Wildfire Devastates California Town of Paradise (apnews.com) 169
A number of readers have shared this report: Tens of thousands of people fled a fast-moving wildfire Thursday in Northern California, some clutching babies and pets as they abandoned vehicles and struck out on foot ahead of the flames that forced the evacuation of an entire town and destroyed hundreds of structures. "Pretty much the community of Paradise is destroyed, it's that kind of devastation," said Cal Fire Capt. Scott McLean late Thursday. "The wind that was predicted came and just wiped it out."
McLean estimated that a couple of thousand structures were destroyed in the town of 27,000 residents about 180 miles (290 kilometers) northeast of San Francisco, where residents scrambled to flee. The extent of the injuries and specific damage count was not immediately known as officials could not access the dangerous area.
McLean estimated that a couple of thousand structures were destroyed in the town of 27,000 residents about 180 miles (290 kilometers) northeast of San Francisco, where residents scrambled to flee. The extent of the injuries and specific damage count was not immediately known as officials could not access the dangerous area.
Paradise.... (Score:1)
can we now call it Paradise Lost?
Since we're OT (Score:1)
I'm sure we won't hear a peep from 45. He hates California and hates the reality of global warming and its effects. He has hardly mentioned any of the devastating wildfires we've had out here in the past 2 years. He only cares about his egotistical agenda.
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Why should he, this city and state got itself into this mess by building where they shouldn't and then not doing controlled burns.
Wildfires are *CAUSED* by human liberals being stupid.
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So, explain ever-increasingly deadly Florida hurricanes?
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Atlantic hurricanes had been milder and fewer than historical average for a long time. It's only in the last couple of years that we got back to NORMAL.
But you're simply too young to remember.
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Hmm... You build big cities on what is basically a spit of swampland sticking out into an ocean. What the hell did you expect would happen?
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"ever-increasingly deadly" ...Thanks for your super scientific explanation but I'm talking about the fact that these storms are getting stronger and more dangerous every year. Just like the wildfires in California cover more ground and cause more destruction. Just like the ice shelves breaking off in the North becoming larger and larger. Same cause, different effects.
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But they aren't, actually. The ones that happened in the 1860s were much larger and more deadly. Since 1900, global warming has been DECREASING the temperature differential and thus reducing the power of these storms.
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Do you really blame the changing weather patterns on liberals? Here, somewhat further north, the problem is wet warm springs causing lots of undergrowth which then drys out and burns really well. I guess everything could be burned every year in a controlled way but it'll take a lot of controlled burns, every year. Very expensive so the conservatives won't go along with it.
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No, I blame the buildup of fuel on liberals. Forests burn quite regularly- you can either burn them yourself or have them start naturally, but burn they must.
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Once again, at least where I live, it is the conservatives who won't fund prescriptive burning. It costs money, especially when you have to do it every year as every spring new fuel grows and then dries out. It also gets tricky doing prescriptive burning close to dwellings.
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The key to the later is to restrict building to OUTSIDE of the forests.
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So only build boathouses? At least where I live, the whole Province is forest with some exceptions in the semi-desert where you get grass/sage fires really easy and have the same problem of too much fuel growing lately in the spring.
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Boathouses only burn when the fire is started from the inside. A boathouse sufficiently away from shore is a great way to prevent your house from burning up in a forest fire.
Another way is to build concrete bunkers instead of wood houses.....
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YES. Both of these. But there is a free market way to do it without regulations:
Ban the insurance industry.
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Oh, and I'm all for lefty liberal busybody regulations. I'm to the point where "liberty"="How can I hurt my neighbor today?"
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It is when that industry is against the free market.
Actually, the hard part is that I see both Republicans and Democrats as liberals. Anti-liberty people like myself are pro-regulation, because it restricts liberty. The only difference in the liberal republicans and the liberal democrats is that one is for fiscal liberty and the other for sexual liberty.
I say the American experiment has proven that people can't rule themselves and stay moral.
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Yeah, well, at least I'm not stupid enough to live in a fire prone desert. Oh, and I've NEVER voted Republican.
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You can build for those disasters. Heck, you can build for fire too.
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What I'm saying is that 45 could at least bring the tragedy up, tell the people of Paradise that their country will do what they can to help... in times of devastation it is comforting to know that a leader is taking time to at least ACKNOWLEDGE what's going on. He is not, and has not.
I live in NorCal. I've been through these fires for the past 6 years, evacuated from my home for weeks, not knowing what kind of life my family and I will have when we come back to see if our home is still standing. I'm lookin
But, he's tweeting! [Re:Since we're OT] (Score:2)
What I'm saying is that 45 could at least bring the tragedy up, tell the people of Paradise that their country will do what they can to help... in times of devastation it is comforting to know that a leader is taking time to at least ACKNOWLEDGE what's going on. He is not, and has not.
Well, maybe that's fair. Obama did: https://www.chicagotribune.com... [chicagotribune.com]
Donald, on the other hand, seems to be more interested in cancelling regulations: https://observer.com/2017/10/t... [observer.com]
He is tweeting, though! He says environmental laws are the problem! https://newrepublic.com/articl... [newrepublic.com] But environmental laws are not the problem https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/07... [cnn.com]
He says that water is the problem! https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/07... [cnn.com] Although turns out water is not the problem: https://abcnews.go.com/Politi [go.com]
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....Wow. Just....ok I'm done with you, troll.
OK (Score:2, Insightful)
So this is terrible news, but why is this on Slashdot?
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"So this is terrible news, but why is this on Slashdot?"
People in Paradise were naughty and went to hell.
If that's not news for nerds, I give up. :-)
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Google Maps [google.com]
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Because there's so much smoke in Silicon Valley that no work is getting done...
No fuel near structures = no fire near structures. (Score:2)
Cut it down then compost it. Zero waste, large firebreaks, problem solved. If there's fuel near your structure, remove it. That simple, but people crave the pretty.
Alternate option, suck up the loss in square footage and build firePROOF, not merely resistant, structures. Reinforced concrete is wonderful stuff and dome structures can also be storm proof. Repeating unwise choices won't get different results.
This is how you solve the problem:
https://www.npr.org/2015/08/26... [npr.org]
Note the steel building next to the
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If there's fuel near your structure, remove it. That simple, but people crave the pretty.
You are ignorant as to how far a large fire can spread across a fuel gap, and likewise ignorant of what it is to be "fuel". No I do not crave pretty. I also don't crave the fact that my neighbour's house is 10m away from me, none the less I know that during hot dry and windy conditions if his house is on fire there's no amount of land clearing and composting that will save my house, which is precisely why fire departments aim a hose at the things that are not currently on fire while also fighting the fire.
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There's more to do also. Make sure vents on the outside of your home are covered with a screen mesh. Often sparks get blown along in the wind and get get inside the attic that way. This is how these big fires spread past fire breaks and into homes during the Sonoma fires.
Where's The Shit Lord Moron (Score:2)
Where's the shit lord moron from a day or two ago who claimed CA doesn't have many disasters?
Brings a whole new meaning to the phrase... (Score:2)
Sad (Score:1)
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It's a preventable natural disaster in 2018 (Score:1)
Re:It's a preventable natural disaster in 2018 (Score:5, Insightful)
Controlled burns can only do so much. When you get a good wind pushing the flames, they move fast and can jump upwards of a mile.
I don't know about California, but up here (BC), the problem is the warm springs lately cause so much undergrowth which then drys out in the summer and leaves the forests full of tinder dry fuel. Can't burn the whole Province with controlled burns.
That's why I said "and the like" (Score:1, Flamebait)
It's like Gun Control. The stuff the left is suggesting ("assault weapon" bans and banning high capacity mags) won't work. There was just a case of a 61 year old guy with dementia who got shot by cops coming to take his guns (literally pried from his cold, dead hands). But then we've got the right wing saying it's OK for a guy with a long history of beat
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Its hard and expensive to prepare for natural disasters. Up here, a big earthquake is going to happen, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps next century. Slowly stuff gets upgraded but it costs money and the budget is only so big. Then there are things like fires that are quite unpredictable. Where do you start? How much money do you spend? And if you are successful, people think it was never a problem to begin with and a waste of money. Which brings up the next problem, a lot of people don't like paying taxes and cer
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California is pretty aggressive about doing controlled burns. The problem is there's normally about 8 inches of rain there by this time in the rainy season, and this year there's less than half an inch. And that's the new normal in recent years thanks to climate change.
That, and it wasn't a particularly safe place to build a town in the first place (a ridge between 2 canyons surrounded by forest, so that fire traveling uphill always gets funneled into town). Climate change takes it from not particularly saf
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Yes, but the hippies in CA refuse to allow controlled burns, so you end up with uncontrolled ones!
Bingo, we have a winner!
California stopped using the forest service to clear fire breaks because "we need to conserve nature man". A few simple fire breaks such as clearing back X yards on both sides of the road, back burning areas between tree groupings, clearing tall trees around major population areas and houses would have prevented most of this.
I remember growing up in Wyoming (which is way dryer) and looking at the mountains and seeing a black line going up the mountain through the tree lines eve
Re: It's a preventable natural disaster in 2018 (Score:5, Informative)
California stopped using the forest service to clear fire breaks because "we need to conserve nature man".
This is a lie.
California does not prohibit fire breaks. They are simply completely ineffectual in case of most CA fires. These fires easily cross firebreaks because of dense and dry vegetation and then jump back to trees, as there's a huge number of tinder-dry dead trees from the recent drought.
The best way to fix it is to remove dead trees but this requires a lot of money and effort.
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That's just a bunch of bullshit, you should do some fucking research other than watching fox news propaganda.
The real reason California has been having huge Forrest fires is that their forests are DEAD. A huge percentage of the trees were killed by beetle in the 2000's. Those trees are either completely dead and still standing or 90% of the way there. The ones that weren't killed by the beetle have been damaged in the 2010's by the dramatic change in rainfall that has starved most of the trees of the water
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You'd need to show some evidence for this that is not from Infowars. The Sonoma fires from last year were likely due to faulty PG&E equipment. And for your racist mind to ponder, California belonged to Spain and then Mexico for a long time before the gringos showed up.
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Yeah, and entire town is destroyed by fire ruining thousands of lives. NBD AMIRITE??!!
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At last report 70000 acres have been decimated, an uncounted number of structures (including more or less the entire town of Paradise) and I'm sure there have been human deaths; yet you say this is all 'unimportant' somehow?
It's not where *I* live therefore it's unimportant
That's what you sound like; again: was that your intention?
Perhaps you'd like to consider walking back your comment before someone gets the wrong idea about you, friend.
Lots [Re:small town] (Score:2)
Excuse me sir, but your comment really makes you sound like a selfish, raging asshole; was that your intention? At last report 70000 acres have been decimated,
A total of 7,299 fires have burned an area of 1,548,814 acres in CA so far this year, and there's almost two months yet to go. So, the 70,000 acres in Paradise are worth reporting but I guess the other 1,478,814 acres weren't?
an uncounted number of structures (including more or less the entire town of Paradise) and I'm sure there have been human deaths;
None reported in the news.
yet you say this is all 'unimportant' somehow?
One fire among many. It's important, but no more important than the Mendocino Complex fire in July (459,123 acres), or the Carr fire [ca.gov], which burned from mid July through August 30th.
It's not where *I* live therefore it's unimportant That's what you sound like; again: was that your intention? Perhaps you'd like to consider walking back your comment
Nope.
before someone gets the wrong idea about you, friend.
Lots of people have many silly ideas.
Update [Re:Lots [Re:small town]] (Score:3)
an uncounted number of structures (including more or less the entire town of Paradise) and I'm sure there have been human deaths;
None reported in the news.
OK, the news has now reported five deaths. I withdraw that statement.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-camp-fire-20181109-story.html
Re: small town (Score:1)
Re: small town (Score:2)
Or better yet build the town with materials that aren't combustible.
But that would eat into property developers profits. GOD Forbid!
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Unlikely. If it cost more to build houses there, they'd just charge more for the houses. Or not build them at all....
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That would work. I read about one man who lost two houses to forest fires, who then built himself a concrete castle. He actually welcomes in firefighters to use his house as an emergency shelter.
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Well, as another pointed out, you can build for most natural disasters now. Even for fire.
Magnitude [Re:small town] (Score:1)
So if it was in Marin it would be important enough to be on the site? Class is the key?
I'm not sure about "class," but apparently the fire makes the news simply because it's a town, not, say, an apartment building [nbcnews.com]
Yes, I'd say magnitude makes a difference. A house burning down doesn't make slashdot. An apartment building burning down doesn't make slashdot. A dozen other wildfires in California didn't make slashtod. Why should this one? Are we interested in fires now?
Re: Aborigonals Didnt Live There (Score:2, Interesting)
You sure about that? My general understanding is the natives used control burning to manage wildfires, something NIMBY white people can't figure out.
Re: Aborigonals Didnt Live There (Score:5, Insightful)
You sure about that? My general understanding is the natives used control burning to manage wildfires, something NIMBY white people can't figure out.
You're absolutely right. They did use "controlled" burns for a long time.
And yes, towns built in forested areas will burn, not if, but when.
However, assigning a racial component to your comment is ridiculous.
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There's a reasonable justification for a cultural component though - by the time the US was colonized by Britain, the British no longer had any wild forests, and hadn't for a long time. The cultural knowledge of how to live within nature had long been lost, replaced with colonialism and unsustainable environmental exploitation. And really, that applies to virtually all of the early colonizers - lumber was one of the chief exports of the American colonies. U.S. cultural was from it's inception a coloniall
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There's a reasonable justification for a cultural component though
"cultural component"... sure.
That argument could easily be made.
But we weren't discussing culture.
Perhaps you should go back and read the posts again.
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Done. The only racial references I see are "NIMBY white people" and your response, and white people anywhere in the world are all pretty much guaranteed to have their cultural roots in Europe. While modern Americans of any non-native ancestry can go a step further and attribute a great deal of their culture specifically to Britain (and Spain, in the West and South), whose colonial influence heavily dominated the socio-political landscape of the early colonies, and continues to strongly dominate the nation
Re: Aborigonals Didnt Live There (Score:2)
Is everyone blind or illiterate? The "original people of California" is a racial designation.
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Is it? Where do they make any reference to the *genetics* of the original people, rather than their culture? The only things I saw any reference to was their cultural practices.
Re: Aborigonals Didnt Live There (Score:2)
If you think there is only one culture of original inhabitants in CA, that itself is kind of racist.
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It's as true as imagining there's only one culture of modern Americans. Obviously false, but true enough for the sort of details that will survive a thousand years of unwritten history.
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If you're living in a teepee and there's a fire, you just run for it and don't worry about your stuff. Modern cities are rather more complex to rebuild.
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Natives mostly didn't live in teepees until the Europeans drove them out of the lush areas onto the plains. Pretty much everything in the popular image of Natives is based on the plains Indian cultures created in response to European invasion. Teepees, warrior-culture, buffalo-hunting, etc. were all minor features in pre-European Americans.
And their stuff cost them just as much life-energy to accumulate as our stuff does today - we have all sorts of stuff because it's mostly made by machines and metal too
Re: Aborigonals Didnt Live There (Score:2)
Read a book. Natives were managing wildfires and flooding on scales not seen again in the Americas until the industrial revolution was in full swing. It's amazing what engineering can do, but it's also amazing what hundreds of years of cultural knowledge of your local environment can do. Only in the 20th century did we start to learn (to not be racist and) what role "primitive" people played in ecological management.
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Fair enough about England - but how much truly *wild* forest did Scotland have? I honestly don't know. Not a whole lot of total land area there to begin with, and I'm reminded of a friend's description of her time in Switzerland - lots of forests, but you can't even take a shit under a tree without someone walking past.
It's 2018 (Score:1)
As other folks on the forum pointed out, you just need to clear the dead tree matter. It's laborious and expensive, but that's it. It means money, and that means taxes. Probably taxes paid by the folks not living there, since a small town near a forest can't afford to protect themselves. Maybe in 20, 30 years that smal
Re: Aborigonals Didnt Live There (Score:2)
If you think it was I who brought in a racial component, I direct your gaze farther up the thread.
If you don't think there's a racial component to wildfire management, I direct you to Google.
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That was the Chinookan people to the north, not the Aztlan to the south. The Aztlan used human sacrifice, a far less efficient method, to manage wildfires and weather.
Did Aborigonals Live There? (Score:2)
The original people of California didnt live there because they learned the cycle of wildfires made the area UNSAFE FOR HABITATION.
Pre-Europeans, that part of CA was part of the Maidu [wikipedia.org] territory, I believe-- the Konkow people, I would guess.
Why do you think they didn't live in that particular part of the mountainside?
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Well, that's not a very fertile area. Not good for farming, not great for ranching, the early native Americans were more nomadic and scavenged for food. Acorns were a staple food for most native American groups throughout northern and central California. The population was low as well.
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The increased intensity of the fires in the west in the last 10 years or so is just an example.
As is the increasingly extreme weather we are seeing worldwide.
But go ahead and keep thinking you are safe and sound, somehow protected from how the planets climate and weather are changing.
Your politics can't save you.
Not just Climate change, tax cuts (Score:5, Insightful)
I saw this in my city too. We cut the sanitation budget, including the funds for the guys that go around clearing debris from the storm drains. Sure enough first really big storm floods the whole city.
I've said it before and I will say it again: The government doesn't waste nearly as much money as people think. When you start demanding substantial cuts this is what happens.
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Because, as every Illiberal knows, forest-management is simply a pre-text for allowing logging companies to cut trees down [theguardian.com]. For profit (spit!).
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Because, as every Illiberal knows, forest-management is simply a pre-text for allowing logging companies to cut trees down [theguardian.com]. For profit (spit!).
When the logging companies "manage" the forest, they only take the oldest and largest lumber, that is worth the most $.
The smaller trees and undergrowth, the stuff that dries out and burns easier gets ignored.
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More unsubstantiated claims...
It's complicated (Score:3)
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that's the real trouble liberals have. Yes, there are cases where logging companies have misused forestry policy to cut trees that didn't need cutting. But that doesn't make make the funding cuts for fire safety any less real.
It has nothing to do with liberals, it is merely market forces at work.
The larger, older trees, which in many cases are the ones that can survive fires better, are the ones that get logged, because they are worth more money.
I completely agree regarding the funding cuts. Without oversight, controlled burns, etc, the fuels just increase every year.
The undergrowth, and especially the beetle killed trees, aren't removed and are a fuel source just waiting for a fire.
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Go back 25 or 50 years and the forests were most definitely clear cut. It is much more difficult and expensive to try and cut down every other tree. I'm from a logging area so I've seen it.
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As someone who once had a government job, I assure you that they waste far more than you can even imagine. The problem is that if you cut their funding they remove the wrong items from the budget.
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That would never be the case, if that was so then I would have to believe that all those times the national park service closed parks whenever there was a threat of 2-4% drop in funding was false.
Heh. Actual example here in TN: about 20 years ago we had a looney-lefty Republican governor (yeah, weird) named Don Sunquist. Very standard leftist. He tried like anything to get a state income tax in place, claiming that we just couldn't function without it. So, when he didn't get his way he closed all the state parks for a year. Now, I know you're thinking "well, he saved money by not staffing the parks". No, everybody kept their jobs and kept going to work in the parks. Their job duties were simp
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Not out here in California. We like to spend $100 bilion [wikipedia.org] on rail from Merced to Bakersfield (servicing around 1 million people total) with no idea how to extend to Los Angeles [wikipedia.org].
And we like to spend $100,000 per homeless person [zerohedge.com] to make us feel better (yes, we could put them up in a hotel and feed them 3 meals a day AND provide free education and healthcare for that amount - but we'll spend it keeping them on the streets because "compassion").
We know how to waste a massive amount of money here in California
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We also went for decades with no burns, and responded to fires by instantly trying to put them out. We now know that was a bad idea, but it's going to still take a long time to get back to a normal amount of underbrush and dead growth.
The extended drought has not helped the situation. Also some moth species have damaged and killed trees in huge swaths increasing the amount of dead wood to burn. Not even invasive species, they just grow out of control if natural predators are reduced in number.
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The largest and more intense California wildfires happened decades ago, even the areas where these fire are happening now had previous fires.
What has changed is we have stopped controlled fires, earlier this year California was going to start again with them so will see how much that helps.
The other problem is that people are spreading out and going out in the wilds more. This has resulted in more fires and fires that do more damage.
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in other news, the sun rose this morning -- probably due to climate change as well.
Forest fires are a thing, and they'll always be a thing. Not maintaining firebreaks around property, as well as letting underbrush accumulate due to fire suppression is more likely the real cause here. (Basically it's better to have a great many small fires, than a handful of very large ones)
And ffs save the climate change attribution for things that are actually caused by it -- the broken record talk has the tendency to wea
Climate [Re:Divine Wrath!] (Score:2)
Climate Change is affecting all of us, right now.
The increased intensity of the fires in the west in the last 10 years or so is just an example.
No one event, even a wildfire, is really attributable to climate change. Climate change is a long term thing.
In the long term, climate change is exacerbating drought in central California. But it is an effect that manifests over decades, and it is only one of many, many effects that are exacerbating wildfires in CA. (To be fair, many of these other effects are also human related.)
In this particular case, a wildfire in the area isn't even all that particularly notable; it's just the fact that it hit a city
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Climate Change is affecting all of us, right now.
No, it's because dead trees and plant matter accumulate because controlled burns aren't allowed, so when a fire does break out, it has all that dry, flammable timber there to feed it.
Your politics can't save you.
No, your politics can't save that argument you made about the fires.
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I see, you still haven't learned the rules of debate. Let me give you a quick refresher of one fundamental rule: Whoever makes a claim is responsible for providing evidence. Like this [wikipedia.org].
Now, you've seen my request for evidence, and even found time to reply. Yet, your reply did not provide the evidence requested — probably, because you don't have any... Ergo, your claims are unsubstantiated — and likely false.
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Climate change? I never said anything about "climate change". All I care for is Divine Wrath — and though His ways are unknowable, not following rules of debate is likely to bring some...
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Acres burned [iii.org] were dropping until the 1990s (when climate change was, you know, happening). Then harvesting of timber [cnbc.com] in California dropped dramatically in the mid 1990s, and we see an uptick in fire coverage - mainly driven by California.
Coincidence or causation? Well, given that California has a record amount of dead trees [wikipedia.org] out there, it's not a big leap to say that reduced harvesting is a problem. And given that lots of people in CA believe logging dead trees is bad [sfchronicle.com], we shouldn't be surprised at the fu
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