOW!Your job is to fight fires,for crying out loud!

  6. Attributing any disaster to climate change has become an instinctive and largely meaningless public utterance nowadays. Swine fever in Ghana? Climate change! Tsunami in Japan? Climate change! Outbreak of sanity in the Washington Post newsroom? Cli... oops, forget that, it'll never happen.

  7. I came across a very informative video that Mike Rowe just posted on You Tube where he interviewed Edward Ring, Director of Water and Energy Policy for The California Policy Center. It explains the situation in California in a straight forward nonpolitical way. https://youtu.be/vda9aFhBrjI

  8. Here is an interesting video from November 1961 showing the same circumstances that affected the present day fires.
    https://www.facebook.com/reel/947708210256100
    Sixty plus years ago before all of the climate change hysteria. Only thing that has changed is the density of the California population and the political climate of managing the infrastructure to keep up with demands for water and power. Wildfires have always been a part of California. It's just a matter mitigating the threat. Mike Rowe did post an excellent discussion with Edward Ring about the problems in California.

  9. The now shrinking (they're blowing them up) reservoir system in California hasn't increased planned capacity since their population was half of what it is today. Dry fire hydrants and criminalized vegetation management don't jump out as good fire prevention and control measures. The green and culturally Marxist theocracy has priorities and human flourishing is not included. I suspect that the loons and lawyers in the executive suites of the ENGOs that own the Democrats were celebrating the resulting incineration of the stains of humanity.

  10. Largely wooden houses and forest trees and scrub (some reportedly Eucalyptus) mixed together in a hot climate form a perfect tinderbox. Ask Australia.

  11. John, I made a post to WUWT that contained the following plus a picture of the Santa Ynez Resevoir.

    The 117 million gallon Santa Ynez reservoir in Pacific Palisades, has not had water in it since 2009. How has the media not picked up on this? When on Google Earth you can skip through all of the historical images in the timeline by year. I tried to post the Google Earth link, but it is not allowing me. Search for it on Google Earth under Santa Ynez Reservoir, Pacific Palisades and view by Historical Images. In June of 2009 there is water, but by 2011 there is none, and it has not has water since then.

  12. Well, (he says with a smile), what's that stuff they put in fire extinguishers with triggers? Oh yes, carbon dioxide. So then if atmospheric carbon dioxide is 'dangerously high', shouldn't the fires be less fierce?

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