I don’t see the kind of wall to wall coverage I might expect from the national news media if this horrific disaster Los Angeles is experiencing was taking place in the east. But I’m sure you’ve seen something about it and it’s actually much worse than you know. Luckily there is robust local news covering this so people in the area are able to get real news. They certainly aren’t on Twitter which is a total shithole during times like these since Elon fired their disaster team and Facebook is equally unreliable. Bluesky is good but it doesn’t quite have the scale to do what Twitter used to do.
I was going to share some pictures here but I don’t have the heart to do it. It’s just devastating.
And keep a good thought for all the animals in the mountains that are on fire here in southern California. It breaks my heart.
By the way, if anyone tells you this has nothing to do with climate change and everyone should just rake the forest, they are wrong. This 2015 article in Rolling Stone by Tim Dickinson explains it well:
This is the present, and the future, of climate change. Our overheated world is amplifying drought and making megafire commonplace. This is happening even in the soggy Pacific Northwest, which has been hard-hit by what’s been dubbed a “wet drought.” Despite near-normal precipitation, warm winter temperatures brought rain instead of snow to the region’s mountains. What little snow did hit the ground then melted early, leaving the Northwest dry — and ready to burn in the heat of summer.
The national data is as clear as it is troubling: “Climate change has led to fire seasons that are now on average 78 days longer than in 1970,” according to a Forest Service report published in August. In the past three decades, the annual area claimed by fire has doubled, and the agency’s scientists predict that fires will likely “double again by midcentury.”
The human imprint on the bone-dry conditions that lead to fire is real — and now measurable. According to a major new study by scientists at Columbia and NASA, man-made warming is increasing atmospheric evaporation — drawing water out of Western soil, shrubs and trees. In California alone, the epic drought is up to 25 percent more severe than it would have been, absent climate change. And this impact doesn’t respect state borders. The study’s lead author, Columbia scientist Park Williams, tells Rolling Stone, “There’s the same effect in the Pacific Northwest.”
The fiery future is upon us…
With our nation’s firefighting resources tapped out by the fires of the present, America finds itself woefully unprepared for the blazes to come, much less the worst-case scenario: a Katrina by fire.
If you have a sub, read the whole thing. It may just be happening right now.
And yet:
America just put this fucking imbecile back in charge:
