January 10Jan 10 54 minutes ago, Procus said: How are you? I would imagine that even if you didn't sustain property damage that the air quality is very poor at the moment. It's bad but not terrible. I wouldn't recommend running a marathon, and if people have asthma they should stay inside. But other than that, it's manageable. It's meaningfully better today.
January 10Jan 10 1 hour ago, DEagle7 said: Florida also happens to be like 90% swamp and wetlands. Which definitely helps. You’d think but as @LeanMeanGM pointed out, once you get about five miles inland from the coast, Florida turns into coniferous forests and prairie land. (Florida actually has a very sizable cattle industry, so there is a F ton of grazing land.) Per year Florida usually gets almost 3k wild fires. The southeast in general has a lot of them. The summer is (usually) wet, but the winters are super dry. Actually last summer a good chunk of the state was under drought conditions. So there’s actually a lot that goes into it. I’m curious to see if there’s going to be an uptick in issues with them here due to how much they are building the suburbs out, but so far the forestry dudes here are on top of controlled burns. I dislike Florida for a lot of reasons, but I have no reason to fault the state for fire prevention.
January 10Jan 10 41 minutes ago, The Norseman said: ok, I'm gonna go there. Articles like this drive me completely insane. A "climate scientist" from UCLA blathers on with some idiot reporter at CNN about how these fires were inevitable due to our warming climate. It's the obligatory climate change article that has to accompany every single natural disaster that happens these days. Assuming that any of this is even true...what is the solution proposed by these people? More windmills, solar panels and electric cars? More government funding for carbon credits? Sign more global climate accords? Even if those were helping, how long would that take to help the people in the path of these disasters? Did the guy who lost his house in the Palisades feel any better about it because he drove a Prius? Wouldn't predictable increases in droughts justify a more responsible approach to forest management and water retention? Wouldn't more predictable flooding lead to better flood water routing and distribution? Are we all just supposed to be victims to the change in the climate? I really just don't get it. https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/09/climate/drought-weather-whiplash-california-fires I think in this scenario it’s possible for two things to be true: climate change is a real issue, and the CA government is grossly incompetent at both the state and local levels.
January 10Jan 10 Author Just now, Diehardfan said: I am running a meeting right now so I can't play this. Did he blame the jews?
January 10Jan 10 For the record, the thing that will hopefully come to light out of all this is the ridiculous amount of money wasted by LA and other cities on funding for non-profits to "combat" homelessness. It's all a scam and grift -- the non-profits get massive grants and then steal all the money while doing nothing. In Oakland, there's a city council member that has multiple non-profits run by her family members -- they've basically stolen ~$9mm over the last few years. That's the thing people really don't focus on; it's not about the small stuff, it's the amount of money being stolen by corrupt politicians through non-profits. LA spent $1.3bn on homelessness last year and accomplished nothing -- where did all the money go? It was stolen.
January 10Jan 10 6 minutes ago, vikas83 said: For the record, the thing that will hopefully come to light out of all this is the ridiculous amount of money wasted by LA and other cities on funding for non-profits to "combat" homelessness. It's all a scam and grift -- the non-profits get massive grants and then steal all the money while doing nothing. In Oakland, there's a city council member that has multiple non-profits run by her family members -- they've basically stolen ~$9mm over the last few years. That's the thing people really don't focus on; it's not about the small stuff, it's the amount of money being stolen by corrupt politicians through non-profits. LA spent $1.3bn on homelessness last year and accomplished nothing -- where did all the money go? It was stolen. I don't know if you can say it's been wasted, that 1.3 billion has grown homelessness in the area tremendously. Wait, that was the point, right?
January 10Jan 10 19 minutes ago, Bill said: You’d think but as @LeanMeanGM pointed out, once you get about five miles inland from the coast, Florida turns into coniferous forests and prairie land. (Florida actually has a very sizable cattle industry, so there is a F ton of grazing land.) Per year Florida usually gets almost 3k wild fires. The southeast in general has a lot of them. The summer is (usually) wet, but the winters are super dry. Actually last summer a good chunk of the state was under drought conditions. So there’s actually a lot that goes into it. I’m curious to see if there’s going to be an uptick in issues with them here due to how much they are building the suburbs out, but so far the forestry dudes here are on top of controlled burns. I dislike Florida for a lot of reasons, but I have no reason to fault the state for fire prevention. Comparing Florida fires to fires out west is ridiculous though. Western states have smokejumpers for one example
January 10Jan 10 1 minute ago, vikas83 said: For the record, the thing that will hopefully come to light out of all this is the ridiculous amount of money wasted by LA and other cities on funding for non-profits to "combat" homelessness. It's all a scam and grift -- the non-profits get massive grants and then steal all the money while doing nothing. In Oakland, there's a city council member that has multiple non-profits run by her family members -- they've basically stolen ~$9mm over the last few years. That's the thing people really don't focus on; it's not about the small stuff, it's the amount of money being stolen by corrupt politicians through non-profits. LA spent $1.3bn on homelessness last year and accomplished nothing -- where did all the money go? It was stolen. Honestly I’m not so sure that it’s going to change. Bleeding hearts see non profits as a compassionate option for people who need taken care of. The best way to combat homelessness is to institutionalize them, which at itself comes with a cost, so I feel like the right won’t go for it because it’s still gonna cost money, and the left won’t because they think it’s going to be One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Realistically we’re living in the Gilded Age 2.0, so politics on either side is just going to be one massive grift for the next couple of decades until we can figure out social media.
January 10Jan 10 19 minutes ago, Bill said: I think in this scenario it’s possible for two things to be true: climate change is a real issue, and the CA government is grossly incompetent at both the state and local levels. Yea, but it's bigger than just the fools in California. For years now the left has maintained that he only possible solution to climate change is a green energy utopia that we could never possibly achieve. We could cut carbon emissions near in half by moving cars and home heating oil to natural gas, but that's off the table because the left hates fracking. The left fought nuclear energy for decades, and only now are coming around on it because they've finally realized that electrifying every car in the country will require 5x the power we produce today. We rail about climate change and the increase in natural disasters, but we aren't willing to sacrifice a rare flower or snail to safeguard our tax paying citizens against these calamities. It honestly just makes the whole climate argument seem very unserious and wasteful, which is a shame.
January 10Jan 10 34 minutes ago, vikas83 said: For the record, the thing that will hopefully come to light out of all this is the ridiculous amount of money wasted by LA and other cities on funding for non-profits to "combat" homelessness. It's all a scam and grift -- the non-profits get massive grants and then steal all the money while doing nothing. In Oakland, there's a city council member that has multiple non-profits run by her family members -- they've basically stolen ~$9mm over the last few years. That's the thing people really don't focus on; it's not about the small stuff, it's the amount of money being stolen by corrupt politicians through non-profits. LA spent $1.3bn on homelessness last year and accomplished nothing -- where did all the money go? It was stolen. I don't think anything is going to change. Everytime there's fires, you get democrat politicians preaching about climate change, even though what like 95% of the time it turns out that the fire started due to either arson or a mistake made by someone that started a fire. Heck just yesterday Bernie Sanders tweeted about how this shows how important it is to battle climate change, and now it appears that this was also a man made fire. Our politicians are idiots.
January 10Jan 10 1 hour ago, Bill said: I think in this scenario it’s possible for two things to be true: climate change is a real issue, It is but they completely failed to show any link to it in the article. They cite the massive LA rainfall totals in '24 as a major contributor to all the brush/vegetation that then dried up during the drought and is now burning. They show rainfall stats in 2024 vs. the normal levels per year back to 1991 as evidence of climate change contributing to the heavy participation. However, if you actually look at the stats back to the late 1800s you find similar annual levels (or more) to the 2024 levels in more than 15-20 different years and no rise at increase at all over the last 40/50 years. Yes, '24 was a year with lots of rain in LA but it isn't historical at all. It happens regularly every 8-10 years or so. Left untouched the forests in that part of the world are heavily thinned by forest fires every 100 years or so. Fires are more frequent over the last 150 years due to the fact that humans start them, either on purpose or not, and there are LOTS more humans around.
January 10Jan 10 43 minutes ago, Phillyterp85 said: I don't think anything is going to change. Everytime there's fires, you get democrat politicians preaching about climate change, even though what like 95% of the time it turns out that the fire started due to either arson or a mistake made by someone that started a fire. Heck just yesterday Bernie Sanders tweeted about how this shows how important it is to battle climate change, and now it appears that this was also a man made fire. Our politicians are idiots. The concern over climate change isn't really relevant to how these fires get started, but rather to how they build and spread. The argument is that the macrotrend of rising temps leads to higher rates of evaporation on average, leading to higher frequency of drought, which provides all the kindling you need at scale. Now pair highly unusual drought conditions in January with strong winter winds and all it takes is some moron with a match to get the devastation we've seen here. There's definitely an element of laziness to just write off every natural disaster as the fault of those who want to ignore climate change, but the increasing frequency and severity of these types of events does seem to indicate that there's likely some truth to it too even if it's almost impossible to prove a direct relationship (to the extent to satisfy skeptics.)
January 10Jan 10 4 minutes ago, Bill said: Yeah your timing couldn't have been worse there. Intelligent discussion is going bye bye.
January 10Jan 10 I'm pretty far from being a save-the-whales, tree-hugging environmentalist hippie (I drink from single-use water bottles every day and think the crusade against straws is among the most ridiculous I've seen in decades) but I have always maintained that the climate change discussion should be compartmentalized in the following steps: 1) Are humans causing global climate change? 2) To what extent are we causing it and how severe is the problem we've caused? 3) What can or should we do about it now and in the future? I usually don't go much past the first point because of the complexities involved, but also because you generally can't even get people outside of the scientific community to agree with you on that first point as evidenced by this thread. We also document that fires are growing significantly faster across nearly half of the CONUS land area and 2.5 times faster across the Western US in just 20 years. Increasing speed will challenge emergency response, evacuation plans, and community preparedness (52). Incident command reports indicate that at least 925 emergency evacuation orders affected >1.5 million households between 2001 and 2020 (44), and approximately half of these were within 1 km of a fast fire (Fig. 4). Wildfire-related emergency evacuation success will be influenced by the density of human settlements, road access (53), and efficient use of early warning systems and information delivery to affected communities (54), all of which will be compromised by faster-moving fires. With maximum daily growth occurring within the first 5 days after ignition for 83% of all events (fig. S2B), we also need to focus on proactive measures that slow fires down or promote fire resilience of the built environment. …” https://www.colorado.edu/geography/2024/12/09/fire-spread-speed-which-drives-threat-people-and-infrastructure-increasing
January 10Jan 10 7 minutes ago, Bill said: Well done stud. Don't forget to towel off before answering the door.
January 10Jan 10 22 minutes ago, we_gotta_believe said: The concern over climate change isn't really relevant to how these fires get started, but rather to how they build and spread. The argument is that the macrotrend of rising temps leads to higher rates of evaporation on average, leading to higher frequency of drought, which provides all the kindling you need at scale. Now pair highly unusual drought conditions in January with strong winter winds and all it takes is some moron with a match to get the devastation we've seen here. There's definitely an element of laziness to just write off every natural disaster as the fault of those who want to ignore climate change, but the increasing frequency and severity of these types of events does seem to indicate that there's likely some truth to it too even if it's almost impossible to prove a direct relationship (to the extent to satisfy skeptics.) This would be a reason to do impeccable forest management, clear flammable underbrush regularly, and ensure that your water reservoirs are well stocked prior to fire season....right?
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