Global Warming Is Irrelevant To The Fires

 ... because the time frames are all wrong. Global Warming Climate Change Global Warming takes decades to occur or reverse. Forest fire seasons are annual. Even if we all immediately began to live in yurts made of goat dung, we'd still have to deal with fires for 20 more years while the climate cooled warmed cooled changed cooled.

Let's assume that California Governor Goober, aka Gavin Newsom, is right and Global Warming Climate Change Global Warming has dramatically increased fire risks, just like he has been telling us for years. That doesn't make him look better, it makes him look worse.

Just what has his team been doing while the forests have been drying up under drought conditions? He's basically telling us that he predicted these fires, but didn't take any steps to reduce the risk. If that's true, then he's an incompetent moron. Dig this excellent article on steps to prevent massive fires like the ones we're experiencing.

The pattern is a form of insanity: We keep doing overzealous fire suppression across California landscapes where the fire poses little risk to people and structures. As a result, wildland fuels keep building up. At the same time, the climate grows hotter and drier. Then, boom: the inevitable. The wind blows down a power line, or lightning strikes dry grass, and an inferno ensues. This week we’ve seen both the second- and third-largest fires in California history. “The fire community, the progressives, are almost in a state of panic,” Ingalsbee said. 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.” ...

(B)etween 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...

We dug ourselves into a deep, dangerous fuel imbalance due to one simple fact. We live in a Mediterranean climate that’s designed to burn, and we’ve prevented it from burning anywhere close to enough for well over a hundred years. Now climate change has made it hotter and drier than ever before, and the fire we’ve been forestalling is going to happen, fast, whether we plan for it or not.

Megafires, like the ones that have ripped this week through 1 million acres (so far), will continue to erupt until we’ve flared off our stockpiled fuels. No way around that.

I can promise you this is true. I've lived in SoCal for more than 40 years and you see this situation whenever you go into our canyons or state parks. Come August, the place is dry as a bone. Each tree is an incendiary bomb. In fact, when fire came right up to the eaves of my parents' home a few years back, all of the pine trees in their 3-acre back yard practically exploded. Between the dry wood and the resin in the trees, they were torches just waiting to be lit.

Meanwhile, the press, who struggle to comprehend even the most basic science, reports either on the human interest stories or the political ramifications of the fires. It's maddening. We used to do controlled burns and preventative forestry which is why we didn't have these megafires. Now we get lectures on Global Warming Climate Change Global Warming while the place burns.

I feel like we're living through this kind of conversation.

"Governor Newsom, your administration let the fuel build up to the point that these fires became inevitable."

"I can't do anything about it because of Global Warming!"

"But you knew this was coming. You even told us it was coming."

"There was nothing we could do because you elected the wrong person president."

"What difference does that make? You could still have taken steps to cut down on the fuel load."

"We can't do anything until you all vote for Democrats!"

"Even if we did that, you'd still have to cut down on the fuel load to prevent more of these fires."

"STOP DENYING SCIENCE!" 

Just admit it. You hate SCIENCE.