California’s hellish fires
I’m “under the weather” so I’ve been lazy and mostly watching videos, keeping up with the news, especially that from California. It’s been a while since I have written about fires, and I thought we might get by without news of terrible fires.
But the fires came roaring back as if making up for being quiet the last year or so.
This time, the fires, instead of springing up in the mountains or in remote areas, are popping up on the outer skirts of the second largest U.S. city: Los Angeles. The last I heard was there were maybe 5 fires, with the two largest (Palisades and Eaton) being minimally contained at 11% and 3%, respectively. (I think.) The fires have been going on since Tuesday and those containment numbers seem rather small.
Possible factors causing fires
Here’s some scientific background as to why it may be so ferocious:
- While 2022 and 2023 was said to be wet years, 2024 had no rain for about 8 or 9 months. Basically, it was a drought last year.
- That drought means the vegetation basically become kindling as everything was dry.
- The typical rainy season arrives in November/December but this time, did not appear, thus there has been no alleviation of the drought.
- Another element was the Santa Ana winds. The winds were so unusually strong that they were clocked at hurricane levels.
- With those two elements, drought and winds, any spark would then be spread very rapidly. What was the spark? Unknown now but one thought was the winds possibly bringing down tree limbs which in turn brought down power lines.
- Another impact of the winds was under those hurricane force winds, planes and helicopters can’t be deployed for firefighting purposes. I guess typically for firefighting in California, planes are used to spray whatever is used to dampen the fires over a widespread area. But with hurricane force winds, you can’t fly a plane.
- And the water ran out. WIth multiple fires spread over a large area, the water pressure dropped from so much usage.
The firefighters’ job became immensely difficult under the abnormal Santa Ana winds.
Relationship to climate change
The Santa Ana winds have died down but is expected to spring back up next week, so we’ll see how next week progresses. Right now, as far as I can tell, fires are still raging.
What could be attributed to climate change? I’m no expert but I am thinking that the 2024 drought and the non-existent rainy season are probably arising from a warming world.
I haven’t seen much talk about how the fires in California are part an outcome from climate change.
But temperatures have been warm. Scientific American has stated that 2024 has been the warmest year, yet again. Here’s a graphic from the article:
The graphic depicts global average annual temperature difference from the average of the period 1850 – 1900. Obviously, the temperature has been increasing, but what about the US or California? The graphic is depicting global average.
US and California temperature trends
My source of data is coming from NOAA.
The next image is that of California showing each month’s average temperature. Each line on the graph represents a year which ranges from 1895 to 2024. I colored certain lines to represent 2020 to 2024. The months range along the x axis and the temperatures are found on the y axis.
The bright blue line is 2024 and you can see that the temperatures hover close to the top of the curve. The grey lines are all of the years since 1895, except for 2020 to 2024.
Here’s the color legend:
Sometimes it is hard to see whether temperatures are increasing when you look at a single year, so here is another graph for California. In this image, each line represents the average temperatures for a decade. So, for December 2024, the decade is 2015 to 2024 and the December temperature is calculated as an average over that decade. I colored the 2015-2024 decade in blue in the graphic below.
Now you can see that the decade 2015 to 2024 was definitely warmer than all other decades.
Here’s the contiguous lower 48 states:
And finally, the decade-by-decade analysis for the contiguous 48 states:
Again, when looking at the data by decade, it starts to look like the last decade was the warmest since 1895.
What does DEI have to do with this?
I don’t know but I’ve been seeing that DEI/woke mentioned in with the California fires. I’m assuming that DEI is another way of saying that California has incompetent leaders in the fire department.
At this point, everything that I have read does not implicate incompetency. The work history of the current fire chief (who is a woman) seems to indicate that she has worked for 24 years without getting fired, so there is some indirect implied assertion of competency. In addition, I haven’t heard any other fire chiefs claim that the fire is being mishandled. And the scientific reason for why this fire is so out of control makes a whole lot more sense than the DEI.
When I compare the authority of those making the DEI statements and those outlining the scientific weather facts, I lean more towards the scientific. Those making the DEI statements have no experience in firefighting or have a scientific background.
My understanding is that there will be an investigation, especially in regard to running of water or lack thereof, which may unearth incompetency. Until that time, I will be leaning towards the scientific and firefighting community and ignoring the others propounding the DEI theory.
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