Mr. Bruce Hall speculates on the causes for the severity of the LA fires:
I remember being in Lompoc, CA in 1968 for a month of military training. Since there wasn’t enough temporary housing on base, I rented a small apartment nearby. One morning, I got up and the hill near the apartment complex was burning. No one seemed concerned. I questioned one of other tenents [sic] about why nothing was being done and the response was essentially that this happened every year and don’t worry about it. In the 50-60 years intervening, the population has spread to areas where these fires were “no big deal”… not just near LA, but in many areas along the coast of California. Policies that allowed controlled burns or forest thinning were abandoned in the “let nature take its course” philosophy. And then the population spread out to vulnerable areas.
https://www.newsweek.com/controlled-burns-california-forest-management-los-angeles-fires-2012492So, now nature is taking its course through stick frame homes and everyone seems so surprised. Sure, it’s dry in California, but not nearly as dry as it has been in the past. So the climate change nonsense has no bearing on the current situation. It’s all about people, policies, and poor decisions. But, hey, now it’s a great opportunity for the YIMBY advocates to walk the talk after they bulldoze the remnants of homes and businesses.
I’ll skip over the fact that the Pacific Palisades area has been developed for quite a few years, and given that the fire consumed houses on the shore, I’m not sure Mr. Hall’s preferred cause is explanatory for this destruction.
Notes: Beach front properties are left destroyed by the Palisades Fire, in this aerial view, Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025 in Malibu, Calif. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill). Source: CBS42.
Let me instead present some data on whether it’s not nearly as dry as it has been in the past, not in geological time, but in the context of human time.
Figure 1: Palmer Modified Drought Index (PMDI) for California Division 6 – “South Coast Drainage”. LOESS smoother in red line. Blue box by author denotes 1968. Source: NOAA, accessed 1/13/2025.
Yeah, sure it’s been drier in California in the past — but only in recent years. Mr. Hall’s visit to California in 1968 was actually in a relatively drought-free period.
Hence, I’m not sure “nature taking its course” is the right characterization, given that we continue to emit vast amounts of greenhouse gases year after year, with many crying global warming is a hoax.
Update: Reconstruction of PDSI in Division 6 region, from MacDonald (2007).
Red arrow roughly at 1861-62.
Misinformation about the California fires has gotten so bad that the State, local police departments and FEMA have all decided they need to devote resources to debunking misinformation:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/la-fires-burn-california-fema-false-rumors-misinformation/
Brucie, once again, is part of the problem. Menzie, as he often does, has set the record straight.
LA is exceptionally dry this year. these fires would not have happened in a typical year. but last year there was excessive water that resulted in growth that died in todays drought. tinder. add in the santa ana winds and you have a problem. fires normally move up a mountain, not down a mountain towards the ocean. bruce hall is simply trying to make a partisan hack argument, as usual. bruce hall has no credibility, and his primary goal in life appears to be a desire to make himself look stoooopid.
No data or rational connection to observed facts – that’s Bruce.
Off topic – UK market wobbles as a warning to Republicans:
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/government-bond-yield
https://www.investing.com/currencies/gbp-usd
UK bonds and the GBP are gettingtrashed. Those market troubles are budget driven. The new government, burdened with the bad decisions of the prior government, is having a hard time getting a budget together.
Recently, Professor Frankel provided a look into the future in which U.S. markets suffer from the inability of Congressional Republicans to face budget reality:
“Each of the two Republican factions saw its role as refusing to raise the debt limit or pass a new budget until the others gave in. It was the familiar game of chicken, this time between these two factions, that led to a month-long government shutdown and downgrading of the US by all three credit-rating agencies. That in turn precipitated the crash in stock and bond markets.”
https://econbrowser.com/archives/2025/01/guest-contribution-retrospective-on-the-first-year-of-trumps-second-term
And by the way, Trump just had a conversation with the new Senate Majority Leader, John Thune, during which he told to get his debt-ceiling ducks in a row. Problem is, Republicans want to blame Democrats for increasing the debt ceiling, and that can’t happen if it’s part of the budget reconciliation. It needs a separate bill, and that very likely means a fight among Republicans – threatening their own party members with default.
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5080266-trump-presses-congress-debt-limit/
Fingers crossed that Frankel is mistaken, but it’s already obvious how he could be right.
Controlled burns were not policy back in 1968; we were still in the grip of fire prevention. It wasn’t until the 1990s that controlled burns became a thing, and even then, adoption was slow. This post by Kevin Drum https://jabberwocking.com/why-dont-we-do-more-prescribed-burning-an-explainer/ is an excellent overview of the topic and also talks about the difficulty of fire management in narrow, steep canyons with chaparral and hurricane force winds.
Wha…wha…what??!! Bruce got his facts wrong??!!
It was a shock to me too, but I guess it happens even to the best of us!!
Krugman has taken the loathsome chatter from the right about California as an opportunity to remind us that Republican states mostly suck up money from the federal government while California, along with New Jersey, Massachusetts, New York, Illinois, Colorado…Democratic states…pay in:
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/in-praise-of-california
States run by the “party of small government” live off of government money from “radical left-wing” states. Title 1 education funds go to Republican states. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance money goes to Republican states. A whole bunch more Medicaid money would go to Republican states, if Republican politicians hadn’t voted to keep that money away from their poor people.
Why do rich Democratic states end up doling out money to poor Republican states? Because Republican states are less prosperous than Democrats states, largely because of poor educational attainment in Republican states. Poor education keeps poor people poor, the same way poor access to health care keeps them sick; it’s a feature, not a bug. So when Elon and Rama-what’s-his-name talk about cutting $2 trillion (or is it only $500 billion?) from the federal budget, you know who will suffer most, yes? People who live in states that voted for Elon and Rama-what’s-his-name, that’s who.
Sorry, those of us who are old enough to have taken the required California history courses know the facts about the “context of human time.” Current weather/climate conditions there are not unusual, there are floods followed by droughts;repeat.
https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/lost-la/how-a-19th-century-drought-gave-us-the-l-a-we-know-today
“The winter of 1861-1862 was much worse. The Santa Ana River nearly wiped out Anaheim, and much of Los Angeles County was a shallow lake for weeks.
The summer that followed was unusually hot, but the winter rain had made the range bloom. Herds increased on a sea of grass. There were now more than 70,000 head of cattle on the coastal plain; three-fifths of them belonged to native Californios who might retire their debts with another year or two of good weather. Steers were selling at $7 a head in Los Angeles.
A Great Dying
But hardly any rain fell in the winter of 1862-1863, less than four inches in Los Angeles. “We have had no rain yet,” his foreman wrote to rancher Abel Stearns in February 1863, “there is no grass, and the cattle are very poor.” Spring brought scorching Santa Ana winds, dust storms and millions of grasshoppers to eat what was left of the withered forage. Only a trace of rain fell in November, and the dying began.
“Thousands and thousands of cattle have died, and are dying, and those that are left … stalk about like spectres,” Los Angeles businessman H. D. Barrows told the San Francisco Examiner in 1864.”
wkevinw: Thanks for the lesson. Spent two decades in CA, so know a bit about this. Understand there have been periods of drought in CA, although I was referring to the period back to late 1800’s. For a longer period, we have this estimate of PDSI back to 40AD MacDonald (2007).
Well, for non-anecdotal information: https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/01/25/california-drought-past-dry-periods-have-lasted-more-than-200-years-scientists-say/
There is nothing particularly unusual about California’s dry condition. What exacerbates “dry conditions” are a population that exceeds the “natural” resources now that the river bed is concrete (to avoid flooding!). Combine that with lack of clearing underbrush and stick homes close together and fires can get out of control.
As for fires consuming houses along the shore… why wasn’t ocean water used as a source for firefighting efforts? Not environmentally friendly? How environmentally friendly is all of that rubble? Oh, well, they are starting to use that ocean water… reluctantly. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/planes-are-dumping-ocean-water-to-fight-the-los-angeles-fires-heres-why-using-saltwater-is-typically-a-last-resort But it’s a “last resort”. Too little; too late.
btw, southern Caifornia is about as dry as Wisconsin and Michigan. Perhaps management of the landscape is practiced differently out west. Perhaps they want to go “natural” out there.
https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap.aspx
California tends to repeat historical follies. From October, 2024 (that’s pre-LA fires): https://cepr.net/publications/us-forest-service-decision-to-halt-prescribed-burns-in-california-is-history-repeating/
I stand by my original comment. Thanks.