I haven't followed the fire closely - is there a reason I'm supposed to chalk this one up to climate change rather than poor forestry management?
Trying to jump into these huge, world-scale theories comes with the risk of blinding us to alternative explanations that might be more valid.
That is a beautiful analogy.
How much could also be other human factors, like building up levees and flood control systems that aren't up to snuff and/or shift worse flooding problems downstream (this has been the case in many parts of the US for decades now; can we presume Europe is better in flood control management than the Army Corps and thousands of small river towns?).
I'd be all for attributing it to not sweeping forests well enough if that actually got the funding to start seriously combating the issue, it’s a positive feedback loop that needs to be mitigated
The cause for the failures have been unprecedented rainfall. There are a million possible factors that can influence the situation, climate change is the leading one. Let's fix it instead of discussing if climate change represents a 90% of the problem or just a 78%.
Let's also spend trillions adding more safety for a worsening and more hostile climate. We could have saved that by taking action earlier, now we need to pay to keep ourselves safe. Let's act before it costs more money and more lives.
Germany has had "once in century" floods every decade for a while now. It's a densely populated country, meaning people can't just move somewhere else and there are not large swaths of unpopulated/unused lands that could be repurposed for massive flood control systems.
It's also not like we are talking about towns that have been built recently in risk-areas, we are talking about towns that have been in those places for centuries, sometimes over a millennia, which is a testament to how out of the ordinary these floods are.
Secondly, after crazy disasterous, world-headlines fires three years ago, Calif. Governor Gavin "perfect hairgel" Newsom appointed a blue-ribbon committee on tracking and dealing with these fires from a forestry point of view.. that committee publishes online and in fact as a Github repo. That committee has to work with aggressive, self-serving entities well entrenched in govt money and commercial licenses, which benefit from "us-vs-them" language and tactics.
In this writers opinion, these are truly historic events, not in the good way.