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

The priesthood has spoken

[Anonymous Coward]

Time for another dose of the truth approved by the priesthood and delivered to us by the AGW/CC acolytes. No questions are permitted, and all must accept this as fact.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[Opportunist]

Nobody keeps you from giving us a better explanation for the increasing number and severity of natural disasters.

We're waiting.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[Anonymous Coward]

Your assumption that natural disasters are getting worse is false. The "cost of damages" is rising because of increased construction in hazard areas and more expensive construction in those areas.

If you look at hurricane tracking, you'll find a sharp jump in the record a few decades ago. This came from the start of off-shore counting. Before that, only storms that made landfall as a hurricane were counted. This invalidates many claims of worse storms.

Earthquakes of significance are unchanged. Despite panic that small rock-settling after fracking would result in new faultlines exploding (or whatever nonsense those stories got to).

Wildfires happen regularly in nature. The article is nonsense about their rarity. Wildfires of this size occur only if there is an abundance of fuel. Naturally, that requires a drought after a couple decades of being too wet to burn. Thanks to California fire departments, all the small wildfires that would've cleaned out the accumulating fuel were extinguished before they could consume much dead wood.

Volcanos are still erupting within the wide range of statistical uncertainty.

I know this is the part where you log onto one of your sockpuppets and moderate me down for actually answering your dogma, and maybe post a [citation needed] or ad-hominem attack to dismiss my explanations without any further thought on your part.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[tsqr]

Nobody keeps you from giving us a better explanation for the increasing number and severity of natural disasters.

We're waiting.

I'm a SoCal native; been living here over 0x3C years. Low humidity and high winds show up at the same time during Santa Ana events, and it happens every year. Brushfires occur so regularly that an autumn without at least one bad one is pretty rare. Maybe the reason they look like they're getting worse (causing more destruction) is that more more people are moving into fire-prone areas.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[Anonymous Coward]

You've missed the point already. You're looking for an answer to a question that's invalid.

There hasn't been an increase in the "number and severity of natural disasters". All of the evidence suggests they're happening just as often and just as severely as they always have.

The only thing that there might be an increase in is the effect of these natural disasters on humans. But that's not because humans are influencing these natural disasters in any way; it's very much the opposite. These natural disasters are happening just as they always have, it just happens that with billions of humans on the planet now, in far more places than in the past, that it's far more likely for some subset of humans to be affected by natural disasters at any given time.

In fact, there is ample evidence to show that there have been far more severe natural disasters in the past, well before humans even existed.

So basically you've created an artificial/fake problem, and now you're looking for "data" to back up this fiction you've created.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[Opportunist]

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.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[Bing Tsher E]

When the population increases in an area, people are always driven to build more housing on the bad land. It's no surprise when 'expensive new housing' is flooded or beset upon by a hurricane. The 'bad land' is the places where there aren't already 100 year old structures.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[Applehu Akbar]

But has a Santa Ana ever occurred this late in the year? Generally they strike in October.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[cyberchondriac]

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?!? ;)

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[110010001000]

Answer: humans are moving into these previously remote rural areas and that increases the amount of fires. Human activity can cause fires. Also, things like flooding and such get worse because we are killing off marshlands and other "buffer zones" that would previously prevent such flooding. So things are worse because of local changes, not global changes. AGW is bad, but what we are doing locally is much much worse.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[Anonymous Coward]

My previous post hasn't been marked as Troll or flamebait yet? And it wasn't even dismissed with vulgar language by the person I replied to?
Now I mildly regret my tone, but much more than that I'm concerned that I'm in a coma and dreaming of a world where civility has returned to discussions.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[Opportunist]

No idea, I'm as astonished that I actually got a relevant, meaningful and well formulated answer to a question as you are.

It really felt like it was 2005 all over again.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Low humidity and high winds show up at the same time during Santa Ana events, and it happens every year. Brushfires occur so regularly that an autumn without at least one bad one is pretty rare

But Santa Ana events lasting for a week straight are unheard of in the past, as are rates of spread exceeding 100 mph in many cases. There have never been such explosive fires here (at least during the period after Europeans showed up).

Maybe the reason they look like they're getting worse (causing more destruction) is that more more people are moving into fire-prone areas.

The population numbers do not have any effect on the rate of spread, flammability indices, acreage affected, or seasonality of fires. All of these have dramatically increased over the last couple of decades.

Re: The priesthood has spoken

[Anonymous Coward]

Humans rarely base decisions on facts or rational analysis so anything that convinces folks to change their behavior and be better stewards of the Earth is a plus.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[tquasar]

Uncontrolled growth can not be sustained. Stop constructing more houses, condos and apartments. All the "good" places to build are long gone so now every piece of land is a target by builders like Pardee. "Award Winning Builders". WTF? https://www.pardeehomes.com/

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[bobbied]

Nobody keeps you from giving us a better explanation for the increasing number and severity of natural disasters.

We're waiting.

Because... We put fires out and restrict landscaping practices that would otherwise reduce the available fuel so when fires do happen, they are more intense and do more damage than they used to.

We discovered this in the nation's national forests. Where for decades we kept putting out fires, even small ones, that naturally cleared out the brush and growth on the ground. This brush grew bigger, creating huge fuel loads that was getting stacked up at the base of mature trees. Finally, a uncontrollable fire would happen and because of all the fuel that collected would burn hotter and faster. Where the mature trees used to survive the smaller more frequent fires, the less frequent hotter fires was enough to kill them. The solution was to either clear the brush manually, or let the fires burn more often.

In LA, the issue is not that fires happen more often, but that they happen LESS often and more fuel piles up. Then when the hot/dry conditions come on those windy days then the whole mess of kindling will be impossible to put out, burn hotter, faster and more deeply. Then like idiots, we build houses next to all this and try to make excuses for why we cannot keep them from burring down every so often.

Yea, man caused this mess, but not the way you think.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[sycodon]

As someone who has watched a 737 at Ontario Airport land with a ground speed of around 30 MPH ...yes, the Santa Ana winds to reach those speeds. They just seemed to hover above the runway sometimes.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[bobbied]

Also, don't forget that humans have been putting out fires in these areas for decades. Fire is a natural part of this ecosystem and we put them out and restrict land management practices that would have reduced the available fuel in these areas currently burning. In that way we HAVE made these particular fires worse. So, I don't think we can lay the whole blame here on Global Warming... Even if it fits the accepted narrative... Some blame? Maybe a very small part of the hot/dry weather, but this is hardly provable. LA is a hot dry and windy place this time of year and always has been in our recorded history.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[Shogun37]

How about the fact that California has so ruined its own environment so badly that it has to pull water from as far as the Great Lakes? And the refusal to put in any kind of sane water management? Or maybe, just maybe that the idea of building large cities in places where they can't be supported is a good reason the rest of the country looks at good ol' Cali funny? Making poor choices and blaming some other, hard to define reason isn't crazy. And good manners prevents me from using the right word.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[Anonymous Coward]

No questions are permitted, and all must accept this as fact.

Whenever scientists explain their theory of gravity to laypeople and the laypeople have problems understanding it, or they disbelieve all the evidence, or are desperate for someone else to think up an alternative theory, or whatever, you will find that they always accept questions. You are definitely lying in the above statement.

By the way, did you actually have any questions?

Or were you just pretending you had looked into it enough to have questions, and then bluffed, hoping that the rest of us would think you had questions, thereby looking smart?

Re: The priesthood has spoken

[Khyber]

What the fuck are you talking about? The SoCal fire departments stopping fires prematurely, thus allowing brush/fuel to accumulate, is the fucking cause of this fire. I am a SoCal resident. It is literally a hot-bed issue here.

Re: The priesthood has spoken

[Khyber]

Source on water from the great lakes, please, because the only long-haul pipeline from other areas into SoCal come from Nevada and Colorado, and the majority of our water supply that isnt from the Sierra Nevadas comes from Lake Matthews, Lake Perris, Lake Elsinore, Lake Arrowhead, and a few other smaller lakes.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[PPH]

A lot of the fire problem has to do with the sorts of people moving onto the land. In the past, land like this would probably have been used as ranch land. And the people responsible for it would have allowed fires to burn through it occasionally. Now, it's the hipsters. And just look at all that beautiful desert scrub growing right up to my back door!

We have the same problem (to a lesser degree due to rainfall) where I live. We used to clear brush annually and burn it. But now the eco-whackos have put a stop to that. So be prepared for a ten year cycle of fire ripping through the canyon, burning all your houses to the ground.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[judoguy]

When the population increases in an area, people are always driven to build more housing on the bad land. It's no surprise when 'expensive new housing' is flooded or beset upon by a hurricane. The 'bad land' is the places where there aren't already 100 year old structures.

Upvote, upvote, upvote.

I grew up going to NC outer banks for holidays. The Styrofoam stucco houses on the beach regularly get devastated while some of the first structures built are still there. People in the 1600's and 1700's knew about the ocean and weather and built as high up as possible and as far from the beach as feasible.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[PPH]

The population numbers do not have any effect

Yes they do. Less cattle and sheep grazing on the land, more hipsters who don't want occasional brush clearing fires.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[Bryansix]

This is exactly right. Many of the places that burned structures are either rural or in the interfaces between wilderness and city. Many of these are built on ridge lines. Of course there are exceptions but the vast majority fall into these categories. The other issue is lack of defensible space. If you live on the interface with wilderness, you need to create defensible space. You can't have trees shading your house because those trees cause fire danger. The only trees that you can keep a little closer are evergreen trees if you clear all the lower branches up the tree so the upper branches can't catch.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[PopeRatzo]

It really felt like it was 2005 all over again.

You have an overly rosy view of 2005. Time makes the smell of garbage fade.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[tsqr]

But has a Santa Ana ever occurred this late in the year? Generally they strike in October.

See this.

"Santa Ana conditions can exist at any time in which the Great Basin tends to be cooler than Southern California -- typically the September to May period. However, the winds garner the most attention around October because of unique aspects of Southern California climate which enhances fire danger in the autumn season."

With respect to duration: "Santa Ana conditions can exist at any time in which the Great Basin tends to be cooler than Southern California -- typically the September to May period. However, the winds garner the most attention around October because of unique aspects of Southern California climate which enhances fire danger in the autumn season."

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no such thing as bad land. There are natural disasters everywhere on this planet. You cannot escape tornadoes, hurricanes, fires, floods, blizzards, heat waves, cold chills, dust storms, volcanoes, earthquakes, etc... Pick your poison and accept it.

Re: The priesthood has spoken

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of the water in that pipeline from Colorado would have otherwise drained to the Great Lakes.

Yeah, there's a continental divide between SoCal and the Lakes, but there are also tunnels.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[Anonymous Coward]

No, we don't pull water from the Great Lakes. However, pulling from long distances is called irrigation and has been done this way for thousands of years. Rather that spouting off about sane water management, maybe you should not talk about a subject matter you know nothing about

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[tsqr]

But Santa Ana events lasting for a week straight are unheard of in the past

Bzzt! Wrong answer.

as are rates of spread exceeding 100 mph in many cases.

Bzzt! Strike two. No gusts exceeding 100 mph have been recorded in the current Santa Ana event. Gusts up to 80 mph were predicted for last night, but failed to materialize. Not uncommon for Santa Ana gusts to exceed 70 mph.

There have never been such explosive fires here (at least during the period after Europeans showed up).

Bzzt! Strike three; you're outta here. Read about the Cedar Fire of 2003, here.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[rrohbeck]

Munich Re has a chart with weather/flood related insurance claims versus other (usually geophysical like earthquakes.) The first category has increased 4x relative to the second over the last few decades.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[Anonymous Coward]

The official USSA governmental position is that climate change is a myth.

Re: The priesthood has spoken

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I could find it looks like it has been proposed by some people but would have to meet the requirements of all states in the great lakes water compact, which isn't very likely. THey require places outside the basin to have exhausted all other sources first. California has not exhausted them all, but they are well on their way to wasting a number of them.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[Grog6]

I remember those "Helpful Links" attached to most discussions mostly pointed to Goatse, lol.

There Was an 'eternal september' for Slashdot; the debate is When it Was. :)

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[Grog6]

Kinda like how the Hemingway House is on the best spot on the Key.

These guys didn't learn these things from books, written by someone with no skin in the game, and willing to deal with 'Acceptable Losses".

People counted for a lot more back then.

Hell, even Cats counted more back then, lol.

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.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[Rakarra]

Or maybe, just maybe that the idea of building large cities in places where they can't be supported is a good reason the rest of the country looks at good ol' Cali funny.

Yeah, like those folks who live on the eastern seaboard in the path of hurricanes. What weirdos. That goes double for any floodland, including Arizona, of all places.
And how about those folks who build in areas prone to tornadoes? playing Russian Roulette, they are.
How about Las Vegas and much of the Southwest? Talk about settling where the land doesn't support it.
This doesn't even go into states in this country without enough industry where they have to rely on tax dollars that come from other states to support their people. Does that count as living in a place that can't support itself? Or making poor choices and blaming some other?

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[PopeRatzo]

There Was an 'eternal september' for Slashdot; the debate is When it Was. :)

These are the good old days.

Re: The priesthood has spoken

[Anonymous Coward]

This is complete bullshit. Cali doesnt take water from the great lakes.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[HiThere]

While what you said is largely true, higher temperatures and drier weather increase fire danger, and those have both increased all up and down the US West coast. There's also insect pests moving North as the weather stops getting cold enough to kill them off. This has caused large numbers of tree deaths in, e.g., Oregon and Northern California, and dead trees are fire hazards.

So fire dangers have gotten worse, It's also true, however, that methods to combat those fires have improved. It's my judgment that fire danger has gotten worse faster than methods have improved, but this is a judgment rather than a fact. That fire danger has gotten worse is a fact. And this isn't helped by people planting flammable things around their houses...and then not watering them in the dry season.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[interkin3tic]

True, and well answered. Worth pointing out though that the big picture is still unambigiously scary. These are similar reasons people cite for not making healthier diet and lifestyle choices. "I ain't had a heart attack yet, and they keep changing what's good and bad for you, so I'm going to continue eating cheeseburgers!"

Excess sodium and calories are bad for your health even if you can't pinpoint any specific adverse events caused by them yet. Carbon and methane are wildly unbalanced in the atmosphere and increasing far more rapidly than anything natural that humans and our farms can adapt to. That carbon and methane in the atmosphere soak up more heat and will change the temperature is a stone cold fact. Piddling about whether it's already causing bad things to happen or not is like arguing whether the deck of the titanic would be wet even if we hadn't hit that iceberg.

So I hope everyone in this-far-too-reasonable-for-slashdot discussion doesn't conclude we're safe from climate change.

Wildfires happen regularly in nature. The article is nonsense about their rarity. Wildfires of this size occur only if there is an abundance of fuel. Naturally, that requires a drought after a couple decades of being too wet to burn. Thanks to California fire departments, all the small wildfires that would've cleaned out the accumulating fuel were extinguished before they could consume much dead wood.

"We knew that for at least 30 years, and California is so environmentally conscious, they MUST have stopped that policy years ago right?" NO THEY'RE STILL DOING THAT. I guess I shouldn't wonder if the Bay area is prepared for the inevitable "Big One"...

Earthquakes of significance are unchanged. Despite panic that small rock-settling after fracking would result in new faultlines exploding (or whatever nonsense those stories got to).

The jury is still out on that one. In places with no fault lines, sure, it seems unlikely fracking will cause earthquakes, but in Oklahoma, it's possible.

Re: The priesthood has spoken

[Anonymous Coward]

The Mississippi River wants a word with you.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[outlander]

Eh. Conservation falls on either side of the political spectrum, based on what's being conserved. If what's being conserved are social structures that help the well-off at the expense of the less-well-off, that's conservatism. If what's being conserved are social structures that help the less-well-off at the expense of the well-off, that's liberalism.

Since there are a lot more less-well-offs, I know where I stand from a do-the-most-good perspective. And I've come to favor that ever more as I've grown older and have seen people like me who haven't prospered as much as I have....success is not guaranteed even to people who do everything right. So I favor provision of services, a 'decency floor' if you will, because watching people fall through the cracks is hard.

Either way, though, I've determined that treating people with basic respect - which in this case equates to situationally appropriate etiquette - goes a long way. It's not that tricky, really. Sexism, racism, ageism etc are not isolated, IMHO - they are, ultimately, all facets of the same behavior, which is evaluating a person based on their morphology rather than their demonstrated abilities.

Not to put too fine a point on it, there are people who are brilliant in every group, and the exact opposite. To stay competitive, we as a country need to ID the brilliant ones irrespective of their morphology and leverage their brains. Forty years ago, John Brunner, in "The Shockwave Rider," realized this, and it is as true now as it was then.

“First we had the legs race. Then we had the arms race. Now we're going to have the brain race. And, if we're lucky, the final stage will be the human race."

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[losfromla]

I look forward to Shogun37's good mannered response. I might have to wait a while, lol. Good response anyhow Rakarra.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[hey!]

In a sense there is no such thing as a "natural disaster" -- natural disasters are always the interaction of natural forces with human development. If there's an avalanche in an uninhabited mountain valley, it's just something that happens, it's not a disater.

And there's no doubt that as population and development increases, our exposure to natural events increases. That said, it's extremely important to note that technology is a powerful counterbalancing force to that exposure. Take the familiar Saffir-Simpson scale for hurricanes; it is defined in terms of the degree of damage to *typical* houses of 1971. The 130-156 range for Category 4 was chosen because it causes catastrophic damage to a well built house of 1971. The eyewall of Irma passed over Cudjoe Key as a Cat 4; I have relative with a house there and it suffered literally *no* damage because it was built after 2000. Older houses suffered catastrophic damage.

The same goes for casualties. When the Hurrricane of '38 made landfall at 2PM on Long Island, people were out going about their business because nobody knew it was coming. Forecasters suspected Hurricane Sandy was going to hit New York eight days in advance, and were confident enough to put the world out four days in advance.

So it's a complicated situation. We're presenting an ever larger target to "natural" disasters, but a much tougher and agile target.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[sjames]

True enough that no place is 100% safe from natural disaster. But some places seem to get hit on an annual basis and others once in 100 years. The former are bad lands. That doesn't mean you absolutely can't build there, but it does mean you're an idiot if you don't build differently in order to handle the conditions. Stilt homes in flood plains, fireproof where fires happen, etc.

I read a while back about a guy who built his own home using appropriate materials in an area where the risk of fire was high. Sure enough, a fire burned through the neighborhood leaving a smoking pit of charcoal except for his house which only needed pressure washing. Unfortunately, his family found it hard to live alone with the post apocalyptic scenery that used to be their neighbors' homes.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[Ol Olsoc]

Nobody keeps you from giving us a better explanation for the increasing number and severity of natural disasters.

We're waiting.

Cthulhu is preparing his triumphant return with the Eldritch horrors?

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[Ol Olsoc]

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.

Although they can take away my physics when they pry it out of my cold dead fingers, and remember, you are asking another version of my "Give me the science behind the reason that the energy retention effects of certin gases fail on a global level" - I'm not one to say that the intensity of the wildfires are due to global warming.

However, it doesn't negate the fact that the effects exists.

So now that I got that bit of run on setnce out of the way, AC has some points that make it difficult to pin this on AGW.

The West of the USA has some big issues with being able to handle the population we are trying to impose on it. Wildfires are a part of the neighborhood.

People are living in areas that are really subject to wildfires. Those canyons and hills are pretty, but just ready to burn. The burning is a natural process that actually makes the ground more productive, sweetening and enriching the soil.

We've tried to suppress fires as well, which builds up flammable material.

The places where people want ot live are closer to desert than woodland. So it becomes a little difficult to say with any certainty that any one fire is related to greenhouse gas levels. Over time, we might measure differences in the Santa Ana winds which can whip these fires into a frenzy, We might find weather pattern instability related to temperatures averaging up.

But for now? I'll note it with interest, but make no claims other than hoping people don't get harmed.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[Ol Olsoc]

I remember those "Helpful Links" attached to most discussions mostly pointed to Goatse, lol.

There Was an 'eternal september' for Slashdot; the debate is When it Was. :)

Actually, Netcraft confirms there was a Beowulf Cluster of Eternal Septembers, you insensitive clod. 8^)

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[Ol Olsoc]

There Was an 'eternal september' for Slashdot; the debate is When it Was. :)

These are the good old days.

Damn, makes me think of most excellent Carly Simon.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[reboot246]

When did Los Angeles move to northern California or Oregon?

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[balbeir]

I read somewhere a theory that claims that the melting arctic icecap has as a direct effect that stronger more persistent high pressure ridges are building up over California. That has less precipitation as a result, which correlates to higher fire risks.

So there may be a link between global warming and these fires

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[Pfhorrest]

As someone displaced from their home by the Thomas fire, I'm kinda pissed that the first discussion in this thread is wah-wah anti-AGW bullshit. To put it politely: shut the fuck up.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[Neuronwelder]

And: the forest did not grow into the houses. The houses grew into, what was once a forest.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[hcs_$reboot]

been living here over 0x3C years.

Hexa makes you younger, indeed. For the passerby who fell on this site by mistake, he's 60.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[Ol Olsoc]

A lot of the fire problem has to do with the sorts of people moving onto the land. In the past, land like this would probably have been used as ranch land. And the people responsible for it would have allowed fires to burn through it occasionally. Now, it's the hipsters. And just look at all that beautiful desert scrub growing right up to my back door!

While you leave no doubt that you hate these "Hipsters" with a white hot passion, the concept of total fire suppression was in effect long before Hipsters were ever around. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

We even parachuted people into the middle of nowhere to fight pointless fires.

It wasn't until the 1960's when this policy was questioned. Now at least here in the east, we have controlled fires to keep the woods healthy. Ugly as sin for a year, but the regrowth is a joy to watch, and it apparently hels control the Emerald Ash Borer, which makes a hellava mess. There is some opposition, but it isn't by hipsters, usually by some of the less informed hunters. The ones who know what nature is about just find a different place to hunt for a couple years.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[Ol Olsoc]

How about the fact that California has so ruined its own environment so badly that it has to pull water from as far as the Great Lakes?

Where is this aqueduct and from which lake is the water coming from?

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[Ol Olsoc]

I look forward to Shogun37's good mannered response. I might have to wait a while, lol. Good response anyhow Rakarra.

I think he's doing some research to figure out this great Lakes aqueduct he's talking about is located.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[Shogun37]

Hurricanes aren't subtle. There is time to get out of the way. I live there, by the way. Pay attention to the weather, keep your house in good repair, and keep the trees trimmed. Chances are, things won't be too close to horrible. Yes, building in places where it floods often isn't smart. Or building cities in the desert. Bad economies happen people adjust, and try something different. Or they don't and towns die out. Very few places, in the US at least, go so far as California has to almost totally destroy the ability of the land to support human life. Love canal comes to mind, but that's been cleaned up, last I heard.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[HiThere]

Welllll....the Los Angeles area has long had the Santa Ana winds, and It's long has less rain. I think the higher temperatures are the main cause. I did hear once, about a decade ago, that the effect of climate change was as if the traditional climate had moved north a few miles, so possibly the Los Angeles climate is now more like that which Baja California used to have, but I only heard that once, and I'm not sure you need to make that kind of assumption. I think drier suffices.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[PPH]

Good points. But we still do too much 'total suppression' in the name of saving rich people's houses. No need to parachute people in to fight fires. You just drive through the main entrance to the gated communities. I don't think it's all about clueless hunters either. There is no hunting in and around residential neighborhoods.

We used to have controlled burns and slash burns in the hills above where I live. Far enough away that residences were not at risk. But we had too many people complain about the nasty brown smoke that this is no longer tolerated. Or its, "I moved out into the country because of fresh air and muh asthma."

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, man caused this mess, but not the way you think.

Building homes to increase our wealth(though on the cheap, because well...), ignoring the natural state of the land, and trying to force the world to bend to our preferences?

That's exactly how I think. Of course, you leave out how many of the former forests of California were cut down, with the ancient trees going elsewhere in the world to make fine furniture and other materials.

Of course, we can at least recognize that we're not practicing slash-and-burn agriculture in America. Elsewhere in the world, well, that's another story.

It probably won't make your local news though.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[hawkfish]

When the population increases in an area, people are always driven to build more housing on the bad land. It's no surprise when 'expensive new housing' is flooded or beset upon by a hurricane. The 'bad land' is the places where there aren't already 100 year old structures.

Not to mention the unscrupulous developers who bribe the local politicians to allow them to put up their overpriced, high risk garbage in these areas and then flee - leaving the buyers holding the bag...

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[redlemming]

This doesn't even go into states in this country without enough industry where they have to rely on tax dollars that come from other states to support their people. Does that count as living in a place that can't support itself? Or making poor choices and blaming some other?

No. Large numbers of people leave the expensive states (such as California) to retire in less expensive locations, and they bring their social security and medi-care benefits with them. This creates the illusion that some state's tax dollars are going somewhere else, that they are paying more than their "fair" share, or that something unfair or inappropriate is going on - a false impression that the unscrupulous are quick to capitalize on for political advantage.

If these people didn't have the option to move somewhere else, their original state would have to pay more to support them - or they would have to save more money, reducing spending and the associated direct tax income in the original state's economy, plus creating stronger political pressure to limit taxes, with all kinds of long term consequences.

All kinds of things work this way.

For another example, many poor people are found in warmer, less expensive locations where the cost of living is lower because they don't have to heat their living quarters as much (and perhaps food is less expensive, and perhaps also they can grow more of their food). As with the retirees, these people bring their welfare benefits with them, creating the impression in some quarters that some states are getting more than their fair share (and leading to the false conclusion that they can't support their population). But if this didn't happen, if these people were forced in live in more expensive locations, the other states would actually be paying more to support these people.

Economists in discussing these matters use the phrase "comparative advantage": some places are just better at supplying certain services or producing certain things. We're not talking expensive luxury crops like California almonds or avocados, but rather staple crops like rice, or wheat, or basic necessities like lumber, most of which are produced in locations with relatively low populations, far from the wealthy cities and states.

Similarly, if you can't grow it or farm it or fish it, you have to mine it - and that tends to take place far from the places that ultimately need the end products of mining. We're not just talking about expensive metals, but staples like toothpaste and salt, and things like copper wire for electrical power so people have computers, light, heat, and air conditioning.

The US federal government subsidizes the production and transportation of these goods so that they can be available at lower cost in other locations - funding to maintain the interstate highway system and coastal or river waterways are examples of such subsidies. Many others exist.

The federal government also pays huge amounts for related research (such as agricultural research).

Even if natural comparative advantage wasn't a factor (things like climate and soil, or minerals, or ports convenient to oil-producing locations), simply the consideration that cost of living is higher in some locations can give others a comparative advantage, which naturally leads to goods and services being produced in the less expensive locations, with subsidies used to assist in moving the goods to more expensive locations.

All this creates the illusion that some states (or regions with states) are receiving "more than their fair share". But if these enormous subsidies weren't available, people in the other states (or regions) would have to pay a lot more for the basic necessities of life. It's not that some places are paying more than their fair share, its that the tax dollars being spent in some locations are lowering the cost of living for for those that are paying: it's actually a bargain due to the comparative advantage.

There are often legitimate reasons for wh

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[Anonymous Coward]

Munich Re has a chart with weather/flood related insurance claims versus other (usually geophysical like earthquakes.) The first category has increased 4x relative to the second over the last few decades.

Not sure this has any significance. Have we gotten better at building structures resistant to geophysical problems? Do we allow more or bigger weather related claims today than in the past? Are the values of claims for weather or flood related damage going up faster than our ability to engineer structures? Does government policy such as guaranteed or subsidized insurance (or disaster relief) in coastal areas affect of number and size of claims? Are people building more (or building more expensive) in areas affected by weather/flood? Are people more willing to make claims, or make more expensive claims? Do more people have applicable insurance? Have insurance policies changed, perhaps as a result of legislation, in ways that encourage people to make more claims? Are there other legal/social/political/engineering differences that could account for these differences? Is the data even legitimate, or are we somehow comparing apples and oranges because things are being counted differently now than in the past? Are we properly correcting for inflation? Are there biases in how the the data is being counted or collected?

Sorry to go all scientist on you, but jumping to conclusions is easy: accurately evaluating data is not.

That climate changes we can take as a given - many former Roman ports are now underwater, as are many former native American coastal villages, because sea level has risen, but going beyond that simple statement to draw clear and indisputable conclusions is a hard problem. I have yet to see a study that conclusively showed - without any oversights or mistakes or problems or simply unexplained issues with the data - that there is a genuine difference in insurance claims that can only be explained by changes in climate.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. That would be cool to see.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[dyslexicbunny]

Yea. I remember reading something to the effect. Also about how they used to do controlled burns but residents complained about how the smoke ruined their nice views so they cut back or stopped. Then you get stuff like this.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[Ex-MislTech]

Sometimes its just about ppl flagrantly lying and getting caught at it.

https://www.realclearpolitics....

I believe we are polluting the planet horribly, but lying about it isn't helping.

AGW is not testable

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything is blamed on AGW. It isn't testable. That makes AGW pseudoscience. If we have a warm winter, it's evidence of AGW. If we have a cold winter, it's evidence of AGW. If we have wildfires, it's evidence of AGW. That's why AGW is obviously a religion and not science.

Re:AGW is not testable

[Anonymous Coward]

2016 was the hottest year on records. Before that 2015, was. Before that 2014 was.

By "not testable" you mean, "well tested with clearly visible effects plain for everyone to see"?

Re: AGW is not testable

[Anonymous Coward]

Except it wasn't. Before 2016, the hottest year on record was 1998.

Re:AGW is not testable

[Bing Tsher E]

By 'on record' you mean since instrumentation you'll acknowledge as 'valid and scientific' has been developed. Hence, about 150 years back. That's a shit-poor data set for 'since forever' judgements.

Re:AGW is not testable

[Anonymous Coward]

2016 was the hottest year on records. Before that 2015, was. Before that 2014 was.

By "not testable" you mean, "well tested with clearly visible effects plain for everyone to see"?

Meh. Not so much.

The IPCC fifth assessment report concluded "Although there have been substantial methodological debates about the calculation of trends and their uncertainty, a 95% confidence interval of around ±0.1C per decade has been obtained consistently for both LT and MT (e.g., Section 2.4.4; McKitrick et al., 2010). In summary, despite unanimous agreement on the sign of the observed trends, there exists substantial disagreement between available estimates as to the rate of temperature changes in the tropical troposphere, and there is only low confidence in the rate of change and its vertical structure."

But that's not useful in generating headlines as clickbait, nor for misleading the sheeple.

Oh, yeah, the IPCC itself pretty much says "the science ISN'T settled". Because we DON'T have good numbers on the rate of temperature change, and the causeS aren't clear, either.

Re: AGW is not testable

[Anonymous Coward]

http://edition.cnn.com/2017/01/18/world/2016-hottest-year/index.html

"Not only was this the third consecutive year to rank hotter than all previous years, it also means 16 of the 17 hottest years on record have occurred since 2000, according to NOAA. To put this in perspective, the last time we had a record cold year was 1911."

Re:AGW is not testable

[Anonymous Coward]

Let us pray to the Gods of intentional misreading to save us from this insane global warming.

95% certainty is still 5% UNcertainty, so perhaps if we all pretend 'rate' is negative and pray it will get cooler! We just need enough faith to overcome the science and the measurements and consensus on the warming. Let us pray!

Re:AGW is not testable

[Anonymous Coward]

95% certainty is based on assumptions on the underlying probability distribution. If your assumption about the probability distribution is wrong, your 95% will be wrong. In 2016 there was 95% certainty that Hillary would win. In 2008, there was 95% certainty that home mortgages and their derivatives would not cause a crash. Those errors come from failing to understand the underlying probability distributions.

If you actually take a look at climate models, they are exceedingly complex, and requiring twiddling dozens of knobs to make the answer come out right (i.e. agree with short history).

There is little doubt that global warming is real, just because actual measurements are trending up, without models. How much is anthropogenic and how much is gynogenic is up for grabs. As to the effect on climate, that will be better understood in about 100 years.

george christie is not happy

[Anonymous Coward]

and no one cares

Re: george christie is not happy

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile, I took a dump in your mouth, and you are very happy about it.

I love that:

[no-body]

"And it's all horribly normal" - what does this Wired guy/gal have have in his skull - Marshmallows?

Re: I love that:

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to fuck you in the ass.

Re:I love that:

[Anonymous Coward]

FTFA: "Before humans, wildfires happened maybe once or twice a century"

Exactly how did they arrive at this conclusion? Ice cores? I doubt there were only 1 or 2 fires every 100 years.

Re: I love that:

[Anonymous Coward]

It probably comes from the same "scientists" who claim that global warming is settled science.

Re: I love that:

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone modded my post down. I really want to fuck that moderator in the ass.

Re:I love that:

[Opportunist]

If you bothered to at least google the matter instead of just making a cynical comment, you'd learn that you can actually find something like this in the soil.

What do you base your doubt on? Gut feeling or something substantial?

Re:I love that:

[Anonymous Coward]

..you can actually find something like this in the soil.

What do you base your doubt on? Gut feeling or something substantial?

Something? Is that a scientific term, or is that your gut feeling?

Re:I love that:

[Opportunist]

Sorry, was just trying to use terms you'd grasp.

Basically it's a little like the strata in rock that differentiate the various geologic times, just on a much smaller scale and, depending on the location, it can be harder to gain a level of fidelity comparable to it, at least if you don't have enough core samples. Since it is (usually) no big deal to get such samples, the accuracy can actually be increased considerably. Obviously the whole process is more accurate in areas that do not suffer from too much human interactions, but even if humans disturb the soil you can still come to sensible conclusions provided you have enough cores from relevant sources. It will not allow you to go down to years (unless you have additional information available like tree trunks that survived the fire in a good enough shape to still identify the annual rings and thus even determine the year of a fire, provided you have current trees for comparison of the ring structures) but it does certainly provide enough information for you to issue reliable statements about how often in a century there was a fire in the area.

Re:I love that:

[Bing Tsher E]

Just as is the case with the fossil record, the preservation of soil traces is often the result of fluke events. So it's hazardous to try to extrapolate from it. You can end up with a 'survey' of the past that is inaccurate, based on a few quirky samples.

Re:I love that:

[sheramil]

Consider yourselves lucky he couldn't find a way to jam the word 'egregious' into it, or he would've.

Re: I love that:

[Anonymous Coward]

All of them except the 2% that work for the fossil fuel industry?

Re:I love that:

[Opportunist]

That's why having a meaningful sample of cores is crucial.

Re: I love that:

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone modded my post down. I really want to fuck that moderator in the ass.

You were probably modded down by the original editor of this post who already has a "butt buddy" named BeauHD.

Re:I love that:

[wbr1]

You don't need ice cores. Trees have this awesome recording mechanism called rings. Old trees in an area an tell you the history of fires and rain for any given year.
https://cdn.uanews.arizona.edu...
Please, try not to be so retarded....

Re: I love that:

[Anonymous Coward]

Seeing as how the vast majority of wildfires I've witnessed where I live in the west are caused by lightning, I call bullshit.

Re:I love that:

[no-body]

If you bothered to at least google the matter instead of just making a cynical comment, you'd learn that you can actually find something like this in the soil.

What do you base your doubt on? Gut feeling or something substantial?

What? I need to "google" - for what is "normal" here? Just MF look around!

There is absolutely no condition in the past except magnitudes of extinction which is comparable to this situation right now and to call anything "normal" because there was something minor in the past is baloney, just a maybe unintentional attempt to console. It's on the same level as some new guy in some office claiming there is no global warming - or climate change is a hoax.

There is one species on this globe with some larger brain and creating with it this havoc comparable only with a few events in the past of this planet.

Yeah, google that:

http://www.independent.co.uk/e...
https://cosmosmagazine.com/pal...

Enjoy!

Re:I love that:

[Bing Tsher E]

And if attaining a meaningful sample is impossible? How do we determine what is a meaningful sample? By sampling the sporatic data available, some only preserved due to fluke events?

Most of the traces of past nature are ground up and not preserved. The fossil record is based on quirk events that preserved an odd sample of a species here or there. I.e. a sudden landslide that preserved a dinosaur carcass so it wasn't consumed and recycled by other animals and plants in the genome. The same is true for trace samples of forest fire activity.

Re:I love that:

[Ex-MislTech]

In major fires in the rock layers you will get an Ash layer similar to the KT boundary.

Thou of course it will not be as pronounced as the KT boundary and limited in geological area.

I think lightning strike started wildfires are far more common then 1 or 2 a century.

Especially in areas that are very dry and get lightning with little to no rain, such as desert.

Re: I love that:

[Ex-MislTech]

Yes, lightning is a huge factor.

I have hiked many miles in many forests, and I almost always see one lightning struck tree.

It has been this way for all my life, and I got a few decades behind me.

Now most of them in my area do not trigger a wildfire because we get quite a
bit of rain as this is not a desert.

As I said in my other related post the areas that get lightning but little rain
it can get ugly.

"During 2007-2011, U.S. local fire departments responded to an estimated average of 22,600 fires per year that were started by lightning. "

http://www.nfpa.org/News-and-R...

22,000 per year....yeah I knew it was high, didn't know it was THAT high.

Here come those Santa Ana winds again

[rmdingler]

There are ideal conditions for wildfires in this region (and others) nearly every year. What's special about this year?

"What we don’t have every single year is an ignition during a wind event. And we’ve had several."

Whether by foolish acts or (pyro)maniacal disposition, people are the blight on this land.

Re: Here come those Santa Ana winds again

[Anonymous Coward]

God is simply weighing in with his opinion on liberals. Los Angeles is full of liberals, and God is simply voicing his disapproval.

Re: Here come those Santa Ana winds again

[Opportunist]

That must be the reason those hurricanes predominately devastate the Bible Belt, I guess?

Re: Here come those Santa Ana winds again

[rmdingler]

The application of God's will to a particular event is rather arbitrary. He gets credit for a lot of touchdowns, yet blamed for very few fumbles.

Re: Here come those Santa Ana winds again

[Opportunist]

So ... God is a CEO?

Re:Here come those Santa Ana winds again

[LynnwoodRooster]

What is different is it's been 5-6 years for a big burn on VTA (I live just south, can see the smoke in the hills). So because it's not been part of the annual fire/Santa Ana events for the last few years (but was regular before that), it is now unique. Remember, history only goes back a few years at most!

Re:Here come those Santa Ana winds again

[humasyed]

Well written!!

Re:Here come those Santa Ana winds again

[tquasar]

Bonus points for Steely Dan reference.

Re: Here come those Santa Ana winds again

[PPH]

He gets credit for a lot of touchdowns, yet blamed for very few fumbles.

Someone had better brief him on Sarbanes-Oxley.

Re: Here come those Santa Ana winds again

[Rakarra]

Remember the tortured logic of the Westboro Baptist Church protesting at the funerals of American soldiers? "God hates fags, and the soldiers protect America which does not have the death penalty for homosexuals, therefore dead soldiers are God's wrath against the homosexuals who aren't dying."

In other words, don't argue with a biblical zealot. They will always find a passage to "support" whatever they want to believe in.

Re: Here come those Santa Ana winds again

[david_thornley]

Back in the 1700s there were people who blamed the Lisbon earthquake on the Boston lightning rods. Other people thought God's aim had to be better than that. This is nothing new.

Re: Here come those Santa Ana winds again

[rmdingler]

The earthquake had wide-ranging effects on the society and culture in Europe. The earthquake had struck on an important religious feast and had destroyed almost every important church in a devoted Roman Catholic city. Theologians and the religious authorities - like the Jesuit Malagrida in Lisbon - exploited the situation and the superstitiousness of the people, declaring that the earthquake was a punishment by god for the sins of the world - but why then should god destroy the churches and spare the brothels? (The churches were mostly located in the city center and build on soft sediments deposited by the Tejo).

Such sediments are prone to soil liquefaction during an earthquake, destabilizing the fundaments of large buildings).

Philosophers, naturalists and even some theologians had argued already since ancient times against this simple view of the world and proposed naturalistic explanations of volcanoes, earthquakes and other natural disasters: the most common hypotheses comprised air circulation in the crust of the earth, tremors as the results of electric discharge or the spontaneous explosion of gases in the underground.

But until the earthquake of Lisbon such ideas were hold mostly by a small number of scholars and discussed in restricted circles. With the possibility to produce cheap and fast pamphlets and journals the news of the destruction of such an important city as Lisbon became widely known and discussed in Europe. The earthquake, the many figures produced over the years and the subsequent discussions had shaken profoundly the belief in a merciful god and the power of the church - for the first time an earthquake was regarded widely as a natural phenomena.

Fascinating.

Re: Here come those Santa Ana winds again

[hcs_$reboot]

Yet you put a capital letter to 'god'.

Re: Here come those Santa Ana winds again

[rmdingler]

Yes. Clearly I've made the classic mistake of confusing the existence of all the gods with the one God.

I will complete penance and mail seven Harry's.

Re: Here come those Santa Ana winds again

[Opportunist]

Westboro Baptists. Trolling since before it was cool.

They're a nuisance only if you let them get to you. Just realize that they're pretty much the real life equivalent of internet trolls, if you ignore them they'll eventually start losing interest.

Re: Here come those Santa Ana winds again

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember the tortured logic of the Westboro Baptist Church protesting at the funerals of American soldiers? "God hates fags, and the soldiers protect America which does not have the death penalty for homosexuals, therefore dead soldiers are God's wrath against the homosexuals who aren't dying."

In other words, don't argue with a biblical zealot. They will always find a passage to "support" whatever they want to believe in.

May I ask what WBC has to do with the fires in SoCal? Get a life.

Re: Here come those Santa Ana winds again

[Rakarra]

May I ask what WBC has to do with the fires in SoCal? Get a life.

Don't be so hostile, dickweed.

And it's all about the foolishness of interpreting any natural disaster, or any calamity on "God's Wrath" against whatever you think God hates.

Re:Here come those Santa Ana winds again

[Anonymous Coward]

you also had a really wet year esp winter snows and rain which led to heavy plant growth ie fuel followed by extreme drought so the fuel is now tinder then had strong winds in a time of year they arent common let alone this strong nor sustained thus a perfect storm for wildfires

it also doesnt help a lot of those areas which burn almost every year are too heavily settled with people and houses its no different than letting people in Houston build houses in historic flood plain as sooner or later they will flood and given other area development it insures when it does happen it will be worse than expected

Re:Here come those Santa Ana winds again

[Ex-MislTech]

My recommendation for recurring fires in California is a return to good firebreaks,
and an incentive to build out of Adobe as it does not burn if you make sure no wood
is exposed.

https://www.pinterest.com/kate...

Some modern Adobe buildings look damn nice too.

http://www.builderhouseplans.c...

Not Katabatic winds,

[Anonymous Coward]

which cannot be hot. Katabatic winds occur in places where cold air descends from atop very high mountains. Common in Antarctica.

Re:Not Katabatic winds,

[tsqr]

I guess "Santa Ana winds" was too pedestrian for the author. Warm, dry air driven by big high pressure areas over the desert. You could set your watch (well, your calendar anyway) by their arrival each year.

Re:Not Katabatic winds,

[Anonymous Coward]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The Santa Anas are katabatic windsâ"Greek for "flowing downhill", arising in higher altitudes and blowing down towards sea level.[4]

[4] Fovell, Robert. "UCLA explains the naming of the Santa Ana winds". Orange County Register. Retrieved May 3, 2012.

Re:Not Katabatic winds,

[Anonymous Coward]

The air warms as it descends -- katabatic heating -- because of the conversion from gravitational potential energy at altitude.

If they start off warm (like over a hot desert rather than in Antarctica) they'll be even warmer as they approach sea level.

Re:Not Katabatic winds,

[Anonymous Coward]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The Santa Anas are katabatic windsâ"Greek for "flowing downhill", arising in higher altitudes and blowing down towards sea level.[4]

[4] Fovell, Robert. "UCLA explains the naming of the Santa Ana winds". Orange County Register. Retrieved May 3, 2012.

Not true katabatic. Maybe pseudo-katabatic, faux-katabatic, semi-katabatic.

Calling Santa Ana 'Katabatic' is another display of American exceptionalism.

CAP: gaseous

True

[110010001000]

There were never wildfires before climate change was discovered.

Re:True

[Mashiki]

Very true. I remember being in Banning, California back in the late 1980's with my parents and seeing the mountains burning. Back then they called it a seasonal burn, now it's wildfires due to climate change.

Re:True

[Gravis Zero]

There were never wildfires before climate change was discovered.

The is real problem is that we're been putting out the wildfires for over a hundred years when burning is part of the natural cycle of life for the ecosystem. As a result there are many millions of dead and dry trees just waiting for a spark. However, climate change is exacerbating the issue by causing more extreme weather (longer droughts and more extreme downpours) which ultimately kill more plants and turn them into fuel for the fire. Climate change definitely isn't the cause of these giant wildfires but it is making it worse.

Re:True

[UnknowingFool]

Only if you promote false dichotomy arguments and don't bother to read even the summary: "Climate change makes fires there more frequent and more severe."

Re:True

[110010001000]

Right. Because human beings moving into those areas doesn't cause more frequent and more severe fires. Must be climate change.

Re:True

[Gravis Zero]

There were never wildfires before climate change was discovered.

Only if you promote false dichotomy arguments and don't bother to read even the summary: "Climate change makes fires there more frequent and more severe."

Right. Because human beings moving into those areas doesn't cause more frequent and more severe fires. Must be climate change.

Did you seriously just reply to the accusation of making a false dichotomy by piling on a second false dichotomy? Brilliant.

Re:True

[UnknowingFool]

Another false dichotomy? What's the number one cause of wild fires (not the human caused ones)? Lightning strikes. So random lightning strikes avoid human areas because. . . ? I suppose that in your world, fire must also avoid populated human areas . . . because fire is smart?

Re:True

[Whorhay]

I remember hearing, when I lived in California for a time, that the "golden grasses" on the hills was actually an invasive species brought by the Spanish hundreds of years ago. The native grasses are better at retaining moisture in the dry climate and stayed green year round. The invasive grass dies off after the rains stop in the winter but is thick enough that it chokes out the native grasses that would otherwise flourish. All that dead grass dries out and makes for ready tinder whenever a wildfire starts up.

Re:True

[Ex-MislTech]

This poster is correct, the CALFIRES ppl had warned back in 2015 it was a disaster
waiting to happen, but they were for the most part blown off.

If they had turned lose the bulldozers for firebreaks and controlled burns
this could have been much less damaging.

The fires would have happened still, but they'd have been easier to fight,
and less likely to spread, and access via firebreak roads would have
allowed a 2nd layer of making the fires easier to fight.

In this case an ounce of prevention would have been worth a mountainside of cure.

500 Years

[Templer421]

California has had droughts lasting up to 500 years.

Just a coincidence that the last 500 years in California were wetter than normal.

Re:500 Years

[bobbied]

Think DUST BOWL..

The history of that man made disaster is rife with the same kind of things they say today, just in reverse.

Nobody wanted to believe that the pan handle of Texas was really a dry desert, unstable for farming. Yea, a decade of rainy weather tricked a bunch of people to plow up thousands of acres of land, year after year, thinking that the rain would return, only to watch their fields blow away as dust.

Re:500 Years

[Anonymous Coward]

Very similar to South Australia in the 1880s where the belief then was "the rain follows the plow" and agricultural expansion continued into the arid far north of the state.

Trouble was, the 1880s were an exceptionally wet decade that was followed by a decade-long drought in the 1890s which wasn't experienced again until the 2000s.

Australia also used to regularly have enormous Mad Max Fury Road-like dust storms up to the 1980s when farmers began to rapidly adopt modern soil conservation practices such as zero-till.

Dontcha need wetter for more fuel?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> higher temperatures and dryer conditions providing more fuel

I thought you needed WETTER conditions to get more fuel. Is anyone surprised that there are a bunch of large fires after California's water supply returned to normal and plants had a chance to grow back? (It was as green along Hwy 1 as I've ever seen it this year.) That stuff dries out...and then burns - science, yo.

http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/10/03/will-this-winter-in-california-be-wet-or-dry/

Re:Dontcha need wetter for more fuel?

[tsqr]

>> higher temperatures and dryer conditions providing more fuel I thought you needed WETTER conditions to get more fuel. Is anyone surprised that there are a bunch of large fires after California's water supply returned to normal and plants had a chance to grow back? (It was as green along Hwy 1 as I've ever seen it this year.) That stuff dries out...and then burns - science, yo. http://www.mercurynews.com/201...

Yeah, that was poorly worded. Higher temps and low humidity turn the abundant growth into more explosive fuel.

At least with the current rash of fires, firefighters haven't had to contend with extremely high temperatures; we've had highs in the low 70s all week.

Re:Dontcha need wetter for more fuel?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I live in Colorado and people always talk about how great it is when we have really wet springs. I guess I have the super power of foresight that allows me to see that the super wet spring will dry out when the inevitable dry months of June, July and August hit which will cause us to have a super high fire danger. It's amazing to me how many people can't seem to remember year to year that Colorado is a semi-arid environment, and if we have a wet period, it's going to dry out when we return to normal.

Re:Dontcha need wetter for more fuel?

[SuperKendall]

Just like every Novemeber/December so many people comment on how unusually warm it is in Colorado even though we see warm weather in those months at times every single year...

Re:Dontcha need wetter for more fuel?

[dfm3]

TFA does a better job than the summary at explaining, but yes, your observation is consistent. Wetter summers mean more vegetation growth, but it's the weather during a few critical weeks in late fall that determine how severe the fires will be.

It's the small stuff (leaves, brush, and weeds) that burns fast, hot, and explosively given the right conditions. In the fall, when the deciduous species lose their leaves, a wet December means that most of this vegetation falls to the ground and begins to decompose, rendering it more dense and less flammable. When you have a combination of dry weather, warm temperatures, and high wind, combined with ignition (historically caused by lightning, but usually by people these days), leaves tend to stay on the trees longer, or fall to the ground without decomposing, and become perfect fuel.

So yes, you're correct that when this stuff dries out, it becomes a hazard.

For example, last fall was a historically notable fire season in the southern Appalachians. Many parts of the mountains in NC/TN/GA had little to no measurable rainfall for a couple months, so the leaves simply dried up and stayed on the trees rather than changing color and falling to the ground. The deadly fires that swept through Gatlinburg, Tennessee became "canopy" fires - an event more common in California but virtually unheard of in eastern forests. Even one good rainstorm could, in theory, have been sufficient to knock enough leaves off of the trees and compress the leaf litter on the forest floor to render it slightly less flammable.

Re:Dontcha need wetter for more fuel?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is anyone surprised that there are a bunch of large fires after California's water supply returned to normal and plants had a chance to grow back? (It was as green along Hwy 1 as I've ever seen it this year.) That stuff dries out...and then burns - science, yo.

I know you're proud of yourself for thinking of this obvious relationship between rainfall, drought, and vegetation, and sincerely believe scientists either never thought of it themselves, or are too engrossed in perpetrating a hoax to notice, but, your theory has a major problem: it's always rained in the rainy season and dried out over the summer. Since that variable is relatively constant over time it can't explain an effect that has been increasing over time. In the field of statistics we would say there is no correlation, since two correlated variables would change in proportion to each other. I'm terribly sorry to have had to be the one to burst your bubble. That's science, bro. U mad?

Re: Dontcha need wetter for more fuel?

[Khyber]

Your science fucking sucks because it fails to account for a FIVE YEAR DROUGHT.

Try again when you actually understand science and can think logically.

Re:Dontcha need wetter for more fuel?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. All those dang easterners moving to the state.

(Dang Californians too, but they don't comment on the temperatures until February, when it's fucking cold.)

Re:Dontcha need wetter for more fuel?

[Ex-MislTech]

The reduction in cutting of firebreaks does explain it though.

The expansion of housing into areas that are prone to wildfires and mudslides
also explains it.

If the houses were made of Adobe, and active firebreak management was
done the problem would still exist, but much less prone to major disaster.

you mean Kremlin winds?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't be surprised if those are caused by some Soviet sputnik weaponry used to microwave air and as result, produce high speed winds and high temps.

Or Russian youth diversants firing up forests. There are plenty of youngery people in USA that have russian roots and are eager to make america great again lol.

p.s.: NAVALNY 20!8

Wait, what?

[tsqr]

Fires don't burn like this in Northern California.

I guess this guy must have been asleep a few months ago when the Tubbs fire burned nearly 40,000 acres, destroyed nearly 6,000 buildings, and killed over 40 people In and around Santa Rosa, CA.

Re:Wait, what?

[110010001000]

That was due to climate change too. Or maybe the Russians. Either way, the science is settled.

Re:Wait, what?

[Bing Tsher E]

What's distressing is how much damage phrases like 'the science is settled' does to the actual promulgation of the Scientific Method.

We've gotta wrest the mantle of Science back from these AGW witch doctors.

Re:Wait, what?

[110010001000]

You will not win that battle. Actual scientists are not well funded, but the people pushing for Carbon Credits and other money making schemes are.

Re:Wait, what?

[king neckbeard]

Yes, because oil companies don't have any money....

Even if there wasn't an overwhelming scientific consensus, we should at least come to the conclusion that God hates petroleum because he fucking buried it mostly under the world's biggest assholes.

Re:Wait, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fires don't burn like this in Northern California.

I guess this guy must have been asleep a few months ago when the Tubbs fire burned nearly 40,000 acres, destroyed nearly 6,000 buildings, and killed over 40 people In and around Santa Rosa, CA.

Yeah but everyone knows that LA, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley are the only parts of California that actually "matter".

Re:Wait, what?

[110010001000]

Oil companies have plenty of money to push their false viewpoints as well. AGW is real, but it isn't causing the California fires. No need to hype it up.

Re:Wait, what?

[tbannist]

What's distressing is how much damage phrases like 'the science is settled' does to the actual promulgation of the Scientific Method.

We've gotta wrest the mantle of Science back from these AGW witch doctors.

No what's truly distressing is how damage people like you do, because you think you can pick and choose which science is real based on your political views.

Re:Wait, what?

[tbannist]

The article says it makes them worse, not that it causes them.

Re:Wait, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah it freakin' sucked even down here in the bay area we had to outfit air purifiers in the house because we were getting sick and coughing from the smoke -

Re:Wait, what?

[Ex-MislTech]

When a racket has billions backing the propaganda your fighting a losing battle.

I don't trust the fossil fuel folks, but I also don't trust the ppl caught in the hadley CRU scandal.

https://www.realclearpolitics....

Re:Wait, what?

[Ex-MislTech]

Tell me more.

https://www.realclearpolitics....

Re:Wait, what?

[tbannist]

Thank you for proving my point by linking to a long discredited story, which you cling to because it supports your political opinions.

If you weren't an anti-science political hack, you wouldn't be trying to peddle those lies here.

Lot of people moved there for the warm weather

[boudie2]

Hope they're enjoying their warm weather. You have to take the good with the bad. Didn't the U.S. steal it from the Indians or Mexicans anyways? Bad karma?

Re:Lot of people moved there for the warm weather

[liquid_schwartz]

Hope they're enjoying their warm weather. You have to take the good with the bad. Didn't the U.S. steal it from the Indians or Mexicans anyways? Bad karma?

Best thing that ever happen to the land if you've ever seen Mexico. If we could go back in time we should have just absorbed Mexico. We'd have a smaller border to defend and the Mexicans would already be integrated and English speaking. It would save everyone a lot of trouble in the long run.

Re:Lot of people moved there for the warm weather

[boudie2]

Woulda, shoulda, coulda. The horse is out of the barn now.

Re:Lot of people moved there for the warm weather

[bobbied]

Hope they're enjoying their warm weather. You have to take the good with the bad. Didn't the U.S. steal it from the Indians or Mexicans anyways? Bad karma?

Best thing that ever happen to the land if you've ever seen Mexico. If we could go back in time we should have just absorbed Mexico. We'd have a smaller border to defend and the Mexicans would already be integrated and English speaking. It would save everyone a lot of trouble in the long run.

We actually took all of Mexico during the Mexican-American War which started over the disputed border after Texas came into the union. What amazes me is that we gave back to Mexico everything we took except the part which was in dispute. We could have kept the whole thing.

Re:Lot of people moved there for the warm weather

[dwillden]

And who would we give it back to anyway? The Mexicans stole it from Spain when they declared independence and Spain was granted their portion of the New World by the Pope, who in theory speaks for God who of course created the planet. ;)

Re:Lot of people moved there for the warm weather

[boudie2]

God appears to be repossessing it.

Re:Lot of people moved there for the warm weather

[Rakarra]

Hope they're enjoying their warm weather. You have to take the good with the bad. Didn't the U.S. steal it from the Indians or Mexicans anyways? Bad karma?

Pretty much all US land was stolen from the Indians (though not always by the US), California included. The state rebelled and was a (very very) short-lived independent republic, but Mexico was not able to take it back since they were distracted by the Mexican-American war. California was included anyway in the peace treaty.

Re:Lot of people moved there for the warm weather

[Anonymous Coward]

We actually took all of Mexico during the Mexican-American War which started over the disputed border after Texas came into the union. What amazes me is that we gave back to Mexico everything we took except the part which was in dispute. We could have kept the whole thing.

Dubious. Winning the big battles was one thing, keeping the land over the long term another. Lots of diseases in the tropics that North Americans of European descent weren't resistant to. Also, Mexico had a strong Catholic influence, which was seen as a liability in a nation that was still mostly Protestant. The large and unenthusiastic native population also posed a problem - they didn't have much in the way of shared cultural values to bind them to the new nation, you would need a fairly large permanent army to maintain control, and that wouldn't have gone over well. Logistics would have been a big problem as well - it's hard to supply troops over the long term over such long distances, and certainly expensive. Politically, a lot of people were opposed to the US taking territory - they thought it was morally wrong. Finally, there just wasn't anything there to justify the time and trouble, in the eyes of the people back then.

Today, with modern eyes, we can appreciate Mexico as an unique and special place, but in their eyes it was mostly worthless desert and jungle.

Also, the USA didn't "give back" California and large portions of the South West - which hadn't actually been in dispute. They kept what some thought was worth keeping - though paying for it (and bought more later).

Re:Lot of people moved there for the warm weather

[Ex-MislTech]

California was home to mexicans, native americans like myself, and a small outpost of Russians as well.

You can find some of the native american names out in the wilderness areas, and the major
cities still hold mexican names to this day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Before humans

[Anonymous Coward]

Go ahead, blame the species; after all, we did discover fire. Or brought it down from Asgard, whatever.

It's simple

[DontBeAMoran]

We are under attack by Galaxy, a worldwide organization led by a trio of mad scientists.

Re:It's simple

[Bing Tsher E]

The relentless assault of Galaxy Tabs, and Galaxy Notes. It's almost like the 'Assault of the IBM' that we fended off decades back. Hunder down under your iGadget and breeeeaathe sloooowly. It will be all right.

If the flames reaches the Cuperino 'Heavens Gate' Spaceship Structure, it can simply take off and land again when it's safe.

Re:It's simple

[DontBeAMoran]

If the flames reaches the Cuperino 'Heavens Gate' Spaceship Structure, it can simply take off and land again when it's safe.

Ah, so Apple are playing Terrans. Got it.

Re:It's simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Props for the "Our Man Flint" reference.

Someone mod that up.

Karma...

[yodleboy]

that's why...

Re: Karma...

[Anonymous Coward]

With all the bad things happening, you'd almost expect the nation to be built on a bunch of Indian burial grounds or something.

In case of emergencies...

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a hand cranked, solar powered radio/flashlight/iPhone charger for when the Earth goes sideways..

I remember reading in Sep. 2017 that

[Anonymous Coward]

Ms. Lawrence made the outlandish statement that the hurricanes that have victimized hundreds of thousands of Americans are punishment for America’s election of Donald Trump as President. I wonder what she thinks of natural disasters today?

Most of California is a desert because SCIENCE

[Anonymous Coward]

Webster Definition of desert
1 a : arid land with usually sparse vegetation; especially : such land having a very warm climate and receiving less than 25 centimeters (10 inches) of sporadic rainfall annually
2 : a desolate or forbidding area

So why should harsh, inhospitable conditions in California and the surrounding are surprise anyone ?

Re:Most of California is a desert because SCIENCE

[PPH]

So why should harsh, inhospitable conditions in California and the surrounding are surprise anyone ?

Because the real estate sales people said that this was such a nice and hip place to live.

Re:Most of California is a desert because SCIENCE

[Rakarra]

It's a semi-arid Mediterranean climate, which is technically different from "desert."

Re:Most of California is a desert because SCIENCE

[Anonymous Coward]

Um. most of California is not a desert. southern california is dry and has a desert, most of the rest of california are plains, coasts and forest. Try looking at a map sometime.

Re:Most of California is a desert because SCIENCE

[Ex-MislTech]

They have been funneling water from other states for decades, and pumping the ground
water to depletion in some areas to green the area so it has given a false sense of environment to some.

Trump...

[mi]

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

Re:Trump...

[R3d M3rcury]

You could say the opposite about that Hurricane that hit Florida. It swept around the back end Florida, missing the "blue" areas and hitting the "red" areas.

Re:Trump...

[mi]

You could say the opposite

Of course, you could. Which is why the mature religions insist on the Deity's ways not only being unknown, but also unknowable.

Meanwhile in Murdoch Land

[Anonymous Coward]

He makes a claim of no sign of man-accelerated climate change while his LA home burns to the ground. And the reason his shit is gone? Man interfering with nature, stopping small brush fires that would have consumed the fuel that is now lit up brighter than a car dealership at night.

Re:Meanwhile in Murdoch Land

[Ex-MislTech]

If he had built his house out of Adobe it would be about as flammable as an Adobe oven.

there's that "great CA weather" again

[cascadingstylesheet]

Me, I find a use now and then for water falling from the sky.

"air moving at freeway speeds"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not LA freeway speeds.

Amirite?

Re:"air moving at freeway speeds"?

[Bryansix]

Well not the 405 at least. Especially now since its closed due to the fires.

Arson

[DatbeDank]

There was also another fire recently east of Burbank threatening wealthy home owners.

It seems too coincidental that another fire just happened to appear in another very wealthy neighborhood during one of the windiest days this year.

Re: Arson

[Khyber]

All it takes is a careless dipshit flicking a cigarette butt out the window. Oh but you didnt pay attention to the 241 toll road fire a couple months back, did you?

Refrain from speaking until you actually have a clue.

Re: Arson

[Anonymous Coward]

Refrain from speaking until you actually have a clue.

Rustled jimmies over there huh?

Who wrote the summary for this story?

[blind biker]

It's surprisingly competent and literate, especially for Slashdot.

Re: Who wrote the summary for this story?

[Khyber]

It is not competently written. A quick search on unfamiliar terms in the summary alone proves it because they are incorrectly used. Katabatic winds are cold, not warm, for fuck's sake.

Re: Who wrote the summary for this story?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Katabatic" just means descending, they aren't necessarily cold.

From Wikipedia: " Examples of true katabatic winds include the bora (or bura) in the Adriatic, the Bohemian Wind or Böhmwind in the Ore Mountains, the Santa Ana in southern California, ..." (emphasis added).

Dunning-Kruger much?

Re: Who wrote the summary for this story?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Katabatic" just means descending, they aren't necessarily cold.

From Wikipedia: " Examples of true katabatic winds include the bora (or bura) in the Adriatic, the Bohemian Wind or Böhmwind in the Ore Mountains, the Santa Ana in southern California, ..." (emphasis added).

Dunning-Kruger much?

Not true katabatic. Maybe pseudo-katabatic, faux-katabatic, semi-katabatic.

Calling Santa Ana 'Katabatic' is another display of American exceptionalism.

Come Back to Michigan

[Anonymous Coward]

2017

Texas and Florida - Hurricanes
Oregon and California - Forest Fires

That's what you get for leaving Michigan!

Kill All Humans

[pipingguy]

"Before humans, wildfires happened maybe once or twice a century"

Really?

Brandolini's Law: The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

Same Thing as Every California Wildfire

[eepok]

Every big stretch of wildfires are caused by the same thing:

1. High winds
2. Low humidity
3. Unmanaged brush
4. Either a lightning storm or (more likely) some human doing something stupid (camp/bonfire, trash burning, arson, cigarette, etc.)

This year was particularly bad for both Northern and Southern California because this past winter's rain was so significant that it almost completely erased the multi-year drought. That means lots and lots of greenery growing in the spring and waiting to burn throughout the summer and fall.

Left out the other stuff.

[gurps_npc]

1) We have been ignoring the fire risk for a long time. Specifically we have stopped all small fires before they get anywhere, which means there are a lot fuel wood stocked up. The smarter thing to do is to let small fires become controlled medium sized fires during the WET season, rather than the dry season when they become huge.

2) We have been putting houses in stupid locations and not requiring appropriate fire prevention measures. There is nothing wrong with building a house in the middle of fire zones. But make it a bunker out of concrete. Yes, it won't look the same as a normal house, so freaking what? A good architect can make a concrete, fire-proof home still look good. Yes it costs more. But less than double, which is what most people will pay.

3) Oh yeah, and stop counting fire smoke from intentionally set preventative fires as 'pollution' while saying that smoke from natural forest fires doesn't count because it isn't man made.

Re: Left out the other stuff.

[Miamicanes]

If the current fires encountered a large expanse of concrete devoid of anything directly combustible, how wide would it have to be to actually stop the fire's spread?

As I understand it, once uncontrolled outdoor fires reach a certain size, they act kind of like weak tornadoes that lift flaming objects high into the air & hurl them out to areas that might be several thousand feet away (enabling the fire to jump over thing like freeways, canals, etc).

If a house in the middle of an affected neighborhood had reinforced concrete walls & roof, plus Miami-grade impact-glass windows, would the heat of the fire as it burned down the neighbors' houses cause the concrete house's interior to combust anyway (like food debris in a self-cleaning oven)? Would ICF construction plus roll-down steel shutters keep the interior cooler, or would the intense heat just cause the ICF styrofoam itself to melt or combust?

I know that conventional wisdom is that individual homeowners are helpless against a fire, but I remember reading about one guy in California a few years ago who put sprinklers on his roof & surrounding yard, connected them to the faucet, and left it running when he evacuated. When he got home, his home had major "baking" damage... but his neighbors' homes were literally burned down to the scorched earth. I think some local official later decided to be a dick & fined him $10,000 for violating water-conservation rules to discourage others from trying to do it in the future.

Re: Left out the other stuff.

[Anonymous Coward]

based on building code provisions, no a concrete house should be fine due to thermal dampening and heat sinking into the ground, so long as the construction adheres to code, non-combustible construction yadda yadda yadda, there's are no construction materials these days with a low combustion or high spread flaming

Re: Left out the other stuff.

[dgatwood]

If a house in the middle of an affected neighborhood had reinforced concrete walls & roof, plus Miami-grade impact-glass windows, would the heat of the fire as it burned down the neighbors' houses cause the concrete house's interior to combust anyway (like food debris in a self-cleaning oven)? Would ICF construction plus roll-down steel shutters keep the interior cooler, or would the intense heat just cause the ICF styrofoam itself to melt or combust?

That depends on how thick the material is and how far the next house is from you. The more important difference is that a house built with a non-combustible exterior will not randomly catch on fire from embers flying from far away, thus significantly reducing the risk of causing the neighbors' houses to catch fire in the first place.

What remains is for someone to analyze the data about which houses burned and which ones didn't, and verify that the building code is working as intended. If any homes built in the past ten years burned, we have a problem.

Re:Left out the other stuff.

[Ichijo]

There is nothing wrong with building a house in the middle of fire zones. But make it a bunker out of concrete.

It doesn't need to be concrete to be fire resistant. I lived in a new subdivision of wood-framed homes with clay tile roofs and ember-resistant vents and fire sprinklers and so on when a wildfire burned its way through in 2007. Not a single structure in my neighborhood burned down, but dozens in older neighborhoods down the road did.

Re: Left out the other stuff.

[Anonymous Coward]

If the current fires encountered a large expanse of concrete devoid of anything directly combustible, how wide would it have to be to actually stop the fire's spread?

Embers can fly for long distances if the wind conditions are right. There are plenty of well documented accounts of embers flying half a mile to a mile and igniting fires, and I have heard accounts of embers flying 6-8 miles and doing the same (though this seems much less common).

Re: Left out the other stuff.

[Ex-MislTech]

shingles made with oil based products, house painted with oil based products.

House made of dried firewood.

Meanwhile Adobe Ovens do not burn.

Wet winter + invasive grasses = more fuel

[toejam13]

California had a wet winter this year, with some parts receiving near record amounts of precipitation. That contributed to a very green spring, which inevitably leads to a fierce wildfire season. As to the degree that climate change contributed to it is debatable.

California is also suffering from the spread of invasive, highly flammable non-native grasses. These grasses are often the first to recover after a burn, so less flammable native plants get pushed out. This is contributing to more frequent, more intense wildfires.
Add in increased development in remote areas and you get a one-two-three punch of destructive wildfires.

Awesome response

[Okian Warrior]

Awesome response. Please keep reposting, whoever you are.

Re:Awesome response

[Anonymous Coward]

Awesome response. Please keep reposting, whoever you are.

Thank you. As with my other reply after this, I do regret my hostile tone, especially at the end. I had grown so accustomed to the numbered masses of Slashdot responding to any post that contradicts their assumptions with as much hostility as the audience at the end of an association football (soccer) game.

I intend to keep posting, but I will never register. I've seen what happens when someone provides a useful post, but had made a comment people didn't agree with an hour earlier in another discussion thread.

Posting from nearish the Thomas fire

[NecroPuppy]

I live and work near it. Well, for certain values of near.

I live 5 miles from it, and work about 10 miles from it.

So far, at least three coworkers that I know (and probably a few more that I don't know) have lost houses to it.

Air quality is currently at about .75 LB (that is, 3/4 of Long Beach, where every day is a pack of filterless Lucky Strike 100s).

Re:Posting from nearish the Thomas fire

[Pfhorrest]

Hello neighbor. I live in Ojai and am currently evacuated to Oxnard. News from my neighbors who stayed despite evacuation is that (contrary to woefully out-of-date online maps) the bulk of the fire has blown past Ojai now and is headed west toward Carpinteria and the mountains north of it.

Hope your home is safe, and my condolences to your coworkers that lost theirs. I don't know what I would do if it had hit mine.

Maybe it'll clear out their HIV

[Anonymous Coward]

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180SB239 This way people don't think it's just hateful bullshit, just like their entire state.

Sounds like hubris

[Anonymous Coward]

Is finally catching up with CA.

No Ad hominen attack

[rsilvergun]

but I've heard from more than one place that California hasn't been keeping up with their maintenance. People know the droughts are a problem, they just weren't doing anything about it (controlled burns). Nobody wants to spend the money doing it until a few towns burn down.

I live in Az, and I'll tell you this much: We get fires all the time. Ever time it happens we bail out the rich guys who's mansions burn. The trailer parks? Not so much. It's been a bone of contention around here for decades but our local politics are hopelessly corrupt.

I think the problem

[rsilvergun]

is you're skipping this step:

The solution was to either clear the brush manually

From what I can tell the funding to do that got slashed. Budget Cuts. The funding to put out the small fires did not get slashed. And eventually you get one of these disasters. As for building houses, that's life. People need a place to live and work.

Pozzolanic outer and inner layers...

[Anonymous Coward]

With a sandwich of non-structural foamed concrete in-between.

The outer layer takes the brunt of the fire, the insulating layer keeps the interior area at its original temperature until/unless the foamed concrete burns through, and the inner layer provides a final layer of protection.

Done properly this will ensure the structure survives the fire, with at most the aboveground outer surface and part of the foamed concrete layer needing replacement. Expensive and would require manual demolition work to clear out for repair, but still cheaper than a whole new house, especially when LA area permitting is considered.

Depending on just how wealthy the people are, they could also build a 'safe room' as a bunker under the house, and given filtration+an air stack, be able to weather out the fire underground until the immediate area had burned down, then either return to their house, or climb out through the rubble as necessary. I mean hey, if the world is ending soon becuz liberals/conservatives, whichever kind of rich assholes they are, they should be prepping now so they have a hidey hole prepared for when things get bad, amirite?

If you wonder what it looks like

[WillAffleckUW]

They film Westworld there.

It's actually the way I get to Santa Barbara, normally. I-5 is too slow and 101 is just boring scenic coastline.

Ventura

[sexconker]

The big fire is in Ventura County, not Los Angeles and not Los Angeles County. There are other fires in Los Angeles County, but the biggin is north west of LA County.

Next you'll tell me JPL is in Pasadena or that the Statue of Liberty is in New York. (And then you'll fucking redraw the map to make it so.)

Re:Ventura

[kaatochacha]

of course jpl is in Pasadena! I drive right by it on my way to Pasadena! ;)

Sooooooooo, about all those (probably) Californian

[Anonymous Coward]

Sooooooooo, about all those (probably) Californian liberals who laughed at the top of their lungs about the hurricanes ripping apart conservatives in parts of Texas earlier this year...

Thoughts?

cut the hysteria, not related to "climate change"

[iggymanz]

The wildfires in the area are a recurring natural phenomenon, what is *abnormal* is humans developing the area and trying to prevent the normal and expect recurring wildfires.

And of course the number has been declining for decades:
http://www.ocregister.com/2017...

Fix it already

[Anonymous Coward]

OP is dumb, rambling on about climate death. The real problem is the agricultural incentives to grow pricey crops that rely on an abundance of water and the subsequent denial of water to said crops. When you go out into Arizona and pay 15$ a bottle of water its robbery. We pay taxes so we can have plumbing and roads so why is this shit happening? And all those Tourist traps with their grease fryers dumping into the sewer are causing damage in the millions while spewing sewage into waterways.

Here in aus..

[philmarcracken]

..we have all the conditions for some terrible bushfires. But where I live in WA we do regular burnoffs during the wet season. In the east they're filled with hippie tree hugging fuckwits that don't like their precious environment getting destroyed by burnoffs, so they let the fuel build up around them, then promptly lose their houses.

I'm guessing theres a similar amount of bleeding hearts for small animals in southern california. Let them burn.

Re:Here in aus..

[kaatochacha]

It's also a population issue: Entire population of Australia: 24 million. Entire population of California: 39 million.

Why is this hard to understand?

[kaatochacha]

I grew up in Southern California. It's a desert with brush growing when rain allows it. Increased population pushing out into the desert means more chances of accidental fire. Add in a windy season, as we've always had, and it burns. It burns every year. Always. this year is worse because of the winds sticking around longer, but yeah: wind=fire for the most part in California.

Wrath of GOD! Sodom deserves it

[Anonymous Coward]

Sodom is going to hell via a firestorm from the wrath of GOD!

Are the fires Australia's fault?

[msevior]

I've occasionally visited California and I was struck by the numbers of eucalyptus (gum) trees in the area. Gum tree have dominated Australian forests by their propensity to survive droughts, burn like crazy and then regrow faster than other species. Fire is their weapon for world domination. So I'm wondering how many of these fires are actually from burning gum trees? Is there are speculation about this? ie Is it actually the fault of introduced tree species?

What I don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

What I don't understand is why they don't just light a fire in front of it like they do on the grass plains in Africa, its a very effective method of putting out the fire.

To stop the fires...

[Anonymous Coward]

reinstate the will of the voters: reinstate PROP8 and arrest the soft headed judges...

It's not climate change - it's the buildup of fuel

[atcclears]

Humans have gotten good at fire suppression, which results in a dangerous buildup of natural fuels. The same thing happened in British Columbia this Summer. A researcher from the University of Victoria estimated that there were naturally-occurring forest fires in areas of British Columbia approximately every 20-30 years. So given that large fires were suppressed and there was a huge buildup of fuels, then *boom*.