Fire and ice and Queens justice
I'm skeptical.
The word “but” does more work than the entire Italian government in August. But I’m plunging in cold—actually I wasn’t going to publish anything today because I went to work very early to beat the snow in Atlanta. But we closed and I was home with an ice-encrusted Subaru melting in the garage by 10:30am, as the neighborhood kids got their sledding and snowball fights on. That’s three buts in a row (see what I did there?).
The AP did a big “but” on the Los Angeles fires, and the chill that brought a rare snowstorm to Atlanta. There’s no link between a giant black hole at the center of the Milky Way and human-caused climate change, but somehow reporters would find it if the prospect of a black hole consuming the entire earth was sufficiently newsworthy. Consulting their contacts app for quotes, nobody with the title “climate scientist” would step up to say the fires in L.A. were the fault of greenhouse gases. But—there’s that word again—they kept looking until they found the most tenuous link.
There’s no sure link between Santa Ana winds — gusts from the east that come down the mountains, gain speed and hit the coast — to human-caused climate change, said Daniel Swain, climate scientist for the California Institute for Water Resources.
But a condition that led to those winds is a big plunge in the temperature of the jet stream — the river of air that moves weather systems across the globe — which helped bring cold air to the eastern two-thirds of the nation, said University of California Merced climate and fire scientist John Abatzoglou. Other scientists have preliminarily linked those jet stream plunges to climate change.
If we follow the logic: climate change has incrementally increased global temperatures, leading to more events like a polar vortex, which really isn’t a “polar vortex” depending on which scientist you call that day. And there’s a “climate change signal” in that. People really have to pay attention.
This is how science works, when all the hypotheses to test human-caused climate change result in impossible to test observable conditions, but all observable conditions can be made to support the “cause” argument for them. It’s equally impossible to disprove hypotheses that early Santa Ana winds and dry air in California were caused by other factors—or not one primary factor at all. As long as you stick a big “but” in there you can claim whatever you want.
I’m not saying that human-caused climate change is not a factor in the weather patterns that have brought simultaneous calamities to both coasts in the form of fire on one and ice on the other. But—there’s that word again—nobody is saying climate change is “the” factor or even a first cause factor in the fires.
Everyone seems to agree that speed of the fires in spread and the intensity of the fires is the biggest problem. Accuweather initially said the L.A. fire damage could reach $57 billion—no, it’s now $150 billion. Such losses are basically “uninsurable” to all but those who can afford to buy “catastrophe bonds.” The rest of the folks who have seen their property go up in flames have to rely on simple homeowners policies. As insurers pull out of the California market, the state’s insurer of last resort, the FAIR plan, has taken on more and more risk, which puts it in the position of potentially becoming insolvent.
This is a similar problem that Florida and Texas private insurers and regulators have dealing with hurricanes. Except wildfires are more difficult to model and predict, and their losses tend to be lower than hurricanes. In the case of the current raging L.A. fires, that may not be true this year.
The difference is, of course, that nothing humans do can stop a hurricane (even dropping a nuke on it). All we can do is prepare and build structures that can withstand the features of that severe weather: catastrophic winds, storm surge and flooding. When a storm like Helene stalls on top of the Appalachian chain, there’s basically no plan that can save places like Asheville, North Carolina.
With fires, however, people can definitely do things to mitigate disasters. Wildfires can be caused by human activity, like failing to put out a campfire, or a thoughtless cigarette butt, or a pyrotechnic-laden gender reveal party gone wrong, as happened in 2021 to spark the El Dorado wildfire. In the Eaton fire, which has consumed well over 10,000 acres north of Pasadena, including a synagogue (pictured above), and threatens broadcast towers on Mount Wilson, insurers are eyeing utility Edison International.
Jan 10 (Reuters) - Southern California Edison (SCE) said it had received notices from insurance companies to preserve evidence related to the Eaton Fire that is still burning in Los Angeles, but said no fire agencies have pointed the utility's connection to the fire.
The group, a unit of U.S. utility Edison International (EIX.N), opens new tab, said on Thursday its filing to regulators was triggered by online publications that "seemingly suggest" the group's equipment may have been associated with the fire's ignition.
Once ignited, a wildfire spreads more easily when there’s dry conditions on the ground. It seems unsaid but just assumed that climate change is the cause of dry conditions. Many in the media and scientists who are totally invested in the climate change link to wildfires (which, remember, scientists won’t say exists, per se, but imply that there’s something there) are quick to blame “disinformation” when someone like Elon Musk brings up water management and environmental regulations for the state of California as a contributing factor in failing to contain the fires.
Others are saying that this will be Trump’s problem if he decides to cut disaster aid to the fifth largest economy in the world (California, as a state). “You’ll never have enough water to put out a Santa Ana fire,” they quoted a wildfire blogger and mapper. I suppose, that’s true, but it’s not true that it’s not possible to get enough water to protect life and property, or to remove dry vegetation (through controlled burns) in a way that fire breaks and other traditional forest fire fighting tools are more effective. But, no, it’s Trump (who isn’t even president yet).
Some of the issues with clearing underbrush and banning controlled burns are real. See, Fox Business has their own contacts app to get quotes.
Joe Reddan, a registered professional forester in California and retired forester in the U.S. Forest Service, told FOX Business that both federal and state policies can create "roadblocks" to property owners
"The California Environmental Quality Act is a quite laborious process to get through to fruition where you can actually put treatments on the ground," Reddan said. "On the federal side of things, there is the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the requirements that go with that including the federal Endangered Species Act, the Archaeological Resources Protection and myriad other federal laws and procedural laws that you have to work your way through."
The federal government—the USDA—published a scientific paper in 2022 dealing with the vulnerability of California water utilities to wildfires. I know this because that’s the title of the paper. The researchers studied wildfires from 1878 to 2020, and used statistical analysis (lots of math) to reach some conclusions. They do blame “a combination of high temperatures and drought due to the increasing influence of climate change…” referencing another study without explicitly saying what the influence is. They do, however point to the importance of knowing where fires are more likely to be damaging, so they can be more effectively managed.
The truth is that we don’t know everything, and the deflections of news and science writers resorting to “conservatives blame” and “if Trump” just make me more skeptical of the accepted, but not explicitly proven, narrative. In my mind, it’s just as important to maintain good quality water sources, elimination of dry underbrush, mandating clear areas and setbacks around power lines and densely populated areas, and enough full-time staff in the fire department to deal with a known peril: wildfires in southern California.
If Florida had simply done nothing after the immensely damaging hurricane season in 2016, that would be unconscionable. And if Georgia had not invested in snow removal, sand, salt, and brine equipment after “Snowmageddon” in 2014, it would be gross incompetence. If Texas and ERCOT had done nothing after Winter Storm Uri in 2021, that would be cruel and corrupt. But California doubled down on their environmental and water management policies, while knowing these policies would affect their ability to control wildfires.
Sure, all of those events—fire and ice—are somehow blamed on human-caused climate change. In a vague way, yes, everything about our climate is somehow linked to climate change. I am not a climate denier. But I also believe that you can’t outsource the proximate cause of every disaster to climate change, clap your hands, and blame Donald Trump or Elon Musk for not doing the same. The cause of the Texas freeze was Texas’ fault, for having no interconnects from outside grids, and no winterization regulations for power plants, and the Texas legislature acted to fix it. The cause of “Snowmageddon” was GDOT’s fault, for being caught off guard with no real ability to do what the fine folks in Chicago, Minneapolis, and small towns in New Hampshire do every winter: plow the friggin’ roads and put salt down.
I got home safely today in about three inches of snow—a laughable amount up north, where I am from. It was not fun driving, because nobody expects Georgia to have the same snow removal capability as Boston, but it wasn’t a catastrophe either. The biggest threat, honestly, was from other drivers who knew not how to drive in the snow, and either drove like maniacs or grandmas. They should have stayed home. If one of those drivers had hit me, I could have told the insurance company it was because of climate change.
A scarlet letter
Donald Trump received a scarlet letter as the sentence for his 34 felonies. The penalty is far worse than jail time for someone who lives for drama. Judge Juan Merchan figured out long ago what he hated about Donald Trump, a fellow Queens kid, and knew what would be most damaging to his target’s ego. Just go, be a felon in the White House. Your case is disposed. Sure, appeal it, try to get it overturned. It’s unlikely any court will do that right now. There’s no sentence that can be overturned because the sentence is simply that Trump is guilty and has a felony record.
Perhaps that was less than Merchan wanted—I’m pretty certain he’d love to see Trump behind bars. But we all knew that was not going to happen, and that most of the country had seen the hush money case for what it was: a stretch by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg. It made for decent television, the highlights at least, but the whole thing was a setup from the get-go, when the feds added an extra charge to a list of tax violations they had on Michael Cohen.
But I bet being sentenced to nothing but a scarlet letter hurt Trump’s feelings, and bought Merchan space in the 47th president’s head rent-free. It’s the only rent-free space in all of Trump world. I don’t know how the future president (in 10 days) will get his revenge on Merchan for tattooing Trump with a scarlet “F” right in the cerebellum, but I imagine the judge had figured that into his calculations. To Merchan, it must have been worth it.
Queens has its own kind of justice, and it has been served bright red like the sauce at Louie’s pizza on Baxter Street.
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Normally Santa Ana winds blow West from Las Vegas, whereas this wind storm is blowing from the North. The wind speeds of a normal Santa Ana are 30-50MPH, with gusts around 70MPH - this wind storm is hitting 100MPH.
It's also not a forest, but scrublands - and scrublands are not like pine forests where prescribed burns are the norm. Pine forests, like up in Northern California or the mountains, regenerate after 10-30 years; scrublands can take 50-100 years, and in that time may end up being replaced by invasive grasses - which are even more prone to fire. Scrub also stabilizes the ground, where grasses do not: so burning scrublands has the wonderful side-effect of increasing landslides.
Important to note is that it is not state law that limits prescribed burns: it's NEPA, and getting a permit takes over 5 years.
It's also not about state water policy, as the reservoirs are at decent levels. There's something to be said about LA's water policy in that the city was designed to evacuate rainfall to the ocean as fast as possible via the LA River - but that's the result of policy set 80 years ago, to avoid flooding.
And just to address other aspects: no, the Klamath dam removal has nothing to do with this, because that river is near Oregon and doesn't flow down to SF or the Central Valley; and it's not about the Delta Smelt, though it should be noted there that it's protected by the federal Endangered Species Act.
What will likely not be addressed is that really - no one should have built in or near those scrublands in the first place, which is a failure of housing and land use policy dating back many decades. By disallowing density in our city centers we instead built sprawl, and that will continue to cause issues as wildfires occur.
Relevant to insurance: it was a 1988 ballot proposal that restricts insurance companies from raising rates to relevant risks. We would need to remove that, which I think would take another ballot measure.
And because few seem to know this: only 3% of forests are managed by California. The feds have 57%, and private landowners 40%.
Just my 2 cents: there is no such thing as climate change.