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The Firestorm This Time: Why Los Angeles Is Burning (wired.com)

The Thomas Fire spread through the hills above Ventura, in the northern greater Los Angeles megalopolis, with the speed of a hurricane. Driven by 50 mph Santa Ana winds -- bone-dry katabatic air moving at freeway speeds out of the Mojave desert -- the fire transformed overnight from a 5,000-acre burn in a charming chaparral-lined canyon to an inferno the size of Orlando, Florida, that only stopped spreading because it reached the Pacific. Several readers have shared a Wired report: Tens of thousands of people evacuated their homes in Ventura; 150 buildings burned and thousands more along the hillside and into downtown are threatened. That isn't the only part of Southern California on fire. The hills above Valencia, where Interstate 5 drops down out of the hills into the city, are burning. Same for a hillside of the San Gabriel Mountains, overlooking the San Fernando Valley. And the same, too, near the Mount Wilson Observatory, and on a hillside overlooking Interstate 405 -- the flames in view of the Getty Center and destroying homes in the rich-people neighborhoods of Bel-Air and Holmby Hills. And it's all horribly normal. [...] Before humans, wildfires happened maybe once or twice a century, long enough for fire-adapted plant species like chapparal to build up a bank of seeds that could come back after a burn. Now, with fires more frequent, native plants can't keep up. Exotic weeds take root. Fires don't burn like this in Northern California. That's one of the things that makes the island on the land an island. Most wildfires in the Sierra Nevadas and northern boreal forests are slower, smaller, and more easily put out, relative to the south. Trees buffer the wind and burn less easily than undergrowth. Keeley says northern mountains and forests are "flammability-limited ecosystems," where fires only get big if the climate allows it -- higher temperatures and dryer conditions providing more fuel. Climate change makes fires there more frequent and more severe.

4 of 231 comments (clear)

  1. True by 110010001000 · · Score: 3, Funny

    There were never wildfires before climate change was discovered.

  2. Re: Here come those Santa Ana winds again by Opportunist · · Score: 4, Funny

    So ... God is a CEO?

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    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  3. Re:The priesthood has spoken by cyberchondriac · · Score: 5, Funny

    I have no sockpuppets, I'm actually happy I got an answer for a change. Thank you.

    The arguments sound valid so far, I'll have to look into it.

    Where is Slashdot and what have you done with it?!? ;)

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  4. Trump... by mi · · Score: 1, Funny

    The state, which most actively opposed — and continues to oppose — Trump, is getting the punishment even while the nation as a whole is prospering.

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    In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.