The LA Fires are Unrelated to Climate Change

Let me begin by saying that I am not a climate change denier. It is fairly obvious to anyone who studied earth’s history in middle school or high school that the climate is constantly evolving. Scientists and paleoclimatologists  know with certainty there were at least five ice ages in earth’s history.

While we may agree that climate change is real, no one knows with any degree of certainty what is causing it, despite leftist brainwashing to the contrary. The reality is that human caused climate change is a theory that has not been subjected to the scrutiny of the scientific method. Not a single experiment has ever been conducted that shows a direct link to human activity and a changing climate.

Fire Conditions in Los Angeles

Over the next few months or maybe years, you are going to hear every woke leftist with a microphone or a pen telling you that the LA fires were caused by climate change, but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, devastating fires have swept through the LA basin regularly throughout recorded history. Studies of pre-1800 wildfires reveal that almost 1.8 million hectares burned annually in the area. Up until 2018, the 1889 Santiago Canyon Fire that affected Orange, Riverside and San Diego counties was the largest fire in California’s recorded history. However, all five of the largest wildfires have occurred since 2018.

The question is why?

A turning point in national firefighting strategy seemed to coincide with the Great Fire of 1910. Up until that devastating fire that consumed three million acres in Montana, Idaho and Washington, the Forest Service, which had only been in existence for five years, didn’t have an official plan for preventing wildfires. Increasingly, they were adopting the centuries old practices of indigenous people, which emphasized small, controlled seasonal burns.

The Great Fire prompted a knee jerk reaction from Washington, and the Forest Service’s budget was doubled. Simultaneously, under the direction of Henry Graves, the Forest Service adopted a policy of strict fire suppression. This included focusing on early detection, which resulted in the construction of access roads and watchtowers while enhancing the size and scope of wildfire personnel.

The unintended consequence of these policies has led to a substantial decline in new growth in the nation’s forests. Instead of the natural cycle of life, older trees become larger than they ordinarily would. When they die, they become dry and brittle, and they are loaded with fuel potential. As a result, modern forest fires burn longer and hotter because the underbrush is thicker and the fuel for the fire is plentiful.

Even when the Forest service began to realize the value of controlled burns in reducing underbrush and encouraging fresh growth, they faced stout opposition from radical environmentalists, who lobbied and litigated to stop any effort to manage the forest through logging and underbrush removal. Influential voters in urban areas turned a blind eye to warnings about consequences since they wanted nothing to do with any effort that would affect the beauty of the forest and their million-dollar views.  

So, when you hear leftists claiming the root cause of the LA fires is climate change, recognize that if it played any role, it was minor. The primary reason these fires burned out of control was mismanagement of wildfire policy that negatively impacted the hills and forests surrounding the city.

Leftist Firefighting Incompetence

Now that we know how Forest Service mismanagement led to creating an environment that magnified the severity of the fires, we move to the second level of failure, which is woke leftist government.

California’s priorities are so misplaced, they led to a complete breakdown in the ability of the state and city to manage the fires once they started.

A damning report revealed that despite repeated warnings of life-threatening winds and dry conditions, top fire commanders decided to pass on deploying roughly 1000 firefighters and more than 30 water toting engines in advance of the Palisades fire.

At the peak of the fire, the hydrants ran dry. This was due to the Palisades reservoir being drained and under repair. That’s fine, except there were no contingency plans in place to cover the loss of that asset. Water that was supposed to be available from nearby jurisdictions also failed, with officials blaming damaged pumps and broken infrastructure.

The list of incompetent decisions is epic: Governor Gavin Newsom decided to protect the delta smelt fish at the expense of citizens by diverting fresh water into the ocean that could have been used to fight the fire. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass cut $17.6 million from the Los Angeles Fire Department’s (LAFD) budget. Newsom planned to cut $150 million from California’s wildfire prevention budget.

The LAFD’s leadership is a direct result of DEI priorities over the needs of the citizenry. Instead of planning for the siege of wildfires, Kristen Crawley, the first openly lesbian fire chief, focused on creating a “DEI bureau” within the fire department. To that end, lesbian Kristene Larson was promoted to Deputy Chief. Internal documents show that two of the top three LAFD priorities were DEI related.

This is what you get when you prioritize appearance over merit. Just ask Boeing how well that works out.

Inevitable Conclusion

The devastating LA fires have created an unprecedented human crisis, and that should be our emphasis for the immediate future. Still, it is important to spread truth so that people understand what caused these fires and why so much of LA was burned before they were extinguished.

It’s one thing to argue against theoretical consequences of bizarro world woke leftist policies, but this is a real-world example of what happens when they gain power. Lives are ruined, and people die.

Leftists will scream about climate change, rail against the rich and somehow spin racism into the discussion, but rest assured, this fire is entirely on them and their stupid, idiotic, radical dogma.

We are all going to pay for the cost of rebuilding Los Angeles, and we’re all going to have to pay higher insurance premiums as a result of this negligence. Let this be a warning because leftists want the California model in every state in the union.

It wasn’t climate change. It was incompetence.