Subject: Re: Just Three Months Ago
Add this story to the ‘Trump was right again’ pile.

He's right only in the sense that it's blatantly obvious to all but the most poorly informed persons. Perhaps you weren't aware that California has wildfires on a regular basis. Or that California, having a fairly arid climate, doesn't have all the water it would like.

He has "brilliantly" identified issues that anyone with any awareness of the world outside of their own backyard already knows.

What he hasn't done is come up with anything close to reasonable ideas to help with these issues.

Clearing dead trees? Yeah, that works if you're in Brooklyn and have a dead tree in your yard. Doesn't work when you're talking about a 10's of thousands of acres of forest with hundreds of trees per acre when something like 1/3 of them are dead. You simply can't clear them all. And of course, the ones closest to civilization (which is a vanishingly small portion) get removed because they present a danger to people and property.

Mother nature has a much better solution. It's called a wildfire. That's how dead trees were taken care of for thousands of years before people came along and tried to live in the forest. Lightning starts a fire, and the rain that usually accompanies the lightning keeps it from spreading too far - most of the time. But not always.

Even further, some of those tree species actually NEED periodic fires to germinate new trees. Some pine cones don't open up to spread their seeds until after they've been heated sufficiently in a fire. Only after a fire can those seeds germinate and grow.

But people have mucked with this system. Fires are going to come through those ecosystems. That makes them a terrible place to build. But we do it anyway. And then we cram the air full of greenhouse gases, cranking up the temperatures, reducing the rain in these areas, and drying up all of the underbrush. So now when a fire starts - as they are going to - they burn hotter and bigger and longer, and they burn all of the stuff people build in these fire prone areas. And because people are "dumb, panicky animals" we flee the fires wailing and moaning because everything we built is burned up. Well, you built in a place that's going to burn on a regular basis. Short of cutting down the trees and putting it all up into parking lots, you're going to have fires. And by building those parking lots, you'd lose the reason you like being in those places.

So sweeping the forest and cutting down the dead trees are idiotic solutions to what is an obvious problem. Neither is putting a lot of water on it. There's a very long explanation of why that doesn't work, but I'll refer you to fire fighters who can explain it better. The short version is that you can't really get water ON a wild fire. It's too hot to get close enough to the fire on the ground, and air drops turn the water into small droplets which turn into steam before they get to the fire.

Sure, water works on small fires like in your fire pit or even in your house, but it doesn't work on even the smallest of wild fires. They're simply too big and too hot to get enough water on them to make a difference. Just one of many things that work on a small scale, but utterly fail on a large scale.

Lastly, all of this has little to do with the current fires around the Los Angeles area. Those aren't burning in a forest. They're burning in chaparral - moderate to large sized oily plants of various species that burn very hot for their size. Very few trees around. Chaparral is another group of plants that needs to burn from time to time to spread their seeds.

Trump is a moron. And anyone who believes the bullshit he spreads is a fool for listening to him.

--Peter