A look at the carbon emissions and destruction of habitat because of the focus on policies based on virtue-signalling and pseudoscience.
Posted by Leslie Eastman
The continuous stream of news from the Great Los Angeles fire is heart-breaking, and the images are gut-wrenching.
And when the smoke clears and the recovery operations begin, I hope that not only do the insidious “Diversity-Equity-Inclusion” policies that led to inept leadership in critical civic positions are jettisoned….but also the “climate crisis” policies are terminated quickly.
To begin with, our elite media continue to press the “consensus” that this fire is the direct result of “climate change”. For example, this gem is from the Associated Press.
It began with millions of people across the U.S. shivering amid blizzard conditions and frigid air that lasted for days, thanks to a jet stream that slips out of its usual path more often these days. Then, catastrophe in California, with wind-whipped flames taking off in a landscape parched by months of drought to become Los Angeles’ worst-ever wildfires.
To cap it off, major weather monitoring agencies confirmed 2024 as the hottest year in global history. Even more dire, four of the six agencies said it was the first full year Earth went beyond a warming threshold seen as critical to limiting the worst effects of climate change.
Welcome to one wild week of the climate crisis, scientists say. There will be more.
I am delighted to report that this inanity is being ratioed, which gives me hope that this disaster will put a stake in the heart of climate cult pseudoscience.
Actually
Issues with the Santa Inez reservoir, which was supposed to provide water for fighting the Palisades fire, include:– The reservoir ran out of water very quickly, just 3 hours into firefighting efforts.
– The reservoir normally holds 117 million gallons of water, but… pic.twitter.com/3c26LJXcnc
— Crystal M Stanley (@4freedom1USA) January 12, 2025
Many on social media have been reporting on the area’s arsons and the arrest of those starting fires.
Hey look, it’s Señor Climate Change
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 12, 2025
I guess the term “climate change” might be correct if it means poor decisions being made by virtue-signalling eco-activists.
It wasn’t a partisan impasse that didn’t upgrade water collection & firefighting infrastructure for decades, ignore forest management, empty reservoirs during fire season, or cut funds to first responders. https://t.co/PkhjvkjTch
— Fusilli Spock (@awstar11) January 11, 2025
I have touched on several disastrous decisions made by local and state leaders already, and blog space is limited. There will be a whole catalog of failures to analyze, and thanks to X.com, the elite media can no longer protect its preferred bureaucrats.
In this piece, I would like to note how all of these climate-cult choices have utterly ruined the natural environment and wildlife habitats in the Greater Los Angeles area.
To begin with, California has been leading the charge on electrical vehicle mandates and ending the use of fossil fuels, because human emissions of carbon dioxide (a life-essential trace gas found in trace amounts within the atmosphere) are supposedly causing “global warming”.
Instead of focusing on water infrastructure, revising forest management choices, or funding fire departments, bureaucrats focused on nanny-state rules. As a result, millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent have been released into the atmosphere.
I would like to share some numbers to put it in perspective: The 2020 California fire season released approximately 127 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
Those fires completely wiped away any emissions savings.
A nearly two-decade effort by Californians to cut their emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide may have been erased by a single, devastating year of wildfires, according to UCLA and University of Chicago researchers.
The state’s record-breaking 2020 fire season, which saw more than 4 million acres burn, spewed almost twice the tonnage of greenhouse gases as the total amount of carbon dioxide reductions made since 2003, according to a study published recently in the journal Environmental Pollution.
Researchers estimated that about 127 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent were released by the fires, compared with about 65 million metric tons of reductions achieved in the previous 18 years.
The Great Los Angeles Fire is still burning, so I don’t have a final number to share with you. However, because it is an urban fire, carbon dioxide isn’t the only emission. The smoke includes toxic cyanide and sulfur compounds, deadly carbon monoxide, and carcinogens.
So, the next time California’s eco-activist regulators want to gut emissions for your SUV or take away your gas stove, tell them to sit back down.
Another aspect of this destruction that has yet to be considered is the horrendous impact on wildlife. Many of the awful policy choices regarding water in this state have been related to protecting fish.
— Leslie Eastman ☥ (@Mutnodjmet) January 11, 2025
Because of these choices, many of the region’s iconic animal species are now suffering.
Animals try their best to move out of the direct path of the fire while remaining close to home if they cannot find refuge during wildfires, Stephanie Eyes, a senior wildlife biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s (FWS) Sacramento Fish and Wildlife Office, noted in an October 2022 article.
…”Wildlife is incredibly resilient,” Eyes said, noting that “California has a long history with wildfire, and many species adapted to endure it.”
“When I was working in Yosemite [the national park], there was a female California spotted owl who weathered several wildfires. We were always concerned about her, but she would still be there, year-after-year,” the biologist recalled.
However, during a “high-severity fire,” which burns across a large forest landscape, moving fast and climbing through the tree canopy, finding refuge can be challenging for animals in the wild.
“Wildlife have adapted to deal with smaller fires, and unfortunately, sometimes they can’t escape these recent, big fires,” Eyes said.
Arguably, the Palisades and Eaton fires are “high-intensity”.
🥹 It’s not just humans fleeing the flames. A mountain lion & two cubs are seen on Topanga Canyon Blvd. running away from where the Palisades Fire ravaged hundreds of homes. 💔
[hollywood hills / Beverly Hills / Los Angeles / wildlife ] pic.twitter.com/SCO7w449Rs— Heart of the streetz 🩶 (@HOTS_twt) January 9, 2025
AN IMPORTANT WORD ABOUT WILDLIFE DISPLACED BY THE LA FIRES. THEY HAVE LOST THEIR HOMES, TOO. #LosAngelesFire #PalisadesFire pic.twitter.com/p4M09vxBAL
— Pamela Version 2.025 ♜☄💈 (@Timpanist) January 10, 2025
Amid the raging wildfires, a firefighter becomes a hero, rescuing a helpless fawn (Deer) from the flames. The exact location and date remain unknown, but this act of courage shines through the devastation.#PalisadesFire #LosAngelesFires #californiafires pic.twitter.com/sNkrdyIvlY
— WarNewsDaily🪖🚨🪖 (@XNews24_7) January 11, 2025
Wildlife Displaced by California Fires
LOS ANGELES, CA: Animals fleeing the California fires are seeking refuge in residential areas, having been displaced from their natural habitats in the mountains and hills. https://t.co/H1XFGMzani pic.twitter.com/vrxEfdTmMJ
— Weather monitor (@Weathermonitors) January 11, 2025
Animals are fleeing the fires in the LA mountains and making their way into residential areas. 😦
Let’s hope there’s some people looking out for them, water if any is left💧🫶
What a disaster! 🙏 pic.twitter.com/HhGocyCyxU— Epstein’s Sheet. 🧻 (@meantweeting1) January 11, 2025
When Americans supported the Endangered Species Act, these were some of the species they had in mind…not bait fish.
Many supporters of sensible climate science policies have gone into great depth about the realities of climate change because of these fires. However, this is the first time I recall “climate crisis’ propaganda posts being so heavily ratioed.
I hope it is not too late to save the remaining natural areas of beauty in this state.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Not protecting fish. Protecting only one specific very small fish, the California delta smelt, of which a single individual was last detected in the 2015 4 month river delta survey. So almost certainly extinct in the wild for almost a decade. As a misguided result of which, billions of gallons of northern and central CA spring meltwater that could be diverted to the naturally dry Central Valley and south and stored for ag and fire fighting is deliberately allowed to run off to the sea.
Did some more basic research today and wanted to add some site knowledge about the truth of delta smelt.
Average lifespan is 1 year, in two stages. Upestuary to fresh water to spawn in spring, then down into brackish estuary water to feed, mature and get ready for the next spring runoff spawning. Average spawn is only 3000 eggs per female. (By comparison, steelhead trout average 9000.) The summer/fall water storage release now is to increase their brackish feeding summer/fall feeding range.
Spring runoff is not the problem, as it also supports the spring steelhead trout/chinook salmon spawning runs into the Sacramento and SanJoaquin river upper reaches. Those runs remain relatively healthy, and the spring melt release supporting them is anyway in excess of present Central Valley water storage capacity.
The true delta smelt extinction problem is predation. The delta smelt’s two primary predators are largemouth bass (fresher estuary water) and striped bass (more brackish estuary water), both non-native invasives deliberately introduced to the estuary many decades ago to enhance sport fishing.
Everything you read about delta smelt as a climate driven ecosystem health indicator is false. The original ecosystem was fundamentally altered by deliberate introduction of two invasive predators for ‘sport’. The result was slow but inevitable. Newsom gets a pass on this aspect only of the LA tragedy.
The “climate/eco-troughers ” are a nasty bunch .
They want to rule over everyone.
May they go away ASAP.
The Green Blob prevented any management of the chaparral that is burning, due to “environmental concerns” for various beasties, exploiting the environmental impact studies to prevent brush clearing by controlled fires, grazing, or mechanical removal. Chaparral will burn, the only question being when.
Your comment is good. Response from the state is lame. They’re is going to form a task group to answer questions around this and also to probe why the Palisades reservoir was empty.
I’ve seen wind driven wildfires in person and it’s most critical for fire response to quickly attack blazes when they are small. It seems that equipment and tankage was not prepositioned to facilitate this, and LA has been reducing the number of stations, which is not conducive to distributed response.
In the Colorado Marshall fire, engines seemed to run about for a time like chickens with their heads cut off. Once these fires get going there aren’t enough resources to tackle everything and difficult choices have to be made.
In fairness, full LA chaparral control isn’t possible due to steep terrain. But localized control sufficient for urban fire suppression certainly is. At Patricia’s otherwise vulnerable North Georgia mountain cabin, specialized brushers control growth on both sides of her otherwise steep about half mile long access road to an extent of up to 150 feet on each side. Simply done with stabilizable trucks with very long multi segment hydraulic boom arms tipped with rotary brushers.
Together with simple blown ember controls (inflammable roofs, screened attic entry) would have prevented the extent of this now utter disaster.
No different than the one very old Lahaina beach house that escaped the fire. The newish owners of a very old wooden house did three simple things:
With brush, there seems to be letting perfect get in the way of better. One wants low intensity fires fairly often, that do not get into the crowns of trees. Or houses.
how about goats- they’ll eat anything
And are very nice to eat.
I wonder if combustion product, aka smoke, from controlled burns will pass muster under CA’s Proposition 65?
‘Proposition 65, officially known as the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986, was enacted as a ballot initiative in November 1986. The proposition protects the state’s drinking water sources from being contaminated with chemicals known to cause cancer, birth defects or other reproductive harm, and requires businesses to inform Californians about exposures to such chemicals.
Proposition 65 requires the state to maintain and update a list of chemicals known to the state to cause cancer or reproductive toxicity.’
https://oehha.ca.gov/sites/default/files/media/downloads/proposition-65//p65chemicalslist.pdf
And all those chemicals now all over LA because of all these houses and cars and god know what that burned for days ?
And why the US has only 10 Canadair CL-415. (Spain has 25) The moment the wind calms down and you have daylight there should have been a fleet of these.
Is there a battery powered version?
I would say that some 80-90% of the houses around here have coloured corrugated iron on the roof, only the older ones have concrete tiles. ie basically non-flammable.
Exterior is either brick, 9mm compressed fibro boards or coloured corrugated iron.
yes, Colorbond™ steel used as cladding, with heavy fibre insulation in the walls.
Think they can’t look good… have another look.
Windows most often aluminium framed.
I really cannot come to grips with the very silly idea of using wood products, let alone tar impregnated, on the roof and flammable timber plies etc on the walls, in a very bush-fire prone area. Very strange.
Where are you located?
Mid Hunter Valley, NSW, Australia..
So a not that dissimilar climate to LA
LOTS of bush with lots of Eucalypts !
Sounds nice.
I’ve only scratched the surface of Australia. Will definitely come back.
ps.. I hope the Californian authorities take a look at building material standards for any rebuilds.
Another product I should have mentioned is aerated cement blocks, rendered on the outside. Great insulation and very difficult to burn !!
Has anyone seen the finished product from a 3D printed concrete house.. they look really interesting..
https://youtu.be/5IxVPpkkWXI
That landscape should be excellent for goat herders! But I suppose the move stars wouldn’t want goats in their back yard.
Goats and chain saws, if one does not wish to use general low intensity burns.
all of the above
“Goats and chain saws,”
That sounds like a pretty gruesome mix… 😉
Greens are noted for being prissy.
As I noted in a previous thread we lived in Topanga Canyon directly adjacent to the Topanga State park. In the early 80’s there was a large flock of goats and a goat herder who went out daily to control the vegetation. That ended and there were some attempts at controlled burns.
The area was accessible by fairly easy hiking with the goats and there was a wide dirt road from an area overlooking the ocean all the way to Mullholland Dr. So no real hinderance for fire control. This overlooked the Palisades.
The failures of the democrat administration both local and in Sacramento is very evident.
On another note we lived there during the 1994 Northridge earthquake. The house was 6 miles from the epicenter. It was a hellava 6:30 am wakeup with numerous aftershocks. The house was fortunately built on bedrock so no structural damage.
Large flock of goats with a goat herder will probably be too cheap for those who want to spend billions.
The last cattle ranch I worked on was on the grassy slopes of Mt. Diablo in Northern California. Almost every year you could map the border between the state park and the ranch by looking at the extent of the burns! On the ranch, the cattle would graze down the grass enough to discourage the spread of fires; while in the park, the lack of grazing made ignition from cigarettes, joints or cook fires a certainty!
In SoCal, a combination of fire breaks and targeted grazing could help prevent rapid fire spread. Or you could ask the millions of illegal aliens receiving generous subsidies from the state to help with brush removal and fire line cutting! Nah! That’d be a bridge too far for reality challenged libtards!
You could even organise a Pride brush removal and fire line cutting day. How many of the LGBT community have lost their home because of the government they voted for?
Separate biological observation. The LA brush that is burning comprises the well characterized California chaparral biome. That plant community evolved for the semiarid chaparral climate via two basic adaptations.
Both adaptations guarantee that resulting wildfires will be hot, and with Santa Anna winds, vicious.
And the often experienced hot dry fast winter Santa Anna wind causes have also been known for decades. Precisely predicted for LA days before the event, as the Cliff Mass post here explained. Plenty of time to fill reservoirs and prep for wind IF LA had competent officials. But extinct delta smelt and DEI took priority.
All this background science has been known for many decades. There is simply no excuse for the public official negligence.
Do not, under any circumstances, replant eucalypts. They are evergreen and will survive most wildfires to regenerate and take over.
I was in the San Franscisco district last year and observed to my local friend the existence of Australian eucalyptus trees which are dreadful fire enhancers. He told me that they were imported from Australia and planted on slopes to hold the ground together … only later did they twig that these are dangerous trees, not only do they burn ferociously, but they also drop boughs that can kill or cause a lot of damage … supposedly, there is a program to eradicate them now.
If you chop them off at the based , paint them with 100% roundup..
…. or the buggers will re-grow. !
Also, keep checking around where they were, for seedlings. !
Eucalypts actually emit aromatic oils, particularly in hot weather….
…. the air itself can literally combust !
Flames seemingly burning in mid air !
It’s not just the delta smelt! Eco-wacko libtards also want to preserve mosquitoes, ticks, leeches, and fleas as they closely identify with other bloodsucking parasites!
My family move to Long Beach in 1962 when I was 8. I’ve been aware of Santa Ana winds almost my whole life. It’s no secret, it’s not new. As you say, there is no excuse.
Wildfires in California have been happening for millions of years. Some of the vegetation produces an oily substance that is quite flammable and even a lightning strike can ignite it. The Giant Sequoia trees even use the wildfires to open their seed pods, it is so reliable. Plus, there are the Santa Ana winds that occur during the winter and spread the fires.
The colossally stupid, completely incompetent and economically destructive climate alarmist policies imposed upon the U.S. and California by Democrat politicians have brought California to its knees with no recovery in sight.
How much more massive damage will they be allowed to inflict upon the state and nation before those responsible for these idiotic and completely avoidable debacles are finally held accountable for their monumental hubris.
What a nightmare.
While I sympathize with those who have lost their homes, Californians keep voting these idiots into office. Look in the mirror to see who is to blame for that. Although I suspect the next elections may be a bit more interesting. Hopefully some rational thinking on the part of voters.
It is unfortunate but these are the kinds of events that are required to jolt the virtuous eco-rats out of their impossible dream.
“It began with millions of people across the U.S. shivering amid blizzard conditions and frigid air that lasted for days…”
Wow, such conditions in January- gotta be due to AGW! /S
It’s so much darker than you think it is…
Apparently they’re doing cloud storage.
I have the greatest sympathy for those who have lost their homes, possessions, pets and some have lost their lives. It is tragic. But what is also tragic is that many of these same people support the very policies that made this event so much worse. What is it going to take for the people of California to wake up? Your leaders and their supporters are responsible for how bad this is. Do something about it, they are liars, cheats and criminals.
What is it going to take for the people of California to wake up?
I have no hope they ever will. They continue to blame CA’s problems on Republicans, while Dems control all of state government with a supermajority. If they can’t see how ridiculous that is, they’ll never see the obvious.
All the right incentives are there for LA politicians and activists to stop chasing the climate chimera and adapt to their environment. Fireproof their houses, space their structures further apart, cut back resinous forests, graze goats to clear underbrush, keep fire-protective gels on hand to spray down their vulnerable property, cover their gutters and screen soffits with fine mesh, vote out politicians who refuse to protect them. There will be Santa Ana winds every winter. And there will likely be fires every two to five years.
https://www.savetheredwoods.org/interactive/giant-sequoia-and-fire/
About the great megatonnage of CO2 that went from California’s 2020 fire season: This was CO2 that California took from the atmosphere (to make biomass) and then returned to the atmosphere. This is unrelated to California policies for decreasing human transport/burning of lithosphere carbon to the atmosphere. The AGW issue is about humans moving carbon from the lithosphere and adding it to the atmosphere and the carbon cycle.
More CO2 in the carbon cycle, along with California’s policies in favor of more trees, has California growing more fuel. And, California has been building wooden houses where wooden houses would be fire fuel. California’s other policies to decrease transporting carbon from the lithosphere to the atmosphere failed because California can’t alone do the whole world needs to do in order to stop the increasing of atmosphere CO2.
The Pacific Palisades & Malibu area was LA’s epicenter for EV’s, PV roof-top solar installations and
domestic batteries. These widely distributed incendiary devices numbered in the thousands and when the winds began the destruction, the resultant thermal runaway had TV journalists gasping at how the fires ‘exploded’. If the firemen couldn’t contain the flames with water, it’s because water is ineffective in electrical fires. Comments?
There are certainly a lot of contributing causes or factors that made this particular fire much bigger and more destructive than most in urbanized California. Many of these are the fault of incompetent politicians and bureaucrats, but not all. So we need to be careful about oversimplifying the circumstances.
The biggest factor of all driving the spread of the firestorm was the Santa Ana winds that happened to hit at the same time the fires broke out. There is nothing new about Santa Ana winds, they’ve been documented and were well understood for centuries before today’s warmunism.
Copy cat arsonists always come out of the wood work and start dozens if not hundreds of fires during the overwhelming fight against the main fires, and perhaps even the main fires were started by firebugs.
Lack of proper fuel management … cutting back on firefighting budgets (though we have to be careful there because the LAFD fire chief who complained about that also promoted massive pay increases for her union members, which does not exactly improve firefighting) certainly didn’t help, especially when the money formerly devoted to fire safety was redirected to preferred DEI recipients.
“Why the hydrants went dry” is an oft-posed question this week. Some of it likely has to do with water diversions for species protection under Engangered Species Act. But as a LAFD spokeperson pointed out over the weekend, urban fire fighting systems were never, and could never be, designed to fight wildfires covering thousands of acres whipped up by high winds. Urban firefighting systems are designed to fight one structural fire at a time. To design a system large enough to fight a conflagration like the Palisades wildfire would simply be both unaffordable (upsized water supply pipes, pumps, etc.) and impractical (where would you put a 36 in pipe in an urban neighborhood?). So again, we have to be realistic.
But clearly Californians have a right to be PO’d about the poor performance of their State and local governments. Not so much in fighting the fires, but in preventing the fires through urban fuel management, and properly managing California’s water supply system.