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it is fire season again in California and again, returning like the sunrise, politicians are blaming climate change for the scale of the fires. A representative example comes from Senator Bernie Sanders’ X account, where he announces:
“…Eight months since there has been no rain in this area.
The scale of damage and losses is unimaginable.
Climate change is real, not a “hoax”.
Donald Trump must treat this as an existential crisis.”
Of course, the good senator from Vermont lives in a place with hot, humid summers and cold winters, with peak rainfall in June and July.
SECOND LAS ANGELES AREA FIRE BREAKS OUT AS FIREFIGHTERS BATTLE RAGING PALISADA INFERNO
Southern California it has a very different climate than Vermont – that’s why Americans moved to California en masse until the last years of the misrule of the left. The climate of Los Angeles is described as “Mediterranean”, meaning it has low humidity and little precipitation, with about 80% of the precipitation usually falling during the four or five months of winter.
When Senator Sanders says that the region has been without rainfall for eight months, my response, as a former resident of Southern California for 31 years before moving to Texas, is, well? That’s why people live there – endless sunny days.
Do Sanders and countless other politicians who decry “climate change” have a valid point? Simply, no.
In 1834, 19-year-old Richard Henry Dana Jr. he boarded a ship in Boston and sailed to California. Dana Point in Southern California is its namesake. Upon his return, he poured his diary into the book “Two years before the mast”. In it he describes the area that is now burning:
“The only thing that detracts from its beauty is that the hills have no large trees, they were all burnt by the great fire which took them ten years before, and have not yet grown again. The fire was described to me by a resident, as a very terrible and magnificent sight. The air in the whole valley was so hot that people were forced to leave the city and occupy their quarters on the beach for several days.”
Was this “terrible and glorious” fire that happened around 1823 driven by “climate change” or something else?
I retired from the California National Guard in 2007. The Guard jokes that the four seasons in California are “flood, fire, earthquake and riot.”
The coastal hills of Southern California are naturally covered in chaparral. These plants have adapted to fire, but due to human activity – starting fires, power line failures, burning cars and the like – fires are happening more often. Pine trees cover most of the foothills at higher elevations. They also become vulnerable to fire before the onset of the rainy season.
In both cases, property owners are advised—often ordered—to clear a 100-foot defensible perimeter around their homes and commercial properties. It is not enough to do. Power companies, under enormous financial pressure to produce more wind and solar power, are also neglecting costly maintenance of transmission lines.
And environmental lawsuits and tightening air pollution rules too often prevent or delay the prescribed burns needed to protect people.
In the north, where the forests are dense, the problem is different. There, federal and state regulations have ravaged the timber industry since the 1990s. But every year, whether harvested or not, the pines grow. Without active management, especially on federal lands that make up vast swaths of the state, trees grow too close together—often up to 30 times the density needed for a healthy forest. This makes the trees much more vulnerable to California’s typically long dry spells.
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It should be noted that prior to the California Gold Rush of 1849, local residents routinely set fires to encourage the growth of grasslands, which produced more food than forests. George E. Gruell, a veteran wildlife biologist, had the idea to compare a large photographic record taken at the beginning of the mass migration to California after the discovery of gold and discovered that California looked much different than it does today. Photo after photo revealed mounds of grass, a few solitary live oaks, and isolated stands of pine, often following stream beds. More than 100 years later, after logging and forest management gave way to fire suppression and the cessation of logging, the same tree-choked vistas were seen.
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But, of course, it’s all “climate change” – that magic spell that absolves politicians of blame for their policies while providing a convenient excuse for imposing centralized government control of energy, and therefore life itself.
However, there is a deeper irony in this, and it is this: even if climate change is to blame for California wildfires the solution is the same: reduce the available fuel that ignites forest fires, clear brush around houses and maintain power lines or, when possible in urban areas, bury them.
