A new call to action by ecologists uses a numerical model to note that wildfires in places like California have been made worse by humans.
That doesn’t mean it is human emissions. For decades, California government has banned logging. They let people move to risky fire areas and then not pay for any mitigation or firebreaks. State and local governments refuse to allow dead brush to be cleared because it impacts the environment.
In the recent Los Angeles wildfires, the Getty Estate escaped unharmed. Since they are not controlled by the government, they had cleared dead trees and brush. The same thing natives knew to do for centuries before the Spanish arrived. People who never learned to read or write 2,000 years after much of the world knew more about how to prevent the spread of wildfires than modern California government.(1)
The issue is not air conditioners. The real pollution of the United States, PM10, actual smog, is negligible compared to 30 years ago. It is so trivial that air activists manufactured PM2.5 as their next level of concern. Virtual particulate matter, 25% of the size of actual smog that kills. The man-made problem is policy. Rather than listening to scientists they listen to activists and prevent things that prevent wildfires from spreading. Water helps prevent fires from spreading yet despite a public referendum demanding more water storage 11 years ago, the current state government keeps it in a review process.
Numerical models that correlate CO2 to greater wildfires or, even more bizarrely, fewer trees to more fires, feed the bias of journalists and activists, but those claims are the ‘vaccines cause autism’ studies of the environment. The only people who believe them make them or want to believe them.
Yet their call to actions aren’t wrong. They just can’t happen in the US state they say is being impacted by climate change. They advocate for managed burning and fire breaks in risky areas.
All things governments in California think are the problem rather than the solution.
NOTES:
(1) Instead, they invoke climate change and demonize “fossil” fuels. To such an extent that they are putting citizens in jeopardy. After yet another round of blame, another refinery wanted to leave the state and Governor Newsom will have to buy it from them to keep it open and avoid the country’s highest gasoline prices from going even higher.