Slashdot Mirror
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.
"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.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Nobody keeps you from giving us a better explanation for the increasing number and severity of natural disasters.
We're waiting.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
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.
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.
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?!? ;)
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
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.
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.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.