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Comment by idownvoted | Hacker News Reader

Using a depiction of Cali wildfires which are mostly caused by the state's own forest management policies puts your quote into perspective: Framing.

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Uh no, not backdoor climate emergency denial. I survived in the 2018 Paradise fire. The main problem there was no rain for 200+ days, coupled with strong, dry winds in a particular direction, and PG&E's 100+-year-old under-maintained, bare powerlines that broke off their ancient fasteners. The reason for the 200+ days of no rain is likely related to both rising average temperatures, breaking record-after-record each year, and the lack of enough Arctic sea ice pack to stabilize the Arctic's jet-stream. Without a stable jet-stream, it breaks off into disjointed loops and also dips down into lower latitudes. This causes havoc and seemingly more random/variable/intense weather in N America. Blizzard in Austin, for example, which never anticipated such an occurrence that far south.

> Blizzard in Austin, for example, which never anticipated such an occurrence that far south

The ERCOT report [0] on the 2011 Texas outage states, verbatim,

> "The winter weather event of February 1-5, 2011 was determined to be a one in ten year event for some regions of Texas in terms of low temperature extremes and duration."

Or, if you'd rather be kinder to Texas power generators while using the same report,

> "Taking these temperature extremes into account, and coupling them with the sustained winds of this event, it is estimated that the resultant [...] event suffered by many Texas generation facilities approached a one in 25 year severity."

With this decade-old report suggesting extreme cold may well occur roughly once per decade, I will respectfully follow up with: Never anticipated my ass.

[0] http://www.ercot.com/content/meetings/other/keydocs/2011/201...

> The main problem there

No, the main problem there was a neighborhood situated in a highly flammable area in the middle of a forest.

The catastrophe would be dramatically different if it weren't because of that.

Climate change makes things more catastrophic. It's not dishonest.

> state's own forest management policies

Weren't most burned acres on federal land (managed by executive branch under Trump)?

Yes and no. I wouldn't blame just Trump per se, because forest management policy implementation across jurisdictions moves glacially-slow. There is likely enough blame to go around, such as not clearing fuel around the electrical grid and not setting intentional, controlled clearance fires.

https://www.redding.com/story/news/2018/11/11/trump-blames-s...

The most economically-destructive fires are at the Wildland-urban interface (WUI), especially new residential developments that build right up to and in large, dense forested areas. Without proper fire mitigation for houses, infrastructure, and communities, devastating Camp Fire scenarios are entirely possible again.

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