This is an extract from a National Review article by Ryan Mills that explains much about the causes of the devastating LA fires:
“And while the topography is different - the fires around L.A. are burning the chaparral landscape in the mountains and foothills around the city, not in forests — the lesson is the same, said Edward Ring, director or water and energy policy at the conservative California Policy Center: The L.A. fires have gotten out of hand largely due to poor land management.
"Historically, that land would either be deliberately burned off by the indigenous tribes or it would be grazed or it would be sparked by lightning strikes," said Ring, an advocate of continuing to manage the chaparral land's oaks and scrub brush with grazing animals, mechanical thinning, and controlled burns.
But that hasn't happened, he said, due to public policies, bureaucratic resistance, and pushback from environmental activists. The result: The L.A. foothills were primed to burn.
But Ring and others say the biggest problem that has allowed the fires to do as much damage as they have is tied to a lack of land management in the L.A.Basin. He blames the problem on state and local government bureaucracies, lawmakers in the pocket of environmentalist and renewable energy lobbyists, and legal challenges from activist groups that can grind the ability of landowners to manage their property to a halt.
Environmental groups, including the California Chaparral Institute, the Sierra Club, and the California Center for Biological Diversity, have aggressively fought against thinning and burning that state's chaparral landscape. In a 2020 letter to lawmakers, they argued that "adding even more fire to native chaparral shrublands" is not an acceptable policy.
"They make it virtually impossible to do controlled burns of any kind. They make it virtually impossible to do mechanical thinning. And they make it very difficult and in many cases impossible to even have grazing on your property," Ring said.
"Everything requires an environmental impact statement, and everything requires permits from the [South Coast] Air Quality Management District," he continued. "All of these things are just impenetrable bureaucracies. They just tie everybody up in knots."
Ring said a focus on single-species management, rather than total-ecosystem management, makes it easy for environmentalist lawyers to find a single bird or lizard that could be affected by a land management project to put the project on hold.
"The Endangered Species Act and the California Environment Quality Act have both turned into monsters that have not only prevented any kind of rational land management, but they've actually had the perverse, opposite effect in many respects," he said.”
This description of the evils of environmentalism is exactly right. The immoral idiocy you describe feeds into the monstrous perversity of a climate policy that does nothing to slow climate change, while corruptly lining the pockets of the renewable energy industry at taxpayers expense. These terrible fires are a wake up call for a paradigm shift.
Regardless of the causal relationship between the LA fires and climate change, commiserating about our leaders’ lack of political will seems pointless. Albedo- and ocean-based solutions need a champion in a position of power to move them forward. Is there a path from this Substack to that person?
President Trump's Energy Secretary Chris Wright could be convinced of the need to listen to Quico. Industries such as insurance and agriculture that stand to gain massive commercial benefits from cooling could open these doors. The new actuarial report Climate Scorpion offers a pathway into the insurance industry.
To answer the author’s question as to why people are not taking climate change seriously is only to look at the current state of science in general and climate science in particular. As soon as climate change became a religion and its acolytes became activist, trust in the science and its myopic mitigations became fodder for climate change skeptics. The blame is on the draconian policies and the lack of imagination of different courses of action. I have been on the receiving end of one who questions the wind and solar “cures” and found that the advocates/activists are not really interested in solutions but shibboleths. As to the perennial fires, these unfortunate events are indeed man made disasters due to poor management but I do understand the mentality of saying all natural disasters as having one major underlying cause—climate change; it makes things easier to understand and makes a complex problem have a simple solution.
If you want people to take climate change seriously, then start discussing and debating it and even doubting the extent of its impact. Come up with feasible solutions. Science is never settled nor is it ever simple.
I do have some old advice from my dear friend Smokey the Bear, “Only you can prevent forest fires.” And his message is more than about camp fires. It includes forestry management. (We learned about it in cub scouts.) So let’s bring back common sense and Smokey along too!
Kevin, climate science is settled, but climate policy is not. A paradigm shift is needed from emission reduction to solar geoengineering to put climate policy on a scientific basis.
I don't think the science is settled. There is great uncertainty about how much sea levels will rise, how fast ice sheets will continue to melt, they are always updating models, etc. We should consider ditching the notion that the science is settled, I think it oversimplifies and turns critical thinkers off at this point... not to mention the damage of telling people the science on COVID was settled. It was useful back when to argue that emissions are having an effect to some degree, but beyond that the topics become more debatable, and it prevents the overly faithful from even considering political factors, etc.
The meaning of 'the science is settled' is just that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are the primary cause of warming. There is a vast community who do not accept this simple observation that has been known since the nineteenth century. Obviously as you say when you get past that the science is not settled, especially on the false claim that cutting emissions by itself could cool the world.
Gotcha. I guess I would reiterate that it might be a little extra work, but might be worth it in general discourse to add in the point you just made whenever possible.
It seems pretty clear to me that a combination of natural cycles and human incompetence led to the disaster in LA. Attributing any aspect of that to climate just plain does not make sense.
No, wrong. As noted in other comments, the meandering of the jet stream created the conditions for this fire storm, purely caused by anthropogenic climate change.
One article stated how the entire ecosystem there is essentially a wildfire prairie ecosystem that's been doing that for basically ever. Couple that with myriad political failures. I feel pretty hesitant to suggest climate change was very significant much at all here, or that if we were somehow at pre industrial levels that it wouldn't have been as bad.
The combination of moronic environment policies and dangerous climate change created the conditions for this catastrophe. A return to Holocene atmospheric composition is needed alongside regulation of the global climate to prevent extreme weather. The use of AI to optimise climate intervention technologies with focus on restoring albedo promises enormous benefits for stability, peace, biodiversity and prosperity.
As a former LA native, I'm confident in saying that 'climate change' had nothing to do with these fires. You could find a more significant correlation between gang shootings in Chicago and climate change than you will between climate change and wildfires in SoCal. Wildfires in the region aren't a change, they're normal, it's only the government management that has gotten progressively worse. You KNOW the climate cult loses credibility when they try to blame individual events on climate change, especially when the aggregate of the events is still well within the range of historical variation. So why are you doing it? Why are you making the same mistake of disingenuous misappropriation of a NATURAL disaster that has nothing to do with climate change for the purposes of propagandist alarmism? Why didn't you look into actual expert opinion before making such a claim?
“I don’t think these fires are the result of climate change,” Jon Keeley, a US Geological Survey scientist, told Public. “You certainly could get these events without climate change.”
Keeley has researched the topic for 40 years. In 2017, Keeley and a team of scientists modeled thirty-seven different regions across the United States and found that “humans may not only influence fire regimes but their presence can actually override, or swamp out, the effects of climate.”
Keeley’s team found that the only statistically significant factors for the frequency and severity of fires on an annual basis were population and proximity to development. “We’ve looked at the history of climate and fire throughout the whole state,” said Keeley, “and through much of the state, particularly the western half of the state, we don’t see any relationship between past climates and the amount of area burned in any given year.”
What about scientists who claim that the dry conditions are unusual? “If you look at the past 100 years of climates in Southern California,” said Keeley, “you will find there have been Januaries that have been very dry. And there’s been autumns that have been very dry. There have been Santa Ana winds in January. So these sorts of conditions are what contribute to a fire being particularly destructive at this time of the year. But it’s not the result of climate change.”
It’s true that “We are seeing changes in Santa Ana winds,” said Keeley. “For example, we’ve looked at fire history going back to the middle of the 20th century. For the first half of that record, Santa Ana winds were more common in September than they are today. They were less common in the winter than they are today. It appears that we are seeing a shift in the distribution of Santa Ana winds.
“But we have no basis for saying that’s due to global warming,” Keeley said. “There’s no evidence that climate change has impacted Santa Ana winds.”
And the fires appear to have started in the residential areas, not in the wildland vegetation known as chaparral. “It doesn’t appear that the wildland vegetation had a lot to do with the fire because the fire didn’t start in the wild land areas. That started within the urban environment. And whether these are unique? I would say, definitely not unique. Fires in Southern California are not an abnormal event. We get them all the time throughout the year. The fact that we have a high-intensity fire in Southern California, that’s a normal event.”
The issue is, overwhelmingly, more people in harm’s way. “If you look at fire history in the San Gabriel Valley, which is where the Eaton fire occurred 50 years ago, we didn’t have events where fires burned into communities. In part that was due because the urban environment was surrounded by citrus orchards. And that’s what buffered the communities from the wildland areas. And if fires started within those citrus orchards or burned into them, they generally burned out. Today, we don’t have citrus orchards. We just have more homes.”
Why, then, does so much of the media coverage focus on climate change? “It all depends on who the journalist interviews,” said Keeley. “If they interview a climatologist who really doesn’t know very much about wildland vegetation and also has an agenda of demonstrating climate change, they’re going to see climate as a major driver.”
No Steven, you are completely wrong. The wandering of the jet stream is purely caused by climate change, notably Arctic Amplification. This global process created the weather whiplash conditions that enabled these terrible fires.
Weather whiplash conditions around LA had exactly no observed statistical relationship to climate change, which quite rules out your theory regarding arctic amplification and the wandering jet stream. There has been NO observed trend of increasing whiplash in the area over the relevant time period, in fact there's actually arguably been a slight DECREASE if anything.
No, Robert, I am quoting an actual expert (Keeley) on the region who has studied that topic for more than 40 years and who has, incidentally, actually lived there and is familiar with the vegetation, weather patterns, and government policies. I'm not sure how many times it needs to be in the interview to get through to you: "There's NO evidence that climate change has impacted Santa Ana Winds". In analyzing the last HUNDRED YEARS of data regarding California fires, the ONLY statistically significant factors for the frequency and severity of annual fires were population and proximity to development. There was NO relationship found between past climate and the amount of area burned each year.
Wildfires are and always have been a part of the natural cycle there. It wouldn't matter if you did somehow rewind conditions back to the Holocene, the fires would still happen every year and some years would still be worse than others when we'd have the occasional dry season that followed a wet season and still have the high winds channeled through from the upper basin to fan the flames.
Steven, climate change is quite different from the century scale variability you cite. We are in unprecedented territory. A major problem in climate policy is the arrogance of scientific subject matter experts who assume that their narrow focus gives them licence to comment more broadly. I fear this is the case for Keeley.
The connection that I mentioned was to the wandering of the jet stream, which has only notably disrupted world climate in recent years, such as the catastrophic Valencia floods last year in Spain, since being first measured in the 1980s. This signature is quite clear, with the blocking highs resulting from jet stream processes known as Rossby waves creating extreme droughts and floods, including the successive rain and drought known as weather whiplash that created the conditions for the LA fires.
This weather whiplash is again a clear climate signature in the LA fires that Keeley may not understand. The warming of the Pacific Ocean is another likely climate signature in the fires.
I am a generalist, and have studied the broad range of climate concerns for two decades from an interdisciplinary integrated scientific perspective. I have frequently seen this syndrome of scientists throughout the IPCC who fail to take a wholistic perspective on climate impacts.
A serious result of such confined wrong thinking is the failure to recognise the urgency of a climate paradigm shift away from emission reduction to solar geoengineering as the climate policy priority.
P.S. I note the Public interview that Keeley gave was in an article by Michael Shellenberger, widely regarded as a climate denier, and not a credible source. Keeley's assertion you cite that “you certainly could get these events without climate change” is totally absurd on a range of levels. https://www.public.news/p/jon-keeley-la-fires-not-the-result
I'm not seeing where Shellenberger is a denier... as far as I can tell he acknowledges climate change but thinks it's not as doomsday as others. I think climate skeptic is a more common term for those stances right now.
Shellenberger is an interesting and complex thinker. I don't accept the distinction between skeptic and denier in climate politics, since the basic issue, as Quico well articulates, is that global warming is an existential risk, and if you are 'skeptical' about that to the point of ignoring objective science then you are a denier. It is valuable and essential to critique the environmentalist movement. What is needed is the nuance and skill to fully support scientific understanding while rejecting the political distortions that infest left wing opinion. I don't think Shellenberger gets this right, especially with his downplaying of climate risk and failure to see the need for solar geoengineering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Shellenberger
Attributing individual fires to climate change is, as you point out, dodgy. The best rationale would be hot, dry weather = more combustible deadwood, if not cleared. But the climate of CA is hot and dry, has been for centuries, in the Summer - less so in Winter. It seems very unlikely that the best explanation for the current fire could be that marginal increase in air temperature in mid-winter.
This LA firestorm has a clear causal climate signature in the meandering of the jet stream caused by Arctic Amplification. Refreeze the poles to cut the drivers of insane extreme weather.
Do you have a term then for someone who doesn't blindly or whole heartedly go with the left leaning narrative, since it seems we're often simply labeled deniers or skeptics, neither of which is really true, we just maybe agree more with lomborg, that there are plenty of other problems to deal with as well, and the doomsday scenarios are just not the basket to put all the eggs in? Climate critic? Climate realist? Climate moderate? Climate centrist?
A major problem is the arrogance of "climate experts" who assume that your broad focus gives to license to ignore the deeper expertise of subject matter experts familiar with ALL the local factors. You've just admitted that you have, at best, HALF the years of experience in your field that Keeley does. If one of you is being "arrogant", the massive gap in experience suggest it's you, not him.
California spends ten billion dollars a year to subsidise renewable energy, supposedly to help address climate change. Fat lot of good that has done to cut fire risk, and any other perils of extreme weather. Hearts go out to the people of Los Angeles suffering a calamity that could have been prevented by sensible climate policies.
If instead California had invested in measures to directly cool the temperature of the Pacific Ocean, through technologies such as marine cloud brightening, as proposed by climate scientists and engineers for the last twenty years, a whole array of factors would have cut fire risk.
But the arrogant "follow the science" crowd know better than to follow the science. These hypocritical misanthropes conceal their immoral political hostility toward humanity behind false assertions that cutting emissions could mitigate climate change.
The only strategy that will actually mitigate climate change is direct climate cooling, combined with large scale carbon mining.
Locally, a cooler Pacific Ocean will reduce California's rainfall variability, the weather whiplash that saw heavy spring rain produce abundant vegetation only for summer and autumn drought to turn it into the ferocious tinder box that incinerated ten thousand homes this week.
90% of the kelp forests of the Santa Barbara Channel are gone due to hot water. This not only causes marine extinctions, it reduces the ocean tang, the biogenic aerosol dimethyl sulphide, which has a significant role in cloud and rain formation.
Globally, a cooler Pacific, combined with cooling in other oceans, would reverse the instability of the jet stream that caused the extreme Santa Ana winds that fed the burning of LA.
We are now seeing the tragic consequences of the idiotic ideology of Emission Reduction Alone, preventing investment in research and development of practical cooling technologies.
It is time, too late in fact for the protection of Los Angeles, for a paradigm shift in climate policy, allowing ongoing emissions while recognising the security imperative to combine direct climate cooling technologies to reflect more sunlight back to space with large scale ocean based biomass restoration to mine the dangerous CO2 from the air and sea, with a goal to ramp up carbon mining to larger scale than world emissions.
Warming is caused by the 2.5 trillion tonnes of CO2 and other GHGs emitted since the industrial revolution. The Paris Accord can slow this growing by about one billion tonnes per year at best, a factor of 0.04%, functionally useless. Actually Paris has done nothing to slow global warming at a very dangerous time. Tipping points are in play that can only be slowed by solar geoengineering.
The whole Paris UN IPCC process is obsolete and corrupt, driven by renewable energy industry rent seeking as epitomised in California. President Trump is completely correct, if for wrong reasons, to take the US out of this bad agreement.
You know what more dangerous than 1.5 degree change averaged over the globe? Not following common sense fire prevention techniques in the name of the said change/environment/purple frog habitats or what not. Even if the temperature was 2 degrees lower, that place would burn with Santa Ana winds. Don’t worry about little stuff, it is designed to misdirect your fears and attention,
This is an extract from a National Review article by Ryan Mills that explains much about the causes of the devastating LA fires:
“And while the topography is different - the fires around L.A. are burning the chaparral landscape in the mountains and foothills around the city, not in forests — the lesson is the same, said Edward Ring, director or water and energy policy at the conservative California Policy Center: The L.A. fires have gotten out of hand largely due to poor land management.
"Historically, that land would either be deliberately burned off by the indigenous tribes or it would be grazed or it would be sparked by lightning strikes," said Ring, an advocate of continuing to manage the chaparral land's oaks and scrub brush with grazing animals, mechanical thinning, and controlled burns.
But that hasn't happened, he said, due to public policies, bureaucratic resistance, and pushback from environmental activists. The result: The L.A. foothills were primed to burn.
But Ring and others say the biggest problem that has allowed the fires to do as much damage as they have is tied to a lack of land management in the L.A.Basin. He blames the problem on state and local government bureaucracies, lawmakers in the pocket of environmentalist and renewable energy lobbyists, and legal challenges from activist groups that can grind the ability of landowners to manage their property to a halt.
Environmental groups, including the California Chaparral Institute, the Sierra Club, and the California Center for Biological Diversity, have aggressively fought against thinning and burning that state's chaparral landscape. In a 2020 letter to lawmakers, they argued that "adding even more fire to native chaparral shrublands" is not an acceptable policy.
"They make it virtually impossible to do controlled burns of any kind. They make it virtually impossible to do mechanical thinning. And they make it very difficult and in many cases impossible to even have grazing on your property," Ring said.
"Everything requires an environmental impact statement, and everything requires permits from the [South Coast] Air Quality Management District," he continued. "All of these things are just impenetrable bureaucracies. They just tie everybody up in knots."
Ring said a focus on single-species management, rather than total-ecosystem management, makes it easy for environmentalist lawyers to find a single bird or lizard that could be affected by a land management project to put the project on hold.
"The Endangered Species Act and the California Environment Quality Act have both turned into monsters that have not only prevented any kind of rational land management, but they've actually had the perverse, opposite effect in many respects," he said.”
This description of the evils of environmentalism is exactly right. The immoral idiocy you describe feeds into the monstrous perversity of a climate policy that does nothing to slow climate change, while corruptly lining the pockets of the renewable energy industry at taxpayers expense. These terrible fires are a wake up call for a paradigm shift.
Regardless of the causal relationship between the LA fires and climate change, commiserating about our leaders’ lack of political will seems pointless. Albedo- and ocean-based solutions need a champion in a position of power to move them forward. Is there a path from this Substack to that person?
President Trump's Energy Secretary Chris Wright could be convinced of the need to listen to Quico. Industries such as insurance and agriculture that stand to gain massive commercial benefits from cooling could open these doors. The new actuarial report Climate Scorpion offers a pathway into the insurance industry.
To answer the author’s question as to why people are not taking climate change seriously is only to look at the current state of science in general and climate science in particular. As soon as climate change became a religion and its acolytes became activist, trust in the science and its myopic mitigations became fodder for climate change skeptics. The blame is on the draconian policies and the lack of imagination of different courses of action. I have been on the receiving end of one who questions the wind and solar “cures” and found that the advocates/activists are not really interested in solutions but shibboleths. As to the perennial fires, these unfortunate events are indeed man made disasters due to poor management but I do understand the mentality of saying all natural disasters as having one major underlying cause—climate change; it makes things easier to understand and makes a complex problem have a simple solution.
If you want people to take climate change seriously, then start discussing and debating it and even doubting the extent of its impact. Come up with feasible solutions. Science is never settled nor is it ever simple.
I do have some old advice from my dear friend Smokey the Bear, “Only you can prevent forest fires.” And his message is more than about camp fires. It includes forestry management. (We learned about it in cub scouts.) So let’s bring back common sense and Smokey along too!
Kevin, climate science is settled, but climate policy is not. A paradigm shift is needed from emission reduction to solar geoengineering to put climate policy on a scientific basis.
I don't think the science is settled. There is great uncertainty about how much sea levels will rise, how fast ice sheets will continue to melt, they are always updating models, etc. We should consider ditching the notion that the science is settled, I think it oversimplifies and turns critical thinkers off at this point... not to mention the damage of telling people the science on COVID was settled. It was useful back when to argue that emissions are having an effect to some degree, but beyond that the topics become more debatable, and it prevents the overly faithful from even considering political factors, etc.
The meaning of 'the science is settled' is just that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are the primary cause of warming. There is a vast community who do not accept this simple observation that has been known since the nineteenth century. Obviously as you say when you get past that the science is not settled, especially on the false claim that cutting emissions by itself could cool the world.
Gotcha. I guess I would reiterate that it might be a little extra work, but might be worth it in general discourse to add in the point you just made whenever possible.
It seems pretty clear to me that a combination of natural cycles and human incompetence led to the disaster in LA. Attributing any aspect of that to climate just plain does not make sense.
No, wrong. As noted in other comments, the meandering of the jet stream created the conditions for this fire storm, purely caused by anthropogenic climate change.
One article stated how the entire ecosystem there is essentially a wildfire prairie ecosystem that's been doing that for basically ever. Couple that with myriad political failures. I feel pretty hesitant to suggest climate change was very significant much at all here, or that if we were somehow at pre industrial levels that it wouldn't have been as bad.
The combination of moronic environment policies and dangerous climate change created the conditions for this catastrophe. A return to Holocene atmospheric composition is needed alongside regulation of the global climate to prevent extreme weather. The use of AI to optimise climate intervention technologies with focus on restoring albedo promises enormous benefits for stability, peace, biodiversity and prosperity.
As a former LA native, I'm confident in saying that 'climate change' had nothing to do with these fires. You could find a more significant correlation between gang shootings in Chicago and climate change than you will between climate change and wildfires in SoCal. Wildfires in the region aren't a change, they're normal, it's only the government management that has gotten progressively worse. You KNOW the climate cult loses credibility when they try to blame individual events on climate change, especially when the aggregate of the events is still well within the range of historical variation. So why are you doing it? Why are you making the same mistake of disingenuous misappropriation of a NATURAL disaster that has nothing to do with climate change for the purposes of propagandist alarmism? Why didn't you look into actual expert opinion before making such a claim?
“I don’t think these fires are the result of climate change,” Jon Keeley, a US Geological Survey scientist, told Public. “You certainly could get these events without climate change.”
Keeley has researched the topic for 40 years. In 2017, Keeley and a team of scientists modeled thirty-seven different regions across the United States and found that “humans may not only influence fire regimes but their presence can actually override, or swamp out, the effects of climate.”
Keeley’s team found that the only statistically significant factors for the frequency and severity of fires on an annual basis were population and proximity to development. “We’ve looked at the history of climate and fire throughout the whole state,” said Keeley, “and through much of the state, particularly the western half of the state, we don’t see any relationship between past climates and the amount of area burned in any given year.”
What about scientists who claim that the dry conditions are unusual? “If you look at the past 100 years of climates in Southern California,” said Keeley, “you will find there have been Januaries that have been very dry. And there’s been autumns that have been very dry. There have been Santa Ana winds in January. So these sorts of conditions are what contribute to a fire being particularly destructive at this time of the year. But it’s not the result of climate change.”
It’s true that “We are seeing changes in Santa Ana winds,” said Keeley. “For example, we’ve looked at fire history going back to the middle of the 20th century. For the first half of that record, Santa Ana winds were more common in September than they are today. They were less common in the winter than they are today. It appears that we are seeing a shift in the distribution of Santa Ana winds.
“But we have no basis for saying that’s due to global warming,” Keeley said. “There’s no evidence that climate change has impacted Santa Ana winds.”
And the fires appear to have started in the residential areas, not in the wildland vegetation known as chaparral. “It doesn’t appear that the wildland vegetation had a lot to do with the fire because the fire didn’t start in the wild land areas. That started within the urban environment. And whether these are unique? I would say, definitely not unique. Fires in Southern California are not an abnormal event. We get them all the time throughout the year. The fact that we have a high-intensity fire in Southern California, that’s a normal event.”
The issue is, overwhelmingly, more people in harm’s way. “If you look at fire history in the San Gabriel Valley, which is where the Eaton fire occurred 50 years ago, we didn’t have events where fires burned into communities. In part that was due because the urban environment was surrounded by citrus orchards. And that’s what buffered the communities from the wildland areas. And if fires started within those citrus orchards or burned into them, they generally burned out. Today, we don’t have citrus orchards. We just have more homes.”
Why, then, does so much of the media coverage focus on climate change? “It all depends on who the journalist interviews,” said Keeley. “If they interview a climatologist who really doesn’t know very much about wildland vegetation and also has an agenda of demonstrating climate change, they’re going to see climate as a major driver.”
No Steven, you are completely wrong. The wandering of the jet stream is purely caused by climate change, notably Arctic Amplification. This global process created the weather whiplash conditions that enabled these terrible fires.
Weather whiplash conditions around LA had exactly no observed statistical relationship to climate change, which quite rules out your theory regarding arctic amplification and the wandering jet stream. There has been NO observed trend of increasing whiplash in the area over the relevant time period, in fact there's actually arguably been a slight DECREASE if anything.
Feel free to check the data and graphs yourself, here's a full article examining that hypothesis and double checking the numbers against gold standard datasets https://open.substack.com/pub/thebreakthroughjournal/p/how-much-did-increasing-climate-whiplash?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=ulpkk
No, Robert, I am quoting an actual expert (Keeley) on the region who has studied that topic for more than 40 years and who has, incidentally, actually lived there and is familiar with the vegetation, weather patterns, and government policies. I'm not sure how many times it needs to be in the interview to get through to you: "There's NO evidence that climate change has impacted Santa Ana Winds". In analyzing the last HUNDRED YEARS of data regarding California fires, the ONLY statistically significant factors for the frequency and severity of annual fires were population and proximity to development. There was NO relationship found between past climate and the amount of area burned each year.
Wildfires are and always have been a part of the natural cycle there. It wouldn't matter if you did somehow rewind conditions back to the Holocene, the fires would still happen every year and some years would still be worse than others when we'd have the occasional dry season that followed a wet season and still have the high winds channeled through from the upper basin to fan the flames.
Steven, climate change is quite different from the century scale variability you cite. We are in unprecedented territory. A major problem in climate policy is the arrogance of scientific subject matter experts who assume that their narrow focus gives them licence to comment more broadly. I fear this is the case for Keeley.
The connection that I mentioned was to the wandering of the jet stream, which has only notably disrupted world climate in recent years, such as the catastrophic Valencia floods last year in Spain, since being first measured in the 1980s. This signature is quite clear, with the blocking highs resulting from jet stream processes known as Rossby waves creating extreme droughts and floods, including the successive rain and drought known as weather whiplash that created the conditions for the LA fires.
This weather whiplash is again a clear climate signature in the LA fires that Keeley may not understand. The warming of the Pacific Ocean is another likely climate signature in the fires.
I am a generalist, and have studied the broad range of climate concerns for two decades from an interdisciplinary integrated scientific perspective. I have frequently seen this syndrome of scientists throughout the IPCC who fail to take a wholistic perspective on climate impacts.
A serious result of such confined wrong thinking is the failure to recognise the urgency of a climate paradigm shift away from emission reduction to solar geoengineering as the climate policy priority.
P.S. I note the Public interview that Keeley gave was in an article by Michael Shellenberger, widely regarded as a climate denier, and not a credible source. Keeley's assertion you cite that “you certainly could get these events without climate change” is totally absurd on a range of levels. https://www.public.news/p/jon-keeley-la-fires-not-the-result
I'm not seeing where Shellenberger is a denier... as far as I can tell he acknowledges climate change but thinks it's not as doomsday as others. I think climate skeptic is a more common term for those stances right now.
Shellenberger is an interesting and complex thinker. I don't accept the distinction between skeptic and denier in climate politics, since the basic issue, as Quico well articulates, is that global warming is an existential risk, and if you are 'skeptical' about that to the point of ignoring objective science then you are a denier. It is valuable and essential to critique the environmentalist movement. What is needed is the nuance and skill to fully support scientific understanding while rejecting the political distortions that infest left wing opinion. I don't think Shellenberger gets this right, especially with his downplaying of climate risk and failure to see the need for solar geoengineering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Shellenberger
Attributing individual fires to climate change is, as you point out, dodgy. The best rationale would be hot, dry weather = more combustible deadwood, if not cleared. But the climate of CA is hot and dry, has been for centuries, in the Summer - less so in Winter. It seems very unlikely that the best explanation for the current fire could be that marginal increase in air temperature in mid-winter.
This LA firestorm has a clear causal climate signature in the meandering of the jet stream caused by Arctic Amplification. Refreeze the poles to cut the drivers of insane extreme weather.
Do you have a term then for someone who doesn't blindly or whole heartedly go with the left leaning narrative, since it seems we're often simply labeled deniers or skeptics, neither of which is really true, we just maybe agree more with lomborg, that there are plenty of other problems to deal with as well, and the doomsday scenarios are just not the basket to put all the eggs in? Climate critic? Climate realist? Climate moderate? Climate centrist?
https://x.com/Hotshot_Movie/status/1878794288277893314
A major problem is the arrogance of "climate experts" who assume that your broad focus gives to license to ignore the deeper expertise of subject matter experts familiar with ALL the local factors. You've just admitted that you have, at best, HALF the years of experience in your field that Keeley does. If one of you is being "arrogant", the massive gap in experience suggest it's you, not him.
California spends ten billion dollars a year to subsidise renewable energy, supposedly to help address climate change. Fat lot of good that has done to cut fire risk, and any other perils of extreme weather. Hearts go out to the people of Los Angeles suffering a calamity that could have been prevented by sensible climate policies.
If instead California had invested in measures to directly cool the temperature of the Pacific Ocean, through technologies such as marine cloud brightening, as proposed by climate scientists and engineers for the last twenty years, a whole array of factors would have cut fire risk.
But the arrogant "follow the science" crowd know better than to follow the science. These hypocritical misanthropes conceal their immoral political hostility toward humanity behind false assertions that cutting emissions could mitigate climate change.
The only strategy that will actually mitigate climate change is direct climate cooling, combined with large scale carbon mining.
Locally, a cooler Pacific Ocean will reduce California's rainfall variability, the weather whiplash that saw heavy spring rain produce abundant vegetation only for summer and autumn drought to turn it into the ferocious tinder box that incinerated ten thousand homes this week.
90% of the kelp forests of the Santa Barbara Channel are gone due to hot water. This not only causes marine extinctions, it reduces the ocean tang, the biogenic aerosol dimethyl sulphide, which has a significant role in cloud and rain formation.
Globally, a cooler Pacific, combined with cooling in other oceans, would reverse the instability of the jet stream that caused the extreme Santa Ana winds that fed the burning of LA.
We are now seeing the tragic consequences of the idiotic ideology of Emission Reduction Alone, preventing investment in research and development of practical cooling technologies.
It is time, too late in fact for the protection of Los Angeles, for a paradigm shift in climate policy, allowing ongoing emissions while recognising the security imperative to combine direct climate cooling technologies to reflect more sunlight back to space with large scale ocean based biomass restoration to mine the dangerous CO2 from the air and sea, with a goal to ramp up carbon mining to larger scale than world emissions.
Warming is caused by the 2.5 trillion tonnes of CO2 and other GHGs emitted since the industrial revolution. The Paris Accord can slow this growing by about one billion tonnes per year at best, a factor of 0.04%, functionally useless. Actually Paris has done nothing to slow global warming at a very dangerous time. Tipping points are in play that can only be slowed by solar geoengineering.
The whole Paris UN IPCC process is obsolete and corrupt, driven by renewable energy industry rent seeking as epitomised in California. President Trump is completely correct, if for wrong reasons, to take the US out of this bad agreement.
You know what more dangerous than 1.5 degree change averaged over the globe? Not following common sense fire prevention techniques in the name of the said change/environment/purple frog habitats or what not. Even if the temperature was 2 degrees lower, that place would burn with Santa Ana winds. Don’t worry about little stuff, it is designed to misdirect your fears and attention,