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The libbruls are burning down Los Angeles, it seems.
…mismanages forests and brush, and fires firefighters for refusing an experimental vaccine?”
President Musk steps right up.
Aren’t they just hilarious?
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The libbruls are burning down Los Angeles, it seems.
…mismanages forests and brush, and fires firefighters for refusing an experimental vaccine?”
President Musk steps right up.
Aren’t they just hilarious?
Before it was inundated with people, it didn’t matter if the L.A. basin burned to the ground (and still doesn’t as far as I care), but with more people (always with a percentage of stupid ones) comes the need for more preventative measures. It’s not the conservationists, it’s the greedy capitalists and their not caring one bit about wise management. I won’t say either one is mostly responsible, because the calculus of that is unknown. I’s mostly a political issue at this point.
Musk talks of a “root cause.” Here it is: combustible things burn. It doesn’t follow that climate change has no effect, but the mighty dipshit has spoken. The guy who’s sci fi fantasies spew thousands of tons of burnt rocket fuel into the atmosphere regularly. Of course the idiot climate deniers are blaming the libtards — particularly the ones who’s vanity projects are partly to blame. Did we think he would remain silent? HAHAHAHAHA
The listicle from Libs of TikTok has several legit complaints on it, things that absolutely could have helped alleviate or even prevent some of the fires now raging. Pity there hasn’t been enough political will to increase taxes and government regulation to pay for and require all those changes.
Since climate change matters and since the science of climate change is important:
Whenever there is a cold snap or a snow storm some will inevitably quip “so much for global warming” and use one weather event as an excuse to ignore the settled opinion about climate change. They are very wrong to do so.
It is equally wrong to point to a drought event, a drought-caused fire, or indeed a hurricane, and suggest that it is due to climate change, or even to suggest that climate change has made those events much more likely. We don’t know enough to know that. After all, California is a semi-desert and prolonged droughts are normal for California (Bristlecone pines show this over eons).
Now, climate models do suggest that the likelihood of a severe Californian drought should have increased, owing to AGW, but only by about 30 percent or so. And this is a really hard thing to model. At this level of prediction, such models are not really verified by data. The model uncertainties are about at the same level as the predicted effects.
Such models also predict that hurricane frequency and intensity should be increasing (global warming => more energy in the system). The problem is that the data don’t show this. So that means that there is a lot that we don’t understand about the formation of hurricanes (which is not a surprise, we know that we don’t know).
So is climate change increasing drought likelihood in California? Well, maybe, but we really don’t know that. We don’t have a good-enough record of data to answer that directly, and we need to bear in mind the limitations of the models; it is wrong to overclaim.
Note that uncertainties in whether climate change is increasing drought likelihood in California is a very different matter from whether climate change is happening globally (that is settled, yes it is). That’s because it is way easier to model the global response to things like CO2 and the global climate as a whole than it is to then reliably predict local fluctuations in one small part of the system (such as Californian droughts).
As I said, understanding the science of climate change does matter and it’s important to avoid overclaiming (and hence: “this drought is caused by climate change” is as dubious as “this cold snap refutes global warming”).
And by the way, since the post mentions everyone’s favourite villain de jour, Musk is a science afficionado and is well read in many areas of science, and likely knows all of the above, which you can factor in to interpreting his tweets. And he has explicitly stated that climate change is real.
He does know that; it’s what Tesla is for… He’s just doing that because the MAGA crowd thinks climate change is funny and he wants to fit in. I’m honestly not sure if that’s worse or not.
The rest of it is more a case of things are complicated. It sure would be nice if during an ongoing disaster people wouldn’t just go around on social media saying “This is obviously caused by my pet issue and it’s all those bad people’s fault.” Rather than dealing with what’s on our screens it’s more fun to pass the popcorn and screech at our screens… are we not entertained.
We know a lot of the factors involved (midwinter drought whose likeliness is increased by climate change, high winds, overforrested Mediterranean climate, high winds, tree to building proximity, etc), but presumably we’ll get some investigations later.
Adding on to that is that certain kinds of fire planes are shared with Australia and Canada and it’s Australia’s fire season.