“Human-caused climate change made the Los Angeles-area fires more likely and more destructive, according to a study”
…
“The study — from an international group of 32 climate researchers — shows how climate change fits into the myriad factors that made the multiple blazes one of California’s most destructive and expensive wildfire disasters on record.”
…
“The scientists found that low rainfall from October through December is now more than twice as likely compared to the climate that existed before humans began burning fossil fuels such as oil, coal and gas for energy.”
…
“the LA fire season is becoming longer, with “highly flammable drought conditions” lasting about 23 more days now than during the preindustrial era.”
The left needs to be focused on competence in government not identity-based social causes, and the right needs to recognize that competent government requires funding and taxes and leaders who care about the organization’s mission and whose main qualification isn’t loyalty to a politician.
“Forest Service Chief Randy Moore will retire effective March 3, according to an email sent to agency staff Wednesday and viewed by POLITICO.
Moore wrote in his staff email that the past several weeks have been “incredibly difficult” due to the Trump administration’s mass layoffs, which have led to 3,400 Forest Service employees — or 10 percent of agency staff — being fired.”
…
“Lawmakers and officials from Western states have warned that President Donald Trump’s cuts to agencies like the Forest Service and funding freezes will threaten critical prevention and mitigation work, leaving the region woefully unprepared for the coming wildfire season.”
“Fired inspector general of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Phyllis Fong was removed from her Washington D.C. office on Monday after refusing to comply with the conditions of her termination.
A 22-year-old veteran of the department—which has a broad mandate to investigate food safety and animal welfare—Fong’s office has been investigating Elon Musk’s brain implant startup Neuralink, among other investigations into the Boar’s Head’s listeria outbreak.
The USDA launched a federal investigation into Neuralink in 2022 for potential animal-welfare violations following internal staff complaints alleging the needless suffering and deaths of animals via testing, reported Reuters at the time.
On Friday, Fong was one of 17 federal watchdogs given their walking papers by the Trump administration, reported Reuters. However, Fong told her colleagues in an email that she intended to stay in her post, arguing that “these termination notices do not comply with the requirements set out in law and therefore are not effective at this time.””
Trump seems eager to help red states with natural disasters, but not California, seeming to not understand the extent that weather made California particularly susceptible to hard to stop fires.
“Across the country, wildfires are getting worse. In addition to the billions of dollars in damage from destroyed homes and infrastructure, these fires are increasingly deadly: Every year, wildfire smoke contributes to thousands of deaths in the US alone, not to mention other health impacts like reduced lung function and increased risk of dementia. And climate change makes extreme wildfires all the more likely as landscapes become warmer, drier, and more flammable.
All of this means that understanding how to control wildfires is more important than ever.
For Yamamoto, fire is a way of connecting with his tribal community and land, but he has bigger ambitions, too: He wants to organize major collaborative projects — between different states, sovereign Indigenous nations — that would spread fire across arbitrary property lines.
One of the barriers to effective fire management is the tangled web of property ownership across the country. Good fire mitigation techniques — like clearing flammable understory on corporate-owned land — aren’t as effective if the family land next door doesn’t do the same. To truly confront out-of-control wildfires and climate change, fire management will have to transcend those lines, which means understanding the land we live on as a shared responsibility, rather than a collection of individual properties.
“Fire doesn’t recognize property lines, right?” Yamamoto said. “That’s a very human construction.””
“President Joe Biden’s disaster declaration came within hours of the wildfires that tore through Lāhainā, Maui, last week, where the death toll is at least 111 and a thousand people may still be missing. The disaster declaration helped unlock federal aid for Maui, adding to Hawaii’s emergency stores another 50,000 meals, 10,000 blankets, and $700 cash for survivors in the immediate aftermath.
But questions around the response at every level of government continue to mount. Many of the disaster’s survivors have said the assistance was slow to arrive, wondering days later why distribution centers were so disorderly, and missing persons numbers still so high.”
…
“At the same time, some decisions made locally also contributed to the chaos. “As reports have come out, the alarm systems weren’t initiated the way that community members would expect,” Ing added. “Even the evacuation process seemed unclear. Some community members were feeling that there was more deference and priority given to the hotels.””
…
“If you think about disaster response, that’s like a body responding to an injury. You’ve got arteries and capillaries, and those are not the same thing; they serve very different purposes. So I think when people critique FEMA and the federal government, it’s sort of misplaced because you can’t assume that a national, huge apparatus is going to know who the right people are on the ground to reach into the community.
What we need to do is make sure those local capillaries are very strong and as well-circulating as possible. The artery function that FEMA is meant to do are the big volumes of aid coming in. If you don’t have FEMA working with those local capillaries and supplying aid in the right spaces, then you get delay and confusion. That has to be organized at the local level so that when they show up, they’re immediately directed by the state and local level to the most effective channels.”
“The summer often brings severe wildfires to western Canada, especially as climate change continues to dry out vegetation and heat up the atmosphere. 2021 was a particularly devastating year, with blazes destroying entire towns.
Provinces in the east — including Quebec and Nova Scotia — are somewhat more safeguarded from fires, or at least devastating ones. Air coming off the North Atlantic Ocean typically keeps the region humid and cooler, making it less likely to burn, per Reuters.
The forests out east also tend to be less flammable, Reuters notes. Unlike western forests, which are dominated by fire-prone evergreens, eastern forests also have broadleaf deciduous trees, which are less flammable (their branches start higher off the ground and their leaves contain more moisture).
But under the right conditions, even eastern forests can burn.
This spring brought the right conditions across parts of the east — namely, low humidity and rainfall, and lots of heat. By the end of April, large parts of eastern Canada were abnormally dry, according to the country’s drought monitor. Some places, such as Sydney, Nova Scotia, recorded their driest April on record. When forests are dry, they ignite more easily.
“What’s unique about this year is that the forests are so dry that the fires are many times larger than they normally are,” Matthew Hurteau, a biology professor at the University of New Mexico, told Vox’s Rachel DuRose.
Still, there needs to be a source of ignition. And for the fires out east, it was likely a combination of lightning strikes, people (who might, say, toss a cigarette butt out their window), and human infrastructure (such as trains, which can create sparks).”