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Comment by czhu12 | Hacker News Reader

It certainly feels like the need for climate change adaptation that's been foretold for years is starting to happen. There’s quite a bit of blame being thrown around regarding details like how much water was in the reservoir and the DEI stance of the fire chief, but does any of that really provide a sustainable solution?

Maybe it’s time to confront the fact that people can’t continue to live in those areas without substantial changes in the build environment.

The tragic reality of climate change is that despite well informed and well meaning people, no one actually wants to meaningfully change their own lifestyle to adjust to the consequences. Clear cutting trees for instance, can be a preventative measure, but I'm sure home owners in the area would protest the environmental impact, the loss of privacy, the change in their lifestyle.

California has always been a state that, on paper, acknowledges the severity of climate change, but thus far, has been fighting tooth and nail to keep homes in wildfire prone areas. What I worry about is that California chooses to create a public option for homeowners insurance that is tax payer funded to subsidize at risk homes, increasing costs for everyone else. To me this would just be another form of climate change denial.

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I'm from a swing state, where you get used to smart people having conflicting opinions.

The people I know who don't embrace climate fear, recycling, etc. always cite hypocrisy as their most salient motivation. They see people like Al Gore and Leo di Caprio talking a big game about a climate catastrophy and then using as much energy as a whole village. They see their friends nitpick composting and then buy single MPG trucks to go camping in. They see cities rolling out fines for recycling badly and then everything going into the same truck when the garbagemen come by.

I don't think environmental activists realize the damage they do to their case by not living by what they preach relentlessly about. By being loudly critical of others without changing their own behavior, they give denialism space to entrench.

"It can't be that bad if even the people who are mad don't seem to actually care."

> I don't think environmental activists realize the damage they do to their case by not living by what they preach relentlessly about.

The ones who do that probably don’t care about their cause so much as having a cause.

Ah, the millennia old argument of "you cannot successfully proselytize donating money to the poor unless you live like a monk yourself".

I am very in favor of climate change mitigations through careful legislation and believe we are doing nowhere near enough. But I think a closer analogy is "proselytizing donating money without donating any money yourself" or in the extreme of making the problem worse -- "proselytizing donating money while robbing from the poor." That proselytizing while making the problem worse is more a problem with the proselytizer than the critic. But the worst of all is making it worse and actively fighting against remediation.

More like the decades old argument that if you keep getting caught fucking men in toilet stalls being gay can't be all that bad.

Is...that a decades old argument? Or is the argument: If you're fucking men in toilet stalls, stop arresting other men for doing the same and claiming no one should do that. AKA the rule of law.

I nitpick about little things like accuracy in scientific studies (hear: blatant bias, even admitted by the authors), and only one side of the opinion being funded for studies and not the others.

I myself used to be a staunch vegan, surrounded by friends who planned not to have kids. Well, they have kids now. That triggered my will to study the original documents and find a movement that is fundamentally dishonest.

The worst angst I have is, what if they were dishonest and still right. That would be terrible.

Eh, as someone who’s been vegan for a couple decades, ascetic for a solid chunk of that time, and active in various other ways to greater or lesser degrees, people will still shut down mentally when they don’t have the hypocrisy lever to pull.

People in the reactionary/denialist/antagonistic camp will just end with “okay yeah you’re right but I’m not changing/I don’t actually care/I accept that I do evil and shrug”.

People looking to inspire positive change being required to be perfect saints lest they and their movements be condemned seems like a hint that human psychology is not tuned to rise to this occasion.

That expectation of perfection is unrealistic. Humans are messy and bound to be hypocritical in countless ways.

The CEO of Phillip Morris may volunteer at the local children’s hospital and feed the homeless on weekends.

Yet his hypocrisy in doing good in his personal life while doing so much harm in his professional life doesn’t seem to interfere with his ability to do harm, in fact it likely helps.

The executive director of the nonprofit children’s hospital going out on weekends and beating stray dogs to death with a pipe, well his hypocrisy may very well end his ability to do good in his personal life.

It seems like we’re just destined to let people who do bad things without any pretense of doing good off the hook, while crucifying anyone who dares try to do a moral good who isn’t somehow perfectly aligned in their lifestyle, ideology, and entire life history. Despite the fact that the former may represent a large net negative to our world and the latter may represent a net positive.

TLDR: Even if the climate activists weren’t hypocrites, your friends would likely be no closer to embracing the terrible reality of climate change and the necessity of painful sacrifice to address it.

Perfectly put. Personally I am quite amazed at people who think this way. This is not adult level reasoning. It’s not something that will change by setting an example.

I just fear that large swathes of society are completely oblivious to what it means to live in a liberal civil society and how changes gets affected. The expectation of perfection seems like a result of being unfamiliar/unrealistic.

Historically, we do have examples of it working though :

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-rise-of-chr...

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-early-christian-strateg...

Though in our case it's a much harder issue :

How do you make and keep a powerful polity while staying militarily weak ? (Tanks / planes / nukes not being an option in a society that decided to de-industrialize.)

This also involves population : a post-industrial society, is likely to have its military strength based on population (like pre-industrial societies did, where agriculturalists overwhelmed hunter-gatherers) : how do you keep your population low without becoming weak ?

(Christian polities didn't exactly stay meek, more like the opposite (after a while)...)

At least values can be transmitted memetically, without genetical lineage, so keeping a stable national population is probably the least unworkable issue as long as immigration and assimilation are high enough...

If the only people we can find who are 'mad' are al gore and leo dicaprio, I'd suggest we have a selection problem. There are plenty of monks, ascetics, lawyers, product managers, entrepreneurs, bankers and trad wives who care and are doing quite a lot more than the average person.

Bad actors, uncommitted actors does not actually change the problem's existence. In an adjacent example consider here in LA. Before the fires, corruption in the homes for the homeless got some decent air. It does not actually change the need for homes for the homeless. Its been poorly implemented and allowed to be exploited. That doesn't mean the homeless should get shafted.

Here the question is quite literally about humanity. If one cannot connect with that, maybe they can connect with the need for a stable population that creates new workers and funds said person's retirement.

What is being preached about is that the way things are going will lead to larger, more unpredicted/out of cycle natural disasters. We are seeing that. Globally. We will all pay, whether its together and preventatively or independently one by one. History shows we do better when we're together.

True, but the relevance or importance of a message is orthogonal to the hypocrisy of the messenger.

Citing the hypocrisy of some messengers as a reason not to care or do anything just means someone really wants an excuse not to care or do anything anyway.

Everybody waiting for a critical mass of other people to tackle something is a good way to not tackle it.

Just talking generally here, not specifically about the climate.

> "Citing the hypocrisy of some messengers as a reason not to care or do anything just means someone really wants an excuse not to care or do anything anyway."

This is not quite the perspective. The issue is that if humans were to shift the climate in a targeted action, it would require an absolutely massive and concerted global effort - something's not only unlike anything else that's ever happened in history, but whose feasibility is strongly contradicted by just about everything in history, and present.

So when even the people that claim to care more than anything else about climate can't really be bothered to live these efforts, what are the chances of people who don't care, are antagonistic, and then let alone with geopolitics entering the picture - actually acting? The answer is, realistically, zero, which means it's necessary to look for different solutions. It's not an excuse to not care, but rather strongly suggestive that caring, in the ways proposed, is not going to be effective.

You know some weird analogy is that it's like teaching kids about sexual abstinence as opposed to teaching them how to use a condom. The first is what you want and it feels good and morally upstanding to go that route, but it's also just not realistic. The latter feels questionable and like it may even be encouraging undesired behavior, but it's also realistic about what's going to happen anyhow.

They’ll say that but it’s a rationalization, not a reason. They’re starting from “climate change is BS” and figuring out a reason for it. If it’s not this so-called hypocrisy then it’ll be something else.

People do need to understand that it’s not hypocritical to say there’s a need for a systemic change, and not live as if the change had already occurred. If the ship is headed for an iceberg, it’s not hypocritical of me to argue that the ship needs to be turned, while not also going out on the front and blowing to the side to add some insignificant turning force.

But if they understood that, they’d probably have enough systems-level thinking to realize that climate change is real and an actual problem.

It seems you have bought into the idea that climate change is caused by plastic straws and pickup trucks and not caused by corporations exploiting the planet and its people for shareholder value and profit.

If we really want to combat or even stop climate change, we need a total revolution of the economic and social order. Unfortunately at this point it would need to be authoritarian, as we obviously can’t count on billionaires to do anything in good faith.

We need to count on worldwide class consciousness, but starting in the West. I personally believe things are trending that way. The more climate related catastrophes, the more wars, the higher prices of groceries, rents increasing will cause massive civil unrest in the US and Europe.

The time of fancy cars, fancy houses, and unlimited wealth is coming to an end. The wealthy are the few, but the good news is the rest of us are many.

Zoom out:

>But in gauging the longer-term trend of what’s really happening with the fires, it’s necessary to go back much further. Data derived from written records from Cal Fire and the U.S. Forest Service dating back to 1919 show that wildfires, far from increasing, have actually declined over the last 100 years. And in fact the website of the National Interagency Fire Center previously noted that fires were at their very worst a century ago. (See data, research, and methodology for this article.)

>The data on the overall, century-long trend suggest that most of the 20th century represented an unusually low amount of fire, and what we’re seeing now is a return to the “normal” levels of fire of the early 1900s.

https://future.com/why-california-burns-the-facts-behind-the...

Thanks for that link. The data also shows that, over a longer (millennia) timescale, California is currently in a wet period.

Context is very important. Climate change is a critical issue, but solving it doesn't help California stop burning.

California leaving a wet period will make it burn less.

The problem isn't a lack of water. It's that we get a ton of water for a year or two. A bunch of stuff grows. Then we get no water for many years. All that stuff that grew in the wet years dries out. Eventually it burns.

If we just enter a dry period, there is only 1 step: no water, nothing grows. No more fires.

Yes, once it's fully into the dry period. The transition period involves a lot of fire.

Climate change is real, but people are vastly overstating the magnitude of its effect.

This is simply a fire prone region, and this was inevitably going to occur at some point, with or without climate change.

The government should have been more prepared for that.

This. Fire is an integral part of CA ecosystems and the native plant communities are dependent upon it. It does burn more frequently thanks to man, but citing climate change as a reason for the fires only makes you sound smart to the ill-informed.

Support in CA for rebuilding is really county based. Butte County is fine with you making the same mistake over again.

Sonomas cities are helpful by not rezoning to the fire codes they really should be. Napa is happy to let you keep a camper on your burned site for as long as it takes you to realize how you can’t afford to rebuild to 7A code.

Malibu was marked 7A years back and those folks can afford it.

> The tragic reality of climate change

Oh, please. I am so sick of this being shoved in front of people's faces as an indisputable cause for, well, everything. Might as well bring Odin and Zeus into it as causes...because they are just as valid.

I have lived in the Los Angeles area for nearly 40 years. The Santa Ana winds happen every year, multiple times per year. It never fails. The winds are strong and mostly directionally constant. Some years are worse than others. Average speeds are not monotonically increasing.

Guess what? Strong wind + a small fire + lots of fuel = massive fire.

It's that simple.

So please, pretty please, with sugar on top, stop with the nonsense. This was a case of bad governance, bad decision-making, misplaced priorities, complete lack of preparedness and, yes, some bad luck.

Here's a simple example of that: Why is it that we have to rent firefighting aircraft from Canada every year? Seriously? I understand costs. Well, I look around Los Angeles today and it is easy to call that argument to be criminally demented. We should OWN a large fleet of these planes and have them ready to deploy en-masse as needed. Again, it isn't like these winds surprise us!

Brush and vegetation (fuel) management are crucial. In our neighborhood, a few months ago, we received a notice from the fire department saying they were going to come around and inspect for overgrown vegetation. In this letter they said that the requirement was to not have trees or large bushes/plants within about 6 feet (~2 m) from the property line.

NOBODY CAME!

The inspections were not done at all, or, if they were conducted, they were done at an almost invisible scale. I have always been very responsible about this. I do not have large trees anywhere on my property. We live in a fire hazard zone with serious winds multiple times per year. My entire backyard is non flammable and my back fence is concrete block. My neighbors, on the other hand, they have massive highly flammable trees almost touching the fence we share and covering their entire property. Every other year massive branches break off due to strong winds. I have advised them that, if we ever have a fire, their trees are going to become massive ember manufacturing machines. They either don't understand, don't care or a combination of both. The point is: The fire department could have come around and enforced some kind of a reasonable safety standard. They have not. Ever.

And so, if a massive fire takes out the entire neighborhood, this lack of bad governance is what is going to result in a high cost in property and lives.

This isn't about climate change. That's ridiculous. This is about incompetence and misplaced priorities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Ana_winds

> Guess what? Strong wind + a small fire + lots of fuel = massive fire.

Yes, that's true. Yes, it is always more or less inevitable it these circumstances will happen. Most won't dispute that.

What climate change changes is the frequency. A suburb being wiped out once in 100 years is something we can collectively afford. But now, you have wild fires in the middle of winter. It's not once in 100 years any more.

Probably the best illustration of that is Great Barrier Reef, something in my back yard. People who aren't keen on blaming climate change repeatedly point out the reef has always suffered the setbacks we see now - like bleaching, crown of thorns that killed parts of it off. That's true. But is also true that now, unlike before, the reef is rapidly shrinking, especially in the northern regions where it's hotter, whereas before it wasn't.

The reason is the frequency of these die offs. Before, when a section of the reef was destroyed by something or other, in 10 years it would be recover, growing back. Now these things are happening at 5 year intervals and the interval is growing shorter. The reef is retreating as a consequence. It is no longer viable in the regions it once was.

The same is true for California. Climate change has made the frequency of these disasters increase. Whereas before you could afford to insure against 100 year event, you can't afford to insure against a 10 year event. Ergo, climate change is decreasing the amount of California that is habitable.

> What climate change changes is the frequency.

Where is the data you used to support that claim?

And, what is this "climate change" thing anyway. The climate has been changing since this planet was formed. So, yeah, climate is a part of the reality of living on this planet. And that's news, how?

You see, that's the problem with this issue. Of course climate change is real. Who would dispute that fact? What isn't real is instantly attributing EVERYTHING to climate change. Every fire we ever have in California is instantly attributed to climate change, and this is spoken as indisputable truth that nobody should dare doubt. Like fires materialize out of nowhere due to molecular alchemy caused by climate change. This is pure unadulterated insanity.

When someone says "it's climate change" we are all supposed to kneel down, bow our collective heads and accept it as the truth. Well, I call on Zeus then. Why not? Who is going to dispute that the fires and your reef example were not caused by Zeus being angry at us? Prove me wrong.

You know what was needed to prevent this disaster? Simple:

  Water: Reservoirs were EMPTY due to political decisions
  Funding: The fire department has been shrinking for many years.
           During that time the city has grown.
           And, during that time, they have been asking for more funding.
           Instead they got budget cuts and less fire stations.
  Execution: Companies who hire incompetent people fail.
             The same is true of government.
             People have been voting for the incompetent, and this is
             the result.
  Maintenance: The only vegetation control we have is when a wild fire
               burns down entire hills. If we don't control the fuel
               the results are predictable.
  Enforcement: People must be responsible for hardening their property
               against fires.

Reservoir:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-10/as-flame...

https://nbcmontana.com/news/nation-world/los-angeles-water-c...

Climate change?

The other day there was an interview with the Chief of the fire department. They printed and displayed, on a table, some thirty different documents (if not more) from the last several years. These documents show how they have been asking for help and got nothing at all.

Climate change?

There's an interview with a guy who saved his home and those of two of his neighbors...using a garden hose. Sure, a bit of luck had to play a part here. However, one thing he said during the interview is endemic to aspects of this event: He said that in the time he spent fighting the fires he never saw a single fire brigade come by to protect any of the surrounding homes. Not one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYQlnHdMqC0

Climate change?

> Climate change has made the frequency of these disasters increase.

And, out of the million other variables driving planetary forces, not a single one plays part on any of these events. It is decreed that it this is due to a single variable, climate change. Time to kneel down and accept it.

We cannot do a damn thing about climate change. Not one thing. The hubris in this religion is incredible. People are walking around talking about this like controlling a planetary scale effect is actually something we can do. It's madness.

I mean, the LA fires this week, when compared to planetary scale, were utterly insignificant in scale. A planetary rounding error. And we had no power when facing such a thing, while, in the same breath, people are saying things like "We have to control climate change!". The only reason we had some control is because the winds stopped for a couple of days.

Have we gone mad?

The planet has always changed, evolved and mutated. And we learned to live on it. It --the planet-- sets the rules. We have to live within them. If things are changing, we adapt. It isn't apocalyptic. It's just change. We can't fix it. Now, that would require Zeus.

> Where is the data you used to support that claim?

NASA ...

* https://science.nasa.gov/earth/natural-disasters/wildfires/s...

* https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/article/climate-change-pushes-...

* https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2912/satellite-data-record-sho...

And poor land management of course .. but also climate change.

> The planet has always changed, evolved and mutated.

Sure .. it had a molten surface once.

Specifically global climate (not weather) has been stable during the development of agricultural and technological humans.

Now, in the space of the last century, that stable climate is rapidly (relative to past changes) changing as a direct thermodymic result of human activity adding significant insulation to the atmosphere.

This has consequences. These consequences are a direct result of human behaviour.

Not one of the three articles you posted supports climate change as the root cause of anything, including the frequency of events. They all do resort to the "Thor is angry at us" method of ascribing causality where it does not exist. Why? Because, if you are a researcher the money keeps flowing as long as you support the cult. Any researcher who dares question this can look forward to driving for Uber. This cult has become a powerful political tool, and science has been distorted because of it.

Notes (quotes from articles you posted):

"How has only 11 percent of the west burned, yet the annual number of acres burned and the frequency of fire increased? It turns out that many fires are occurring in areas that have already experienced fires, known as burn-on-burn effects. About 3 percent—almost a third of the burned land—has seen repeated fire activity."

Interesting, isn't it. THE WORLD IS ON FIRE! THE WORLD IS ON FIRE! FIRES ARE HAPPENING MORE OFTEN!

Wait. Wait. What's going on? Only 11% has burned and a third of that is the same areas burning? Well, first, this does not look like the end of the world at all. This hints at other reasons. What are they?

Well, as is usually the case, none of these papers discuss or explore other potential drivers in detail. It's climate change. Kneel, bow down and accept everything we tell you to think and do.

OK, so, a few of us like to actually think. How about this:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/206097/resident-populati...

Population of California has gone from about 15 million to 40 million since 1960. Surely that had nothing to do with it. Right? What is the probability of more homes, vehicles, power lines, power consumption and accidents increasing any kind of event when the population of a region quadruples in size?

No, sorry, it's climate change. How dare I suggest that more people occupying a region might lead to more of anything. How dare I suggest that mismanagement and bad governance might actually be part of the problem.

Here's another fun one:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1067138/population-unite...

Population of the US went from 80 million in 1900 to over 300 million today. Yet, everything is caused by climate change. Everything. Well, that's what one of the articles clearly states anyway:

“But because the root cause is climate change, the most important path forward is to prevent further degradation and warming, which requires both individual and collective action.”

Once again, kneel down and submit. It's climate change, not a 4x population growth and everything that comes with it.

Well, at least one of the articles takes a glancing pass at this, while neglecting to mention population quadrupled:

"In the Western U.S., people are accidentally igniting fires all the time"

Four times more people folks. Does it stand to reason that you might have an increase of incidents that might lead to large fires? Nah, climate change.

"For example, in 2018 sparks flying from hammering a concrete stake into the ground in 100-degree Fahrenheit heat and sparks from a car's tire rim scraping against the asphalt after a flat tire were the causes of California's devastatingly destructive Ranch and Carr Fires, respectively"

Four times the population has no impact on the occurrence rate of potential fire-starting events?

Anyhow, this is why I react badly to the climate change card constantly being pulled out as the root cause of absolutely everything. The domain has become polluted with bad science and politics. It is dishonest and likely damaging to society. From my perspective it seems very difficult to list it as the root cause because almost 100% of the time people neglect to include a million other variables in the conversation.

Be careful with buying into a cult. Human sacrifices were justified with such things.

I’m sympathetic to both sides of the ranting here. It is simultaneously true that

(1) man made climate change exacerbates these things

(2) california state and local government is a bottomless wellspring of incompetence

And also, it is true that we will adapt to man made climate change. But many things in the biosphere (e.g. corals in the GBR) cannot adapt on these timescales. Extinction is forever, it is an incomprehensible loss.

> But many things in the biosphere (e.g. corals in the GBR) cannot adapt on these timescales. Extinction is forever, it is an incomprehensible loss.

In many ways that's the other red herring. Extinction = bad. More generally, change = bad. I think I can say more things have gone extinct on this planet than exist today.

Some 200 million years ago all the continents were fused into one. I can't even imagine the cataclysmic losses and changes this brought over time. Yet, life and the planet evolved, adapted and survived.

Sure, the time scale was millions of years. I posit that there is no difference here and today. We, humans, and a very small number of us at that, are the ones who are exaggerating the importance of time. A thousand years ago we would not have known anything about changes happening all over the globe. We did not have the kind of global visibility into things we have today. It is quite possible that many things changed massively during the centuries and we had no idea.

If we didn't have politicians and cultists constantly pounding us with climate change as the cause for everything, people would not think life was different in any meaningful way. And that's the fact for everyone on this planet, except for a few who are being driven into irrational panic by the cult. We even have child abuse, with Greta Thunberg perhaps being the most visible example.

In many ways this is no different from what religious extremism does to people. Using such things as the fear of going to hell to justify anything and demanding uncontested belief and obedience, sometimes under threat of punishment. Climate change is a new religion in this sense.

Extinction is permanently destroying genetic information. An analogy might be spending 100,000,000 years and countless trillions of kJ to train a neural network, and then simply rm -rf the weights.

On the concrete example of corals, scientists are investigating compounds found only in corals that could help with treatment of asthma, cancers, and HIV. This has no value to us? And again, corals. Many mass coral die-offs have occurred over the last several millions of years. Coral species, even sensitive ones, survived without going extinct, because the die offs were relatively slow, taking place over tens of thousands of years. This is not true today, specifically because of the speed and extent of ocean warming and acidification. Many examples like this. It's the speed. Continents moved centimeters per year; temperatures have moved whole degrees in decades.

We have scientific evidence on biosphere stability 1,000 or 100,000 years ago. It was more stable than it is now! It was more stable because we did not have anthropogenic climate change! (among other things, habitat loss, pollution, etc).

People focus on climate change because it is caused obviously and directly by many things we do day to day, like driving and eating red meat.

> People focus on climate change because it is caused obviously and directly by many things we do day to day, like driving and eating red meat.

I think people focus on climate change because it is being pushed through political and business narratives from every angle. Without this type of ideological carpet bombing the average person would tell you everything is fine.

Aside from that, I submit that our contribution to climate change is a small part of it and not, as you put it, caused by many things we do. Your statement makes it sound like we are the one-and-only cause. I am not sure that's the way you meant it. I am not attacking your comment, simply pointing out that being precise with language can be important.

Here's an interesting read:

https://www.dailyhistory.org/What_is_the_history_of_wildfire...

They talk about 1.2 million acre fires in the 1800's and how fire suppression policies backfired. The argument presented is that letting forests burn through is healthy, whereas allowing diseased, old and dead trees to remain actually increases risk factors.

One of the key things various climate change narratives tend to ignore is that these massive fires, which occur in many parts of the world, contribute very significant amounts of CO2 and other matter to the atmosphere. It isn't uncommon for a two-week fire to produce an amount of CO2 that is equivalent to or greater than all the CO2 produced by road transportation in California. So, the culprit is always cars and cows and not the reality that such things as fires are here to stay. This is where mismanaging our forests can have truly negative and deadly consequences.

There are other fires that have been burning for hundreds of years (mines). Here's one:

https://www.iflscience.com/the-worlds-oldest-fire-has-been-b...

None of these things fit the narratives needed by politicians (who use climate change as a tool for votes), business (to make money) and academia (to grab grant funding). Instead they reduce a complex multivariate problem into a silly "human = bad" narrative to keep the ball rolling. If we were truly honest about most of these things the entire cult would collapse.

BTW, none of this means we should not clean up our act. Of course we should. We simply need to stop claiming we are all going to die and we have to save the planet. We are not going to die. The planet does not need saving. And, if it did, we would never be able to do it.

> Where is the data you used to support that claim?

Remember "Inconvenient Truth"? It was 20 years ago, but I'm guessing you were around at the time. There was not lot of warming then, and he was making predictions about what would happen decades into the future. Brave man I say, and he took a lot of shit over it. Not entirely without reason - the high temperatures in 1998 did made his thesis look a little wobbly for a while. But then artic ice cap disappeared in the summer, the monsoon has retreated north and so Papua New Guinea is facing dry times, glaciers have retreated causing rivers to dry up, the earth has just had it's hottest year since thermometers were invented and Australia's Great Barrier Reef is shrinking as it dies off under heat stress. His predictions are looking pretty good now - a little under done if anything.

Things like record and consistently rising temperature is what I consider to be the data you asked for. But you probably won't believe me. That's OK. After this outburst I won't be believing much you say either:

> we are all supposed to kneel down, bow our collective heads and accept it as the truth

Is that bullshit? Surely it's false - it seems unlikely someone has asked you to do that. But you don't care, whatever it takes to win the argument, right? That's the definition of a bullshitter.

Fortunately we don't have to believe each other. Climate deniers decided to have a go at getting Inconvenient Truth banned (I guess they like the Musk definition of free speech - you're free to say anything Musk agrees with), and took it to court. The court ruled it was broadly correct. https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=187. So we don't have to argue about it, as the good old US of A ruled on the matter. How convenient.

> what is this "climate change" thing anyway

As I understand it, it is a theory first put forward in the 1970's that said rising atmospheric CO2 levels would cause rising temperatures. It was largely based on the physics of C02 spectral absorption because back then temperatures hadn't moved much. So it was theoretical prediction and not surprisingly it was largely ignored. But then the temperatures started to rise in the way they predicted ... and here we are.

> We cannot do a damn thing about climate change

Actually, the theory that predicted climate change would happen gave a single and very clear reason for it happening - rising CO2 levels. Stop that and you eventually put and end to climate change. That's what the physics says anyway. Now I've written is down it seems pretty simple - no? A 5 year old would have no trouble with the basic principles.

> Have we gone mad?

It's usually called the denial phase, not madness.

> rising CO2 levels. Stop that and you eventually put and end to climate change.

And that, precisely, is what we cannot do. Ever. It is impossible.

Why?

Well, here's the simple, as you put it, 5-year-old reason:

https://i.imgur.com/wbHptnf.png

Now, take a crayon and erase the US and the "Rest of the world" portions of the pie.

How?

Captain Kirk beams all of the US and whatever is in that other slice of the chart into space next Monday. Gone. Not even cows left behind.

And we still pump 65% into the atmosphere. And, BTW, this is from 2019.

The very idea that we can stop CO2 and get to "net zero" is so laughable that, again, to use your term, even a five year old could understand it.

Just last week, here in California, the fires we had likely produced more crap going into the atmosphere than all of our vehicles combined for an entire year.

I mean, the idea is just silly. If erasing the entire US and say, China, from the planet can't neutralize it --much less reverse it-- why are we pushing lies about this stuff?

BTW, this isn't about denying climate change, human contribution or the science behind what CO2 does in the atmosphere. This is about the madness this cult has become, one where everything is attributed to climate change. As I said in one of my other posts, we might as well invoke Odin, Thor or Zeus, because the arguments are equally valid.

Some idiot starts a massive brush fire by hammering a metal stake into the ground and the only narrative that emerges is that the cause was climate change (BTW, that happened and it was one of the largest fires in CA history).

We don't maintain our forests, mitigate fuel availability, ensure readiness and water supplies and the root cause is always climate change.

I have family members and friends who almost lost their homes in these fires. I have friends and acquaintances who did lose their homes, burned down to the ground. I am sick and tired of religious climate bullshit driving the narrative to the point where people are put in mortal danger and lose everything. We should be addressing real problems, not be driving by a cult.

Sorry if this offends you. When you lose your home or someone close to you does, you tend to lose your patience for nonsense and bullshit. This has to stop. Real science has to come back to the narrative. If we engaged in real science, these politicians would be laughed off the stage, climate change profiteering would be severely punished and we would finally go after real measures and mitigations for a changing world. The planet isn't going to kill us, we are, if we continue to be stupid. Just look at what happened here in the span of a single week.

> Sorry if this offends you.

Actually, it caused me to chuckle. In your image you erased the US but kept the biggest piece of the pie - China. As it happens China is moving to to renewables faster than the USA, or most of the rest of the world for that matter.

I wish I could say China and the the other countries that are replacing fossil because they place the future of mankind above all else. To think we could respond to looming catastrophe in a sane and robust way would bode well. The reality is renewables are cheaper. The reduction of CO2 is being driven by bankers, not greenies. Even if it was a net negative for the planet I don't think you could stop it. A sharp reduction in mankind's CO2 provision looks more like its inevitable as opposed to impossible.

As for your rant about fires, I'm Australian. We've seen a few fires overrunning cities here recently. The California fires are causing a bit of hand wringing here, believe it or not. We have been saving costs by sharing man power and equipment with California. During our winter we send stuff to California's summer, and visa versa. Now you're having fires in the winter - so that's going to end.

As you said much earlier fires, well summer fires have always happened. Australia reacted a decade or so ago with very stringent building codes to cope with fire. I'm building a house and it raised the cost of the house by about 10% and limits what sort of things you can build. In the light of that you're railing on about dry fire hydrants is kinda funny. Australia's solution to that is it's mandatory for any dwelling in a fire zone to have 3000 gallons of water on the property. A pool will do. Plus a whole lot of other stuff that I won't bore you with, but when I looked at the aftermath of the recent fires if California they looked to be largely absent in the homes that burnt down.

I can't tell you the reason for that, but I can tell you that the same would be true for many Australian suburbs, despite the rules. They are only a decade or so old, and houses last a lot longer than that. So why didn't we have them before? After all we have mandatory building codes that insist every home built after 1960 or so withstand a category 5 cyclone, and as a consequence most of our housing stock in cyclone prone areas is cyclone proof. (Those codes were introduced when an entire city, Darwin, was literally flattened as if a steam roller had run over the place.)

But does raise the question doesn't it? Evidently Australia has no problem with imposing strict building codes when catastrophe's like fire can wipe out entire suburbs, so why then didn't we do for fires 60 years ago, as we did for cyclones? It wasn't if as bush fires burning down houses hasn't always been a thing, as you say. The thing is - those houses that burnt down were always where in the middle of nowhere and often where some idiot built on a ridge line for the view.

Then we got hit by the Canberra fire in 2003. It was emitting 2 mega watts / meter. It literally sterilised the ground by burning the underground roots. It eventually stopped on its own accord just before it hit Canberra (the nation's capital). Which was just as well, as the fire fighters said it was unstoppable. You can see a video of it here: https://esa.act.gov.au/cbr-be-emergency-ready/bushfires/fire... Then we had another one outside of Sydney (our biggest city) in a national park of about the same intensity. Again nothing survived. The seeds of Eucalypt's that rely on fire to reproduce were incinerated. Nothing grew back for years - in what had been a lush national park. (East Australia averages over 1 meter of rain per year, so it's pretty wet - more than enough to support a rain forest. But climate change predicts more extremes including cold and dry. That year it was very dry.) But it also stopped of its own accord before it hit suburbs. Then the inevitable happened. It seemed like 1/2 of Australia was on fire at the time, and this time suburbs were wiped out and people died. Now we've got ourselves a new building code.

Australia has had Western civilization for 200 years, yet it's only since 2000 or so that we've seen fires anything like this. Rather unfortunately for you, that happens to neatly correspond to the went we started to feel the effects of climate change. We didn't need those bush fire building codes before. Now we do.

I guess there are some out there who would say we should have introduced those codes in the 1970's when Hansen predicted what was going to happen. It definitely seems like you have it in for your local pollies for not predicting and making allowances for wild fires in winter. I disagree, theories are just theories. I'm all in favour of waiting until a few houses burn down proving the theory true. But now it's flaming obvious. Some places are getting less habbitable, some more.

Interestingly, Northern Australia, the place that needed those cyclone building codes, doesn't suffer from forest fires, yet. But as I said earlier, the monsoon is moving north. We used to get cyclones every year. But this the hottest year on record with the summer 2/3's gone - nothing. Not even a hint of one. Maybe we won't need those cyclone building codes soon. But another consequence is the top end is drying out. A famine could happen in Papua New Guinea - almost unheard of. And North Queensland may need to introduce stronger fire codes for buildings. I'd lay odds it won't happen until we lose a suburb or two.

But back to you and California. You've just had a unique event - a wild fire in winter. You rave about how dumb the pollies are for not preparing for this unique event. You attack them for leaving a weir empty for repairs in the middle of your low fire season. Yet if someone had said here "hey climate change is a thing, bad fires in winter are going to be a thing, we need that weir fixed" the red haze would have descended and you would have called them a moron right? You would do that despite the fact the very year they said that was the hottest ever recorded by a thermometer. That's nothing special you say. Instead what was special was an idiot banging a metal stakes into ground. Seriously? You are blaming metal stakes, when every year you have bigger idiots deliberately lighting bush fires? There is nothing special about idiots, empty weirs or any of the other things you list. All have been with us for centuries.

If a politician said "we have an outbreak of special circumstances like fire bugs, ergo I'm going to impose building codes that raise the price new homes by 10%" I would be a little concerned. But when ours said "the recent worsening bush fires are apparently driven by climate change and the science says it's going to get worse, so we are raising building standards" I thought "very prudent". You seem to want your pollies use the former excuse. That's just ... weird.

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