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Los Angeles burns: What you need to know | This is terrible. This is climate change.
(www.theclimatebrink.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2025
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Site popped a fucking modal window in my face when I tried to read the article so I didn't read it all.
But the fires were caused by unusually long draught and poor funding of public services (this funding was inhibited by republicans). Yes, climate change is important, yes it's getting worse, yes it contributed to these fires, but to use these fires as a debate point in the realm of climate change is cheap and stupid. Just because they're adjacent to each other doesn't mean they're the same thing. Authors need to be better than that. We're not stupid and we're not going to read their literature if they continue to treat us like we are.
Last year and the year before there were extreme fires all over North America. How many do we have to see before it becomes reasonable to refer to them in a debate about climate change? The way a general trend manifests is in particular events. There isn't really a way to draw attention to it except by referring to those particular events.
... but if they're caused by something else then? Not everything is due to climate change. In this case there's plenty of science done on how our forest management causes these extreme fires.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-46702-0
I think the point a lot of people are missing is that we know forest management as it was done in the past 20/30-100 years ago was a bad idea. Forest management practices have changed significantly: prescribed burns, letting fires burn naturally (when possible), and other mitigation techniques are a part of the practice on a much wider scale now.
You can scream up and down that they should have done more to clear out the dry vegetation, but it's just not that simple. Remember, we are currently right in the middle of what is the prescribed burn season! You can't just do prescribed burns willy nilly. You need the right conditions of wind, cool weather, etc. If you never get that weather, you can't do them.
These aren't your typical forests like in NoCal, Oregon, Washington and BC. The area is pretty much desert with dry grasses and low brush. AKA, tinder. Some of the practices that caused forests to be susceptible to fires aren't even a factor here, e.g. clear cutting.
Dead vegetation needs to be removed with care and takes a lot of time. You have to be careful not to destroy the habitats of wildlife. We're not talking about a small area here. You can't just bulldoze all of southern California.
So, continuing to say "it's because of bad forest management" is a bit disingenuous. If you look at this particular case, as pointed out in the posted article (and backed up by what you posted), a confluence of factors are creating the current situation: particularly high winds, particularly dry vegetation, and particularly abundant vegetation (due to particularly high amounts of rain early in 2024). All of which are happening more and more often due to the climate changing. This doesn't give a lot of time to do wildfire mitigation, no matter how much you want to spend on it.