It’s on— millions of leafy-lane owning California homeowners are looking around their neighborhoods this morning and many do not like what they see.
I am a climate-change-denying- it can’t happen here- Northern California homeowner. I was until Wednesday. The massive wildfires in Los Angeles can’t happen up here. We still get rain, our Diablo’s ( dry hot winds from the Great Basin blowing westward toward San Francisco Bay Area) are too infrequent, not as strong, and the odds of all the factors lining up for a true conflagration are just too long and improbable. Right— go ahead— you make up in your head whatever you want to believe— see how that works out.
All our climate mitigation efforts, and the noble attempt to build out our electricity grid, electric power cars, and alternative non-carbon powered sources has been insufficient to the task. We were warned not to allow things to get out of hand, but here we are this year crossing the 1.5 degree higher and hotter threshold.
California’s fabulous climate is simply too ripe for picking. We are now drier and hotter, our evaporation rates and lower for longer humidity levels prime our nearby lovely trees to turn into tiki torches at the first spark.
Popular destinations include Reno, Las Vegas and Phoenix. They’ve all got their problems.
Here in Palm Springs where I am for the moment there is nothing much that can burn so wildfire threat is low. That’s all fine but we can’t exactly move 10-15 million people to the Coachella Valley. That’s won’t work.
As a thought experiment with friends living in nearby Altadena I wondered what if anything they could do to fireproof their home. They could cut down all the trees on their lot and it would still be vulnerable to wildfire. Remove all bushes, trees, and flammable ground cover still wouldn’t do it. Maybe a roof made of inflammable materials, specialty valves that close all roof vents, all manner of eves suppression design work, maybe that would do it? Maybe, but who wants to live like that? People live along the slopes of the San Gabriel Valley because it is beautiful, because it is crowded, because we are the most populated state in the union and give me a break we all have to live somewhere.
Maybe we tear down all the single family dwellings, we build fire resilient towers, sky high condos from sea to San Bernardino, maybe that would do it—
What we have here is a climate emergency and once the smoke is gone and the rebuilding begins our best will come up with a better plan than to simply rebuild and wait for the next fire.
As I said everyone living along a leafy-lane in California is looking around their neighborhood and they are wondering what in the hell to do now.
