Of Course the California Wildfire Problem Can Be Solved, by James Pinkerton.
According to news reports, virtually the entire city of Paradise, CA, has been destroyed. … Or as a fire official said even more succinctly, Paradise, once home to 27,000 people, is now “Armageddon.” …
Californians have suffered a clear defeat — a defeat at the hands of nature. …
They allowed a town of 27,000 to be destroyed by a fire? Is this the middle ages or something? How incompetent is that! Put the grown-ups back in charge, please.
Are green policies against controlled burns encouraging a build up of flammable material in the forests perchance, which is the cause of the greater intensity of bushfires recently in Australia?
Maybe they are allowing eucalyptus trees to spread? Eucalypts encourage fire, because they regenerate much faster than other species after a fire. They evolved methods to create bigger blazes — like dumping lots of flammable litter — and burn down their competitors. Maybe the US doesn’t yet know how to deal with eucalypts.
As Trump has argued, in their opposition to logging, the greens have allowed forests to become denser, and thus more vulnerable to the eventual killer fire.
Moreover, the greens have steadily opposed water desalination on the seacoast that could provide water for firefighters.
So we can see, thanks in no small part to the legal and regulatory structure created by the greens, millions of ordinary people, not just in California, are virtually defenseless against wildfires.
Of course, to the greens, human defenselessness is a feature, not a bug, because for half a century now, they have argued that we have too many people, doing too much damage to the environment. …
For instance, John Holdren, an advocate of radical population reductions, was appointed in 2009 to be President Barack Obama’s White House science adviser. …
Peak foolishness? (Sadly, no. Next year will probably be worse)
Yet the emerging line, courtesy of the elite chattering class and the Main Stream Media, is that the problem of wildfires is insoluble. For instance, here’s a headline in The Atlantic that reads, “The Simple Reason That Humans Can’t Control Wildfires.” The answer, according to the article, is that fire is “like an ocean” — that is, too big to contain. …
Any effective plan for extinguishing fires will encourage growth in rural areas. And the greens, thinking about, say, the Spotted Owl and the Delta Smelt, don’t want that. As we know, in recent decades, the greens have won a lot more legal and regulatory battles than they’ve lost—and their victories are a big reason why Paradise is no longer a paradise.
Moreover, the greens will think that if we develop a plan for putting out fires, we will be undercutting their core argument — that the only acceptable solution to the problem of wildfires is to “take action” against climate change. …
Indeed, as we dig into the arguments against doing anything about fires, we see the full depths of the opposition to actually stopping fires; the opponents would rather deliver a larger critique of civilization itself. For instance, here’s a recent headline from Bloomberg News: “Don’t Think It Will Be Easy to Fireproof California.” The piece quotes one “expert” as saying, “The idea of defensible space strikes me as an intrinsically Western one.” That is, Western Civilization = Bad. (Admit it: You knew that the MSM would get there soon enough.)
Well, actually, here’s some news: Defensible space is a global concept, embraced by peoples around the world. The ancient Babylonians and Egyptians put up walls around their cities, as did the Chinese and the Incas. Indeed, it’s deadly obvious that human beings anywhere won’t last long if they don’t have some sort of shelter, which soon enough becomes “defensible space.”
So we’re back to the ultimate question: Do we want people to win, or not?
The carbon dioxide theory of global warming is simply due to a modeling error made in the 1960s and present in all the climate models. Book soon, but in the meantime consider the evidence.
Global warming in the last century has been less than one degree Celsius. In the continental US, it has been even less. How does a rise of less than one degree in the average temperature cause more intense, unstoppable wildfires in California?
Northern California is cooler than the south of the state, because it is further from the equator. What is the rise in average temperature from the north of California to the south? Far more than one degree. The global warming of the last century has no more effect than moving a few hundred miles further south. Were unstoppable and frequent wildfires a problem a few hundred miles further south of Paradise a century ago? No, they weren’t. What’s changed is the ideology of the people in charge.
By the way, it’s been warming globally since the late seventeenth century, and at roughly the same rate. Carbon dioxide levels only really shot up after WWII. Maybe something’s wrong with the theory?
hat-tip Scott of the Pacific
