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.

Comments

Re: The priesthood has spoken

[Anonymous Coward]

Those wildfires are literally hitler!

I mean to say, my personal scientific research indicates these fires are by no means natural. They are in fact supernatural.

Hitler's suicide was a carefully planned ceremony which utilized his vast research into the paranormal.

These fires are a manifestation of his ethereal existence!

If we can just feed him the souls of the SJWs we can finally put that demon to rest. (Or maybe we just burn up a bunch of SJWs) Win,Win with no repercussions!

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[jellomizer]

Then was a bunch GW Bush bashing on every post. And a lot of Slashdotters were switching to a better tech site called Digg. Users were celebrating the rise of Apple from the ashes, as the only way to bring Microsoft down. Most articles that covered around Global Warming, were more or less poking fun of the Climate deniers as stupid hicks. And jokes and worries about the Terrorist threats being over exaggerated, and fears of the government via Homeland security spying on us and taking our rites away. The biggest threat to the Techs is the outsourcing to India.

The overt racism wasn't there (there was stronger sexism though) . There were still a lot of stupid posts and not much arguments against normally a left leaning response. An post about anything anti-GPL would get modded as a troll.

I expect the average age for Slashdot has risen. And most of us have gotten older, many have tossed away their liberal idealism often to the extreme, to far conservationism. (Although as I have aged I found myself moving more to the left, as I have found modern conservatism much too cruel for what the world needs.) But as we get older we have more stuff to protect, and to Protect what we have is a core Conservative ideal, however once we change over to different camps we find a different world view which has its points that we may not have figured out before. So for those who may had said the Science is undeniable, once they get older and see a world where we see issues in the scientific community (Where the Publish or Parish culture will often push out crap, at a level too high to be properly reviewed), and a lot of other things that we use to think as true, to actually be false, brings up questioning on what people are saying this is true, get over it.
Also as we age, we have a tenancy to be more comfortable with like people and being around diversity scares us more. This brings up tribalism, and racist responses, due to a reduced lack of tolerance, which may be evolutionary, as we age out of prime child baring ages, our natural role in society to to protect the community of those who are like us, so outsiders have a reflexive account of fear and suspicion.