Timothy Birdnow

California is flaming.

No, I am not talking about San Francisco's gay population. I'm talking L.A., the city of the demons angels.

Wildfires are out of control in America's #2 city, with no apparent end in sight.

Southern California has been battered by ferocious winds with gusts as high as 99 miles per hour. These are the infamous "Santa Ana winds" that bedevil SoCal so frequently and spread wildfires.

Of course the Golden State makes it easy for that to happen; they refuse to remove deadwood from forests out of environmentalist fantasies (believing it's a "pristine forest" but failing to understand "pristine" forests have occasional mass fires) and by refusing to store adequate amounts of water out of environmentalist concernes for snails and bait fish.

And while it will be petroleum that will allow this fire to be put out (by fueling emergency vehicles like fire trucks and running water pumps and the like) the people who brought us these conditions will double down, blaming fossil fuels and "climate change" when in fact it was always terrible public land use and other policies rooted in the superstition of the environmentalist movement.

California sufferes from it's most attractive feature - lots of sunshine. The very thing that draws people means it is fire prone. Most water vapor in the atmosphere settles out in the Sierras, or is drive up north into Oregon and Washington (and tto a lesser extend norther Cal.) Weather in California almost always comes off the Pacific and almost none from North America (unlike the rest of us who get a lot of it from the Gulf of Mexico or from Canada.) Right now we are in La Nina conditions in the Pacific, and La Nino generally causes hot, dry conditions along the Pacific rim, especially in California and in Australia. January is usually California's wettest time, but not this year as La Nina sucks all the moisture towards India and China.

For those who are unaware, La Nina (little girl) is a cooling of the surface waters in the south Pacific off the coast of South America, and it changes the air patterns in the Pacific basin. It's counterpart - La Nina - does the reverse and usually brings bot and we conditions to the basin. The ENSO (El Nino Southern Oscillation) has a profound impact on global climate with effects seen all over the globe, not just in the Western hemisphere.

At any rate the L.A. area was prime for wildfires. And now the region is ablaze.

For all of my SoCal friends, particularly reader Bill, please do be careful and stay safe.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 11:18 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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