Why do Floridians keep rebuilding in the wake of endless hurricanes? Why do folks live in Tornado Alley? Why do Dakotans endure one tragic winter after another? Why did New Orleans build back after yhe flooding?
Man seeks to tame nature - to bend it to our will. Plus we'll take "build now, great views now" over "possible disaster later ".
One could argue that nowhere is completely risk free, but it seems like the homing instinct (Plus the cultural instinct to build out of wood) is strong.
It might be time to consider alternate building methods suitable for the risk of the area.
I truly feel bad for the people who lost their homes, it's awful. But it shouldn't be the tax payer who picks up the tab. If insurance is so prohibitively expensive you can no longer afford to build there, then so be it - you can't afford to live there after all.
Rebuilding is exactly what paying taxes are for. We've been giving too much of it to corporate interests, why not give some to the citizens? What are we, nodes of the Matrix, supplying the machine with labor for nothing but an illusion of a decent life?
Keep in mind that for many expensive homes, much of the expense is in the location, and not the home itself. It doesn't cost the market value of the house to rebuild it on the same spot. It's also not free, and in mass disasters it can be more because of shortages, but it's still less, often significantly so, than the market value.
Part of that is easily attributable to depreciation of the structure but another large portion is the large increase in skilled labor costs in the last couple years.
That’s fine. If it’s not possible to buy insurance for a particular house at a price that you can afford, don’t live in that house. The state’s other taxpayers shouldn’t be assuming your financial risk.
Say the city has invested in infrastructure, has a thriving industry etc. That typically isn't "portable". To get a return on that investment they need residents.
The residents naturally want things like insurance etc. It's high though - a barrier to entry. The city runs the numbers and decides that a resident is a net win even after insurance subsidies are applied.
Now granted, the calculation isn't that simple, and usually these things come with much hand-waving. But its not as simple as "other tax payers assuming the risk".
It seems like sunk cost fallacy is at play here. When is it time to stop throwing good money after bad, and start thinking about a managed retreat?
Private insurance doesn't have the same upside
I don't know if I agree with this but am answering your question fwiw
That said, there are some cities that have a local income tax so, in theory, one can imagine a scenario where, as a development project, some local government convinces high-income artisans or work-from-home workers to move into extremely cheap housing by subsidizing their disaster (flood, fire, earthquake, etc.) insurance. This is again likely a paradox: if high-income people wanted to live there, the housing wouldn't be cheap anymore.
Not enough of a worst-case cost to cause a run on the banks (or a collapse in property prices), but enough to get people to start using the brains they were born with.
But I expect there comes a point where insurance companies say "enough is enough".
Perhaps federal and state money will start to pay out, but the land gets bought as well.
For example, I don't pay for collision protection on my car. I can afford losing the car. Over time I've saved far more in insurance premiums than the cost replacing the car.
The same goes for insurance for appliances, etc.
If everyone who said screw it got unlucky the way the internet likes to make it seem then insurance as a business model simply wouldn't work at the price points it does.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/charlie-munger-said-warren-bu...
I pay about 1 000 NOK (about 100 USD) per month to ensure my 2015 Tesla S here in Norway. It would take over forty years to get back the purchase price by not insuring it all and more like eighty if I were to merely drop the collision protection. And that's not even considering that they have paid out about 60 kNOK (6 kUSD) in claims for collision damage so far for this car (no other vehicle involved).
I lease EVs with the federal tax credit and invest what I’d otherwise spend buying cash. You need to look very closely at the numbers for your own situations but it’s been a “better” deal than buying cash the past few cycles.
Sure, you could also just buy a decade-old Honda used, but then you get to drive a used decade-old Honda. It’s like suggesting that camping is cheaper than a hotel or that luxury hotels provide no additional value beyond budget hotels.
On the other hand, used Range Rovers depreciate so drastically that you can buy one less than a decade old for under $10k, just make sure to check insurance and maintenance costs and actually have it inspected before buying. The air suspension in particular is why you see so many “dropped” examples for cheap.
This is a shockingly archaic outlook espoused by the outmoded likes of the 17th century's Francis Bacon who posited "Man, as the minister and interpreter of nature", asserting that "the secrets of nature betray themselves more readily when tormented by [science] than when left to their own course."
To tame, conquer, and torment is an abhorrently perverse attitude to hold towards the cradle of our species. It's not the dominant philosophy of humankind, only the ideology of a backwards niche minority that's had some recent success--not unheard of in nature. ;)
More common and contemporary perspectives are based in concepts of interconnectedness, innate affinity, and stewardship rather than ministration.
Funny enough it's also the only place in Europe that takes floods seriously.
I'm guessing Belgium simply because they broke the dikes during WWI to flood the land with seawater to delay the German advance.
It sure seems like the folks in Florida are rebuilding more often than most.
My family has been there since the 50s and has never had major damage to any home. There’s some work and minor damage involved with tropical storms but nothing like a full on flood or total loss of house like these fires.
It’s just not true at all to say that most of Florida is regularly majorly impacted.
There is very little substance to my comment other than to share a point of pride for the state. The GP is correct in that if you’re not as familiar with the region it’s easy to forget how massive the state is.
Similarly, tornado alley seems tremendously destructive, but the breadth of the destruction is small. The average interval between house-destroying tornadoes at any given point is hundreds if not thousands of years
When I was little and lived in Kansas, tornadoes came through the town. We huddled down in the basement. Found out later that the tornado literally lifted up and hopped over the house. A giant tree next to the driveway fell down parallel to the house and a few feet away.
A fair chunk of the town was flattened.
Any interested HNers should beware the tornado documentary YouTube rabbit hole ;)
They will absolutely rebuild. Get in now if you’ve got the cash to buy land there. It might take a decade for the EPA to clean it up like Lahaina, but they will absolutely 100% rebuild there.
Who knows? If not for those policies, Pasadena could have been built denser and Altadena could have been miles of flat natural reserve that acts as a large firebreak where firefighters can easily fight the flames before they threaten thousands of structures, with frequent prescribed burns to keep the fuel load down.
That's probably the real kind of conversation we should be having of municipalities easing housing restrictions to build denser and the state buying up large swathes of these wildland adjacent communities to create larger breaks between the hills and the houses.
Perhaps we should build different though to mitigate risk. It's not hard to build a fire-proof house. Or one that's flood resistant. Or hurricane proof...
Shouldn't this be mandated, if a "natural disaster" destroys a home, to not replace it with a similarly vulnerable structure?
There are basically no earthquakes, tornadoes, tsunamis, wildfire, etc. I would imagine a lot of places are like that.
If the AMOC flips the UK and Europe will have a completely different, far less hospitable landscape.
Meanwhile in the Med increasing temps are making extreme flash floods much more likely (Valencia, for example) and fires are becoming more common in drier areas, like Greece.
Living next to the Great Lakes also means that regardless of what happens with droughts, we have a supply of fresh water that is virtually limitless. I have to wonder whether the region will start to become more popular with climate refugees. Might Chicago become more of a destination, for example?
I feel like any natural disaster here has plenty of warning, which massively reduces the actual risk me and my family assuming I take the warning seriously. Unfortunately there is absolutely no warning for earthquakes and relatively little warning for wildfires (better than earthquakes, but still not as good as tornados or winter storms).
The reason being that you want to rely on your home after such a disaster, if you get hit.
Fires in the Mediterranean region are a serious thing. I got evacuated once from our family house once: flames 20 meters high near the house.
[edit: typos]
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/the-la...
The Inauguration Day Windstorm was one of the few times I've seen almost everything shut down.
Earthquakes - I never went through anything major, but when you get the queasy feeling in your stomach and realize that it's the building slowly swaying side to side - that can be unsettling.
The other quake occurred just after the plane I was in had taken off from SeaTac. Pilot then announced that Seattle had just experienced a minor earthquake, people were reaching for the in-seat phones to call and check on their loved ones.
1/10 Flood. 1/10 Fire. 1/10 Wind. 7/10 Air. 3/10 Heat.
Seems manageable. Of course, earthquakes are not climate-related.
Those stats are meaningless. 1/10 just means unlikely but the dice could still land that way.
Map of tornado between 1950 and 2021: https://databayou.com/states/tornadoes.html
I find Western European construction standards to be higher than American. European homes feel like they're made out of brick and stone, seem better insulated, and American homes feel like they're wood-framed with giant modular pieces of wood (at least here in the northeast).
Is Mass Timber Fire-resistant? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9Y35Zsga1Q
How to build a wood skyscraper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qry7AmdIn8
Google's first mass timber building in Sunnyvale, CA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHnR-HdvTAA
It's not your choice though, state regulations prohibit earthquake-unsafe buildings.
But having seen the pictures from social media of the torrent of embers, maybe a few more homes might have survived but probably not many (unless they concreted their gardens too).
Does anyone honestly think that debate has any actual chance of hapenning, even now? Malibu and the Pacific Palisades are some of the best real estate in the state if not the country. There’s always going to be someone willing to pay the rising cost of fire insurance and take the risk to live there. Short of the state buying out all the property owners or making that area uninsurable by CalFAIR, people are going to build. Not to mention the political connections they have.
Altadena, on the other hand, was built where and how it was built because of segregationist redlining in Pasadena and South Pasadena. It’s a historically minority neighborhood that was only built so densely with so little fire protection because they couldn’t afford it and the state never gave them much help. It looks like once again our power companies are responsible for starting a destructive conflagration because they siphoned maintenance money to shareholders and executives (many of whom probably live in Malibu or the Palisades). Any state policy that tries to solve the Malibu/Palisades problem is going to disproportionately screw these low income communities that have built out around the edges. I’m betting that entire neighborhood will sell out to real estate developers building apartment complexes that can afford more expensive fire mitigations, destroying a historical community as much as any freeway and opening the door to tenement fires.
This has all happened before and will happen again. I don’t really see a holistic solution that has any chance of passing public scrutiny and working, other than chipping away at the insurance regulator and CalFAIR, which will screw over the most vulnerable and entrench the real estate NIMBYs.
https://www.taxfairnessproject.org/map only has it for the Bay Area, but Zillow and the county tax assessor websites can show for any address — it’s public record.
More exploration can be done here https://www.officialdata.org/ca-property-tax/#34.04626347956...
It is the government that picks up the bill in real disasters I suggest everyone reads the fine print on their contracts.
This creates larger, systemic risks and is simply unfair. Someone in Montana should not have to pay to rebuild homes in California.
Montana receives way more Federal aid per capita than California. So it's fair to say that Californians shouldn't be paying for road maintenance in Montana.
Besides Montana receives tax payer money from the people living in those California mansions.
We shouldn't be back stopping the insurance costs for anyone. If they can't pay it, maybe that tells them something about the place they are choosing to live in.
Are Montana residents' taxes currently paying for rebuilding homes in California? How does that work - I actually don't know but I thought FEMA doesn't rebuilt homes?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_FAIR_Plan
However if you look at the "Key Statistics" fact sheet, you'll see that, guess what:
>The FAIR Plan’s Highest Wildfire Exposures
>This map shows the five areas with the highest wildfire exposure concentrations each in Northern and Southern California. Each quarter circle represents a 7-mile radius where risk is concentrated.
https://www.cfpnet.com/key-statistics-data/
Pacific Palisades is one of many cities where a wildfire would bankrupt the entire system, because the plan didn't actually charge people what the actual cost of replacement value of the homes is. The system apparently has about $700M in assets, and it is predicted to have over $7B in exposure right now.
I think it's pretty clear that they're going to have California tax payers bailout the system so that people living in the best real estate all of CA rebuild their homes in a place where people probably shouldn't be building in the first place, and continue to have their insurance subsidized by normal folks who could never afford to live in places that valuable.
Fascinating (and thanks for sharing all that info), but I still don't see how this money would be coming from Montana residents.
The existing precedent is the National Flood Insurance Program.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Flood_Insurance_Progr...
Is this an interesting comment to make? Yeah... the tax payers foot the bill because like we elect the representatives to maintain the government.
> Someone in Montana should not have to pay to rebuild homes in California.
Is this a joke? Should I, as a Californian, also be able to say "oh, my tax money? You damn well not send it to Montana to help subside program XYZ that doesn't help me."
CalFAIR is the state insurer of last resort but last I checked it's not subsidized. There were talks of needing a possible bailout last year, and it's going to intensify now, but it hasn't happened yet.
This is all a moot point though: you cannot force companies to offer insurance. If regulations prevent them from offering policies at a profit, they just leave. Which is exactly what is happening in California (and Florida): every company is bailing out and refusing to renew policies.
I’d really argue that for-profit insurance companies are a bad idea in general, but that’s a higher-level debate. There’s an interesting idea where governments handle all disaster-related insurance handling but are then also able to have a more comprehensive approach to management (though that’d be hard to trust in the current US political climate).
Money spent to repay loans or to make reserves are not profits.
In insurance the problem is even worse, because you can’t compute what a reasonable profit cap is. Because of tail risks, you often see insurance companies making a profit of $1b each year for 30 years, then suffering a loss of $40b. Looked at during the typical year you might conclude the profits are excessive, but over a long term it might become apparent that the average profit is actually zero or even negative.
As is often the case, more competition and better competition policy is the solution.
Insurance is an industry with great cashflow. They should be able to keep any profits they make off of investing the premiums, but not the premiums themselves. The incentives just do not line up, they siphon off the money and scream about over regulation before they need to get bailed out.
Or an insurance company that went bankrupt?
Insurance companies are already highly regulated (especially in CA). There are regulations around how much money has to be held in reserves to pay claims. There are regulations around what investments can hold reserves in.
Hell in CA, there are regulations around how premiums can actually increase and a mechanism for returning “excess premiums” back to policy holders.
In fact those regulations are one of the reasons insurers are leaving CA. They can’t increase premiums sufficiently to cover risk.
You can read all about them: https://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/130-laws-regs-hear...
Yes. There were 6 insurance companies that went bankrupt in Florida in 2022. I am surprised you didn't know insurance companies go bankrupt all the time due to mismanagement.
https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2022/11/03/with-climate-im...
Insurance should not be used as a profit source. It is antithetical to the purpose of insurance.
Regardless, the Florida examples are eligible for FIGA insurance that covers claims that insolvent insurer can’t.
1. In parts of the Pacific Palisades/Malibu, as the article points out, yes, there are firestorms that are going to happen there pretty much inevitably. But even then, if you look at some places that had both the money and motivation to really invest in fire prevention (e.g. the Getty Villa), they escaped the worst of the damage - no structures in the Getty Villa, smack dab in the middle of the Palisades, burned.
2. What happened in Altadena was entirely different. It shouldn't go unnoticed that in many pictures and videos that lots of trees are still standing unscathed while the homes are all burnt to the ground. Most of these homes went up long before adequate fire protection was deemed a necessity, and given land values there now (even with it being in the state it's in), it should be possible to rebuild in a much more fire resistant state than what existed previously.
> Across the Californian region, paleoclimate records dating back more than 1,000 years show more significant dry periods compared to the latest century. Ancient data reveals two mega-droughts that endured for well over a century, one lasting 220 years and one for 140 years. The 20th century was fraught with numerous droughts, yet this era could be considered relatively "wet" compared against an expansive 3,500 year history. In recent times, droughts lasting five to 10 years have raised concern, but are not anomalous. Rather, decade long droughts are an ordinary feature of the state's innate climate. Based on scientific evidence, dry spells as severe as the mega-droughts detected from the distant past are likely to recur, even in absence of anthropogenic climate change.
I say this because people should not confuse the issues. Fighting climate change won't stop California from burning. This was always going to happen; even in the best-case massively carbon-negative future, we at best defer the burning a few years. So we shouldn't have the attitude "California will just be OK if we can go carbon negative." It won't.
So a drier California might actually not burn as much, because, as the article points out, there's not much to burn in a desert ?
Also, this being more about human behavior, people might be much less interested to build in a desert (in this case, I doubt it, see also : Saudi Arabia). (Up to a point of course, worst case climate change scenarios involving these latitudes becoming uninhabitable in the next centuries.)
Otherwise, I was wondering whether, under a still "wet" California, but under still mild climate change, the more frequent both rains and droughts, might increase the frequency of firestorms just high enough so that humans actually start taking them seriously.
(EDIT : And looks like they already did, if those 2007 building code changes aren't just for show ? How is the correlation between the post-2007 buildings and those that survived firestorms?)
Maybe it’s time to confront the fact that people can’t continue to live in those areas without substantial changes in the build environment.
The tragic reality of climate change is that despite well informed and well meaning people, no one actually wants to meaningfully change their own lifestyle to adjust to the consequences. Clear cutting trees for instance, can be a preventative measure, but I'm sure home owners in the area would protest the environmental impact, the loss of privacy, the change in their lifestyle.
California has always been a state that, on paper, acknowledges the severity of climate change, but thus far, has been fighting tooth and nail to keep homes in wildfire prone areas. What I worry about is that California chooses to create a public option for homeowners insurance that is tax payer funded to subsidize at risk homes, increasing costs for everyone else. To me this would just be another form of climate change denial.
The people I know who don't embrace climate fear, recycling, etc. always cite hypocrisy as their most salient motivation. They see people like Al Gore and Leo di Caprio talking a big game about a climate catastrophy and then using as much energy as a whole village. They see their friends nitpick composting and then buy single MPG trucks to go camping in. They see cities rolling out fines for recycling badly and then everything going into the same truck when the garbagemen come by.
I don't think environmental activists realize the damage they do to their case by not living by what they preach relentlessly about. By being loudly critical of others without changing their own behavior, they give denialism space to entrench.
"It can't be that bad if even the people who are mad don't seem to actually care."
People do need to understand that it’s not hypocritical to say there’s a need for a systemic change, and not live as if the change had already occurred. If the ship is headed for an iceberg, it’s not hypocritical of me to argue that the ship needs to be turned, while not also going out on the front and blowing to the side to add some insignificant turning force.
But if they understood that, they’d probably have enough systems-level thinking to realize that climate change is real and an actual problem.
Bad actors, uncommitted actors does not actually change the problem's existence. In an adjacent example consider here in LA. Before the fires, corruption in the homes for the homeless got some decent air. It does not actually change the need for homes for the homeless. Its been poorly implemented and allowed to be exploited. That doesn't mean the homeless should get shafted.
Here the question is quite literally about humanity. If one cannot connect with that, maybe they can connect with the need for a stable population that creates new workers and funds said person's retirement.
What is being preached about is that the way things are going will lead to larger, more unpredicted/out of cycle natural disasters. We are seeing that. Globally. We will all pay, whether its together and preventatively or independently one by one. History shows we do better when we're together.
Citing the hypocrisy of some messengers as a reason not to care or do anything just means someone really wants an excuse not to care or do anything anyway.
Everybody waiting for a critical mass of other people to tackle something is a good way to not tackle it.
Just talking generally here, not specifically about the climate.
This is not quite the perspective. The issue is that if humans were to shift the climate in a targeted action, it would require an absolutely massive and concerted global effort - something's not only unlike anything else that's ever happened in history, but whose feasibility is strongly contradicted by just about everything in history, and present.
So when even the people that claim to care more than anything else about climate can't really be bothered to live these efforts, what are the chances of people who don't care, are antagonistic, and then let alone with geopolitics entering the picture - actually acting? The answer is, realistically, zero, which means it's necessary to look for different solutions. It's not an excuse to not care, but rather strongly suggestive that caring, in the ways proposed, is not going to be effective.
You know some weird analogy is that it's like teaching kids about sexual abstinence as opposed to teaching them how to use a condom. The first is what you want and it feels good and morally upstanding to go that route, but it's also just not realistic. The latter feels questionable and like it may even be encouraging undesired behavior, but it's also realistic about what's going to happen anyhow.
The ones who do that probably don’t care about their cause so much as having a cause.
If we really want to combat or even stop climate change, we need a total revolution of the economic and social order. Unfortunately at this point it would need to be authoritarian, as we obviously can’t count on billionaires to do anything in good faith.
We need to count on worldwide class consciousness, but starting in the West. I personally believe things are trending that way. The more climate related catastrophes, the more wars, the higher prices of groceries, rents increasing will cause massive civil unrest in the US and Europe.
The time of fancy cars, fancy houses, and unlimited wealth is coming to an end. The wealthy are the few, but the good news is the rest of us are many.
People in the reactionary/denialist/antagonistic camp will just end with “okay yeah you’re right but I’m not changing/I don’t actually care/I accept that I do evil and shrug”.
People looking to inspire positive change being required to be perfect saints lest they and their movements be condemned seems like a hint that human psychology is not tuned to rise to this occasion.
That expectation of perfection is unrealistic. Humans are messy and bound to be hypocritical in countless ways.
The CEO of Phillip Morris may volunteer at the local children’s hospital and feed the homeless on weekends.
Yet his hypocrisy in doing good in his personal life while doing so much harm in his professional life doesn’t seem to interfere with his ability to do harm, in fact it likely helps.
The executive director of the nonprofit children’s hospital going out on weekends and beating stray dogs to death with a pipe, well his hypocrisy may very well end his ability to do good in his personal life.
It seems like we’re just destined to let people who do bad things without any pretense of doing good off the hook, while crucifying anyone who dares try to do a moral good who isn’t somehow perfectly aligned in their lifestyle, ideology, and entire life history. Despite the fact that the former may represent a large net negative to our world and the latter may represent a net positive.
TLDR: Even if the climate activists weren’t hypocrites, your friends would likely be no closer to embracing the terrible reality of climate change and the necessity of painful sacrifice to address it.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-rise-of-chr...
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-early-christian-strateg...
Though in our case it's a much harder issue :
How do you make and keep a powerful polity while staying militarily weak ? (Tanks / planes / nukes not being an option in a society that decided to de-industrialize.)
This also involves population : a post-industrial society, is likely to have its military strength based on population (like pre-industrial societies did, where agriculturalists overwhelmed hunter-gatherers) : how do you keep your population low without becoming weak ?
(Christian polities didn't exactly stay meek, more like the opposite (after a while)...)
At least values can be transmitted memetically, without genetical lineage, so keeping a stable national population is probably the least unworkable issue as long as immigration and assimilation are high enough...
I just fear that large swathes of society are completely oblivious to what it means to live in a liberal civil society and how changes gets affected. The expectation of perfection seems like a result of being unfamiliar/unrealistic.
I myself used to be a staunch vegan, surrounded by friends who planned not to have kids. Well, they have kids now. That triggered my will to study the original documents and find a movement that is fundamentally dishonest.
The worst angst I have is, what if they were dishonest and still right. That would be terrible.
>But in gauging the longer-term trend of what’s really happening with the fires, it’s necessary to go back much further. Data derived from written records from Cal Fire and the U.S. Forest Service dating back to 1919 show that wildfires, far from increasing, have actually declined over the last 100 years. And in fact the website of the National Interagency Fire Center previously noted that fires were at their very worst a century ago. (See data, research, and methodology for this article.)
>The data on the overall, century-long trend suggest that most of the 20th century represented an unusually low amount of fire, and what we’re seeing now is a return to the “normal” levels of fire of the early 1900s.
https://future.com/why-california-burns-the-facts-behind-the...
Context is very important. Climate change is a critical issue, but solving it doesn't help California stop burning.
The problem isn't a lack of water. It's that we get a ton of water for a year or two. A bunch of stuff grows. Then we get no water for many years. All that stuff that grew in the wet years dries out. Eventually it burns.
If we just enter a dry period, there is only 1 step: no water, nothing grows. No more fires.
This is simply a fire prone region, and this was inevitably going to occur at some point, with or without climate change.
The government should have been more prepared for that.
Sonomas cities are helpful by not rezoning to the fire codes they really should be. Napa is happy to let you keep a camper on your burned site for as long as it takes you to realize how you can’t afford to rebuild to 7A code.
Malibu was marked 7A years back and those folks can afford it.
Oh, please. I am so sick of this being shoved in front of people's faces as an indisputable cause for, well, everything. Might as well bring Odin and Zeus into it as causes...because they are just as valid.
I have lived in the Los Angeles area for nearly 40 years. The Santa Ana winds happen every year, multiple times per year. It never fails. The winds are strong and mostly directionally constant. Some years are worse than others. Average speeds are not monotonically increasing.
Guess what? Strong wind + a small fire + lots of fuel = massive fire.
It's that simple.
So please, pretty please, with sugar on top, stop with the nonsense. This was a case of bad governance, bad decision-making, misplaced priorities, complete lack of preparedness and, yes, some bad luck.
Here's a simple example of that: Why is it that we have to rent firefighting aircraft from Canada every year? Seriously? I understand costs. Well, I look around Los Angeles today and it is easy to call that argument to be criminally demented. We should OWN a large fleet of these planes and have them ready to deploy en-masse as needed. Again, it isn't like these winds surprise us!
Brush and vegetation (fuel) management are crucial. In our neighborhood, a few months ago, we received a notice from the fire department saying they were going to come around and inspect for overgrown vegetation. In this letter they said that the requirement was to not have trees or large bushes/plants within about 6 feet (~2 m) from the property line.
NOBODY CAME!
The inspections were not done at all, or, if they were conducted, they were done at an almost invisible scale. I have always been very responsible about this. I do not have large trees anywhere on my property. We live in a fire hazard zone with serious winds multiple times per year. My entire backyard is non flammable and my back fence is concrete block. My neighbors, on the other hand, they have massive highly flammable trees almost touching the fence we share and covering their entire property. Every other year massive branches break off due to strong winds. I have advised them that, if we ever have a fire, their trees are going to become massive ember manufacturing machines. They either don't understand, don't care or a combination of both. The point is: The fire department could have come around and enforced some kind of a reasonable safety standard. They have not. Ever.
And so, if a massive fire takes out the entire neighborhood, this lack of bad governance is what is going to result in a high cost in property and lives.
This isn't about climate change. That's ridiculous. This is about incompetence and misplaced priorities.
Yes, that's true. Yes, it is always more or less inevitable it these circumstances will happen. Most won't dispute that.
What climate change changes is the frequency. A suburb being wiped out once in 100 years is something we can collectively afford. But now, you have wild fires in the middle of winter. It's not once in 100 years any more.
Probably the best illustration of that is Great Barrier Reef, something in my back yard. People who aren't keen on blaming climate change repeatedly point out the reef has always suffered the setbacks we see now - like bleaching, crown of thorns that killed parts of it off. That's true. But is also true that now, unlike before, the reef is rapidly shrinking, especially in the northern regions where it's hotter, whereas before it wasn't.
The reason is the frequency of these die offs. Before, when a section of the reef was destroyed by something or other, in 10 years it would be recover, growing back. Now these things are happening at 5 year intervals and the interval is growing shorter. The reef is retreating as a consequence. It is no longer viable in the regions it once was.
The same is true for California. Climate change has made the frequency of these disasters increase. Whereas before you could afford to insure against 100 year event, you can't afford to insure against a 10 year event. Ergo, climate change is decreasing the amount of California that is habitable.
Where is the data you used to support that claim?
And, what is this "climate change" thing anyway. The climate has been changing since this planet was formed. So, yeah, climate is a part of the reality of living on this planet. And that's news, how?
You see, that's the problem with this issue. Of course climate change is real. Who would dispute that fact? What isn't real is instantly attributing EVERYTHING to climate change. Every fire we ever have in California is instantly attributed to climate change, and this is spoken as indisputable truth that nobody should dare doubt. Like fires materialize out of nowhere due to molecular alchemy caused by climate change. This is pure unadulterated insanity.
When someone says "it's climate change" we are all supposed to kneel down, bow our collective heads and accept it as the truth. Well, I call on Zeus then. Why not? Who is going to dispute that the fires and your reef example were not caused by Zeus being angry at us? Prove me wrong.
You know what was needed to prevent this disaster? Simple:
Water: Reservoirs were EMPTY due to political decisions
Funding: The fire department has been shrinking for many years.
During that time the city has grown.
And, during that time, they have been asking for more funding.
Instead they got budget cuts and less fire stations.
Execution: Companies who hire incompetent people fail.
The same is true of government.
People have been voting for the incompetent, and this is
the result.
Maintenance: The only vegetation control we have is when a wild fire
burns down entire hills. If we don't control the fuel
the results are predictable.
Enforcement: People must be responsible for hardening their property
against fires.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-10/as-flame...
https://nbcmontana.com/news/nation-world/los-angeles-water-c...
Climate change?
The other day there was an interview with the Chief of the fire department. They printed and displayed, on a table, some thirty different documents (if not more) from the last several years. These documents show how they have been asking for help and got nothing at all.
Climate change?
There's an interview with a guy who saved his home and those of two of his neighbors...using a garden hose. Sure, a bit of luck had to play a part here. However, one thing he said during the interview is endemic to aspects of this event: He said that in the time he spent fighting the fires he never saw a single fire brigade come by to protect any of the surrounding homes. Not one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYQlnHdMqC0
Climate change?
> Climate change has made the frequency of these disasters increase.
And, out of the million other variables driving planetary forces, not a single one plays part on any of these events. It is decreed that it this is due to a single variable, climate change. Time to kneel down and accept it.
We cannot do a damn thing about climate change. Not one thing. The hubris in this religion is incredible. People are walking around talking about this like controlling a planetary scale effect is actually something we can do. It's madness.
I mean, the LA fires this week, when compared to planetary scale, were utterly insignificant in scale. A planetary rounding error. And we had no power when facing such a thing, while, in the same breath, people are saying things like "We have to control climate change!". The only reason we had some control is because the winds stopped for a couple of days.
Have we gone mad?
The planet has always changed, evolved and mutated. And we learned to live on it. It --the planet-- sets the rules. We have to live within them. If things are changing, we adapt. It isn't apocalyptic. It's just change. We can't fix it. Now, that would require Zeus.
NASA ...
* https://science.nasa.gov/earth/natural-disasters/wildfires/s...
* https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/article/climate-change-pushes-...
* https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2912/satellite-data-record-sho...
And poor land management of course .. but also climate change.
> The planet has always changed, evolved and mutated.
Sure .. it had a molten surface once.
Specifically global climate (not weather) has been stable during the development of agricultural and technological humans.
Now, in the space of the last century, that stable climate is rapidly (relative to past changes) changing as a direct thermodymic result of human activity adding significant insulation to the atmosphere.
This has consequences. These consequences are a direct result of human behaviour.
Notes (quotes from articles you posted):
"How has only 11 percent of the west burned, yet the annual number of acres burned and the frequency of fire increased? It turns out that many fires are occurring in areas that have already experienced fires, known as burn-on-burn effects. About 3 percent—almost a third of the burned land—has seen repeated fire activity."
Interesting, isn't it. THE WORLD IS ON FIRE! THE WORLD IS ON FIRE! FIRES ARE HAPPENING MORE OFTEN!
Wait. Wait. What's going on? Only 11% has burned and a third of that is the same areas burning? Well, first, this does not look like the end of the world at all. This hints at other reasons. What are they?
Well, as is usually the case, none of these papers discuss or explore other potential drivers in detail. It's climate change. Kneel, bow down and accept everything we tell you to think and do.
OK, so, a few of us like to actually think. How about this:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/206097/resident-populati...
Population of California has gone from about 15 million to 40 million since 1960. Surely that had nothing to do with it. Right? What is the probability of more homes, vehicles, power lines, power consumption and accidents increasing any kind of event when the population of a region quadruples in size?
No, sorry, it's climate change. How dare I suggest that more people occupying a region might lead to more of anything. How dare I suggest that mismanagement and bad governance might actually be part of the problem.
Here's another fun one:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1067138/population-unite...
Population of the US went from 80 million in 1900 to over 300 million today. Yet, everything is caused by climate change. Everything. Well, that's what one of the articles clearly states anyway:
“But because the root cause is climate change, the most important path forward is to prevent further degradation and warming, which requires both individual and collective action.”
Once again, kneel down and submit. It's climate change, not a 4x population growth and everything that comes with it.
Well, at least one of the articles takes a glancing pass at this, while neglecting to mention population quadrupled:
"In the Western U.S., people are accidentally igniting fires all the time"
Four times more people folks. Does it stand to reason that you might have an increase of incidents that might lead to large fires? Nah, climate change.
"For example, in 2018 sparks flying from hammering a concrete stake into the ground in 100-degree Fahrenheit heat and sparks from a car's tire rim scraping against the asphalt after a flat tire were the causes of California's devastatingly destructive Ranch and Carr Fires, respectively"
Four times the population has no impact on the occurrence rate of potential fire-starting events?
Anyhow, this is why I react badly to the climate change card constantly being pulled out as the root cause of absolutely everything. The domain has become polluted with bad science and politics. It is dishonest and likely damaging to society. From my perspective it seems very difficult to list it as the root cause because almost 100% of the time people neglect to include a million other variables in the conversation.
Be careful with buying into a cult. Human sacrifices were justified with such things.
(1) man made climate change exacerbates these things
(2) california state and local government is a bottomless wellspring of incompetence
And also, it is true that we will adapt to man made climate change. But many things in the biosphere (e.g. corals in the GBR) cannot adapt on these timescales. Extinction is forever, it is an incomprehensible loss.
In many ways that's the other red herring. Extinction = bad. More generally, change = bad. I think I can say more things have gone extinct on this planet than exist today.
Some 200 million years ago all the continents were fused into one. I can't even imagine the cataclysmic losses and changes this brought over time. Yet, life and the planet evolved, adapted and survived.
Sure, the time scale was millions of years. I posit that there is no difference here and today. We, humans, and a very small number of us at that, are the ones who are exaggerating the importance of time. A thousand years ago we would not have known anything about changes happening all over the globe. We did not have the kind of global visibility into things we have today. It is quite possible that many things changed massively during the centuries and we had no idea.
If we didn't have politicians and cultists constantly pounding us with climate change as the cause for everything, people would not think life was different in any meaningful way. And that's the fact for everyone on this planet, except for a few who are being driven into irrational panic by the cult. We even have child abuse, with Greta Thunberg perhaps being the most visible example.
In many ways this is no different from what religious extremism does to people. Using such things as the fear of going to hell to justify anything and demanding uncontested belief and obedience, sometimes under threat of punishment. Climate change is a new religion in this sense.
On the concrete example of corals, scientists are investigating compounds found only in corals that could help with treatment of asthma, cancers, and HIV. This has no value to us? And again, corals. Many mass coral die-offs have occurred over the last several millions of years. Coral species, even sensitive ones, survived without going extinct, because the die offs were relatively slow, taking place over tens of thousands of years. This is not true today, specifically because of the speed and extent of ocean warming and acidification. Many examples like this. It's the speed. Continents moved centimeters per year; temperatures have moved whole degrees in decades.
We have scientific evidence on biosphere stability 1,000 or 100,000 years ago. It was more stable than it is now! It was more stable because we did not have anthropogenic climate change! (among other things, habitat loss, pollution, etc).
People focus on climate change because it is caused obviously and directly by many things we do day to day, like driving and eating red meat.
I think people focus on climate change because it is being pushed through political and business narratives from every angle. Without this type of ideological carpet bombing the average person would tell you everything is fine.
Aside from that, I submit that our contribution to climate change is a small part of it and not, as you put it, caused by many things we do. Your statement makes it sound like we are the one-and-only cause. I am not sure that's the way you meant it. I am not attacking your comment, simply pointing out that being precise with language can be important.
Here's an interesting read:
https://www.dailyhistory.org/What_is_the_history_of_wildfire...
They talk about 1.2 million acre fires in the 1800's and how fire suppression policies backfired. The argument presented is that letting forests burn through is healthy, whereas allowing diseased, old and dead trees to remain actually increases risk factors.
One of the key things various climate change narratives tend to ignore is that these massive fires, which occur in many parts of the world, contribute very significant amounts of CO2 and other matter to the atmosphere. It isn't uncommon for a two-week fire to produce an amount of CO2 that is equivalent to or greater than all the CO2 produced by road transportation in California. So, the culprit is always cars and cows and not the reality that such things as fires are here to stay. This is where mismanaging our forests can have truly negative and deadly consequences.
There are other fires that have been burning for hundreds of years (mines). Here's one:
https://www.iflscience.com/the-worlds-oldest-fire-has-been-b...
None of these things fit the narratives needed by politicians (who use climate change as a tool for votes), business (to make money) and academia (to grab grant funding). Instead they reduce a complex multivariate problem into a silly "human = bad" narrative to keep the ball rolling. If we were truly honest about most of these things the entire cult would collapse.
BTW, none of this means we should not clean up our act. Of course we should. We simply need to stop claiming we are all going to die and we have to save the planet. We are not going to die. The planet does not need saving. And, if it did, we would never be able to do it.
Remember "Inconvenient Truth"? It was 20 years ago, but I'm guessing you were around at the time. There was not lot of warming then, and he was making predictions about what would happen decades into the future. Brave man I say, and he took a lot of shit over it. Not entirely without reason - the high temperatures in 1998 did made his thesis look a little wobbly for a while. But then artic ice cap disappeared in the summer, the monsoon has retreated north and so Papua New Guinea is facing dry times, glaciers have retreated causing rivers to dry up, the earth has just had it's hottest year since thermometers were invented and Australia's Great Barrier Reef is shrinking as it dies off under heat stress. His predictions are looking pretty good now - a little under done if anything.
Things like record and consistently rising temperature is what I consider to be the data you asked for. But you probably won't believe me. That's OK. After this outburst I won't be believing much you say either:
> we are all supposed to kneel down, bow our collective heads and accept it as the truth
Is that bullshit? Surely it's false - it seems unlikely someone has asked you to do that. But you don't care, whatever it takes to win the argument, right? That's the definition of a bullshitter.
Fortunately we don't have to believe each other. Climate deniers decided to have a go at getting Inconvenient Truth banned (I guess they like the Musk definition of free speech - you're free to say anything Musk agrees with), and took it to court. The court ruled it was broadly correct. https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=187. So we don't have to argue about it, as the good old US of A ruled on the matter. How convenient.
> what is this "climate change" thing anyway
As I understand it, it is a theory first put forward in the 1970's that said rising atmospheric CO2 levels would cause rising temperatures. It was largely based on the physics of C02 spectral absorption because back then temperatures hadn't moved much. So it was theoretical prediction and not surprisingly it was largely ignored. But then the temperatures started to rise in the way they predicted ... and here we are.
> We cannot do a damn thing about climate change
Actually, the theory that predicted climate change would happen gave a single and very clear reason for it happening - rising CO2 levels. Stop that and you eventually put and end to climate change. That's what the physics says anyway. Now I've written is down it seems pretty simple - no? A 5 year old would have no trouble with the basic principles.
> Have we gone mad?
It's usually called the denial phase, not madness.
And that, precisely, is what we cannot do. Ever. It is impossible.
Why?
Well, here's the simple, as you put it, 5-year-old reason:
https://i.imgur.com/wbHptnf.png
Now, take a crayon and erase the US and the "Rest of the world" portions of the pie.
How?
Captain Kirk beams all of the US and whatever is in that other slice of the chart into space next Monday. Gone. Not even cows left behind.
And we still pump 65% into the atmosphere. And, BTW, this is from 2019.
The very idea that we can stop CO2 and get to "net zero" is so laughable that, again, to use your term, even a five year old could understand it.
Just last week, here in California, the fires we had likely produced more crap going into the atmosphere than all of our vehicles combined for an entire year.
I mean, the idea is just silly. If erasing the entire US and say, China, from the planet can't neutralize it --much less reverse it-- why are we pushing lies about this stuff?
BTW, this isn't about denying climate change, human contribution or the science behind what CO2 does in the atmosphere. This is about the madness this cult has become, one where everything is attributed to climate change. As I said in one of my other posts, we might as well invoke Odin, Thor or Zeus, because the arguments are equally valid.
Some idiot starts a massive brush fire by hammering a metal stake into the ground and the only narrative that emerges is that the cause was climate change (BTW, that happened and it was one of the largest fires in CA history).
We don't maintain our forests, mitigate fuel availability, ensure readiness and water supplies and the root cause is always climate change.
I have family members and friends who almost lost their homes in these fires. I have friends and acquaintances who did lose their homes, burned down to the ground. I am sick and tired of religious climate bullshit driving the narrative to the point where people are put in mortal danger and lose everything. We should be addressing real problems, not be driving by a cult.
Sorry if this offends you. When you lose your home or someone close to you does, you tend to lose your patience for nonsense and bullshit. This has to stop. Real science has to come back to the narrative. If we engaged in real science, these politicians would be laughed off the stage, climate change profiteering would be severely punished and we would finally go after real measures and mitigations for a changing world. The planet isn't going to kill us, we are, if we continue to be stupid. Just look at what happened here in the span of a single week.
We do know how. It is required by code. Chapter 7 of the IBC code is the specific section. It was adopted in 2007. Most houses in America pre-date 2007 construction. If only comments on the internet had the power to retrofit millions of structures across the country, we'd be set.
https://codes.iccsafe.org/content/IBC2018/chapter-7-fire-and...
Edit: when I say not in code, I mean not in the IBC. I think CA has their own code for fire prone areas. I'm not sure if that code only applies to rural areas or not. One would hope that it applies universally and the rebuilding will be done with the fire hardening methods. Insurance might influence reconstruction too.
https://codes.iccsafe.org/content/IBC2018/chapter-7-fire-and...
My understanding is building code primarily focuses on (1) primarily keeping occupants safe long enough to get out of the house (e.g. material must have a minimum fire resistance duration) (2) keeping emergency responders safe when entering a house fire (e.g. stair hand rails cannot be open to avoid snagging fire fighter clothes or hoses). Once these two tasks are done, the code doesn't really care if the house burns to the ground.
Further, these codes are often the reference base used nationally. They're a reasonably safe base, but different location may add more requirements.
The Wildland Codes are specifically for wildfires, which burn longer and more intensely.
How does the idea of defensible space work if your neighbor's walls are 5 feet from your walls? What happens when an entire neighborhood is that closely spaced? How do you retrofit the space between buildings?
There are dozens of challenges like the above, and a lot of them delve into personal freedoms. Should you be able to choose what trees to plant on your property? Should you be allowed a shed? Should the government use air surveillance to enforce the cleanliness of your backyard?
There's lots we can do, lots we should do, but it is far from a simple path with a singular solution.
The real question is this: do we have the capability to build a house that would not burn down if the neighboring house caught fire? If so, a city could be build that would be impervious to wild fire, arson, and accidental fires.
How much would this cost?
The better question is, do we have the capacity to build a _city_, that would limit spreading fire damage even if one of it's neighborhoods completely lit on fire?
That will cost a lot less and still be a beautiful place to live.
Not true. Here in Riverside we were watching large still-lit embers floating in (some which caused a repeat fire in the riverbottoms north of the 60, first called Brown then called Holly.) The primary stopping zone currently is around Pomona but another hard uptick in wind and it can easily cover out to the badlands.
These winds are absolutely insane, you just do not understand. When they were peaking on Wednesday morning, my Subaru was being blown almost out of lane while driving down the 91 to work.
If you have fire resistant structures and only vegetation burned, not any structures, it would be much less expensive to replace just the landscaping plants.
In a 80 mph wind, it would be very challenging to design a structure that would survive a wooden house burning next door.
I am grateful for learning more of the the history of Malibu and am reminded once again that fuel management is key to prevent or at least mitigate conflagrations.
There is almost no discussion of why, or how, letting natural fire processes go unchecked would help the situation.
It may very well be the case that this would be a good idea (or not), but this article really doesn't talk much about it in any case.
But still, some detailed historical context of fires in LA...
"Malibu" is the community, not the raw elements of wind and vegetation. Letting a town burn is of course absurd.
Even if Olmsted’s proposal for a great public domain park in the Santa Monicas is a sensible idea, you still wouldn't sit back and let that burn naturally without rigorous fuel load management, thinning of tall trees etc. On that point, the right amount and spacing of tall trees (even eucalypts) are important for wind breaks and shade.
I don't think there's such thing as "total loss of neighborhood" in terms of home insurance. Your plumbing is still there. The land, streets & footpaths are still there; power can be restored to streets quickly, and a huge amount of employment and activity is generated in your devastated area.
The missing part I'm unsure about is where people live while their house is rebuilt. In a trailer on the property might be an option if you can't afford to rent somewhere else during that time? Perhaps the state can waive rates, or some other benefit to allow fire victims to afford rent while they rebuild their homes.
I’m sure it is possible to get coverage that would help you in this case but that goes beyond a standard home insurance policy.
It also depends on how many houses were insured by the state insurer CalFAIR. It’s over half a century old and has never been bailed out (funded entirely by premiums) but this is the most destructive fire in Calfironia history so we’ll see how well that holds up to this stress test.
The super-dry brush needs controlled burning. California will need to put up with polluted air during the controlled burns. We have to in Australia at times. People complain and the authorities say "sorry but we need to do this, please stay indoors during the burnoff".
Strategic placement of water tanks in the hills and around properties. Building codes, roof-top sprinklers with backup power so people can leave their house to fend for itself with better odds of survival. All of these measures matter. Bickering about climate change helps nobody.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santiago_Canyon_Fire
The Santiago Canyon Fire in 1889 burned 10x what's currently burning in Pacific Palisades. Whether the fires are a coin-flip or a two-thirds probability, they're just going to happen.
It only makes sense to stress this question if you reject that premise entirely, and think that if we just get California to to better managing its underbrush, then this whole thing goes away.
otherwise the causality is a bit moot? except maybe it opens the discussion about how much we can afford to spend to clear brush given that this is going to keep being a problem.
Please familiarize yourself with coastal sage scrub communities in so cal.
Being posted in a tech community with an ideology of constant improvement, I’m positive there will be a preponderance of solutioning in response. I grew very tired of the repetitive nature of the writing. I also noticed amongst its supposed specificity, none of the actual causes of the fires were given. For example, I recall the fire that burned part of Redding was from multiple fires burning together caused by both arson and a trailer chain left dragging against the pavement. I think some of use are aware of the arsonists caught in the current LA county fires. We can point to failures of leadership and forest management. But the author calls the behavior of mankind believing we can tame nature perverse. What a disappointing perspective. Were that true then we have no business ever exploring space, the ocean, or housing anyone for any reason on the Earth’s polar ice caps. The fact is we can and do tame nature in many MANY ways. Anyone that drives a car can understand this. So it’s not a matter of whether we do or not, but to what extent are we trying. That is not a perverse belief, as I’m sure you may know of will read in other replies. We, or those in leadership positions, know what can be done to mitigate destruction and loss of life. The challenge is, and as the history in this article suggests, is doing it.
Wildfires can be tamed, but it requires 1) controlled burns which aren't held up for years in red tape, 2) insurance priced appropriately to risk, which means not everyone who wants to live in a fire zone should be able to afford it and 3) construction codes with mandatory firebreaks, specific fire-resistant materials and vigorous enforcement punishing anyone not doing these (since one break in the firewall can lead to the whole town burning down). California refuses to do any of these things, never mind all of them, and pays the inevitable consequences.
If you need a direct call to action, and why wouldn’t you as a good little techie, then call or write your representatives and officials with your solutions.
At least when I commented I read the entire article, quoted a piece of it, then referred to other sections. Ya know, kinda following the rules.
