Many suspicious fires

This is what kills me about this issue: these fires aren't any more suspicious than they were a few years ago, arsonists have always existed and will continue to cause destruction when and where they can (and should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law possible). What's different is that scientists have been warning the world for decades now that what we are seeing now is precisely what would happen - more severe and extended droughts, more extreme weather swings (record highs - like CA recording the hottest temp ever on Earth last month - and record lows, changes in regional precipitation, mega-wildfires, more intense and/or more frequent hurricanes, loss of biodiversity, acidifying oceans, etc which would result in harder to recover from disasters, and yet the Republican Party overall in general has denied the science, denied reality, and continued to support the miniscule number of deniers' claims. Trump himself has stated over and over again he doesn't believe in climate change (nor in vaccines once upon a time, funny how that's changed now that there's a pandemic which will impact his ability to get re-elected), and did so again during his most recent visit to areas devastated by historic fires. Not one scientist will tell you that fires are caused by climate change, what they do say is that they are exacerbated once started by conditions increasingly worsened by climate change. We are seeing the effects year after year in continuing to break our greenhouse gas atmospheric concentrations, our "hottest year" records, "largest fire" records, and "most hurricanes by X date" records.

There are always arsonists, not a single soul will dispute that, it's even mentioned in this article shared by Elk Creek Fire a couple of days ago. That the USFS hasn't been managing the overgrowth of our forests well for nearly a hundred years now is nothing new, cutting back on prescribed burns and aggressively containing fires that do start even in low-risk areas. People have been camping that entire time and starting fires, and yet mega-fires and a constant fire season are a recent phenomenon - the difference? Increasing temperatures, worsening droughts, overload of fuels, and more people in the wildland-urban interface on top of all that fuel. All variables we knew were going to happen if we did nothing to mitigate anything, and here we are because of a lack of political will to do anything about our looming fire danger, efforts by oil and gas companies to continue their status quo, greed-driven industry through lobbying, fighting efforts to adapt to sustainable energy sources, and supporting sketchy scientists at laughable "foundations" to push confusion about the science so the public has little will to demand change. Politicians keep ignoring the issue because they can, they cut fire prevention budgets, and rake in the dough while the public suffers the consequences and has to keep paying more for insurance, and to rebuild lost homes and livelihoods.

Of course more burned in prehistoric times - who cares? 1.) the climate was different then and, more importantly, 2.) humans weren't there to suffer the results. We have to deal with the reality we are facing now so more people don't die or lose their homes and businesses (and our economy isn't further harmed), and that means we need to get serious about addressing climate change, how we manage our land and growth/development, and how we respond to disasters of all types. We need to better mitigate our forests, being we're more proactive than reactive, so we build safely, responsibly, and sustainably. We need to rebuild coastal wetlands we've drained to build upon that provide a buffer for hurricanes allowing them to lose strength before reaching towns and cities where they cause loss of life when they hit, and soaring costs to remediate and rebuild. We need to start incentivizing people to move back from coastlines that will become inundated by rising sea levels. We need to stop building homes in too-risky of areas, or those who choose to live there need to understand that they won't receive bailouts when their homes are destroyed because at some point we will run out of money to rebuild areas that should be left undeveloped. Every mile of concrete poured, every forest clear cut, every gallon of fossil fuels that are dug up out of the ground and burned will keep making this situation worse and it requires a coordinated, worldwide serious effort to address it - individuals only changing their behaviors will not cause enough of an effect.

This long article (mentioned above) is well worth your time to read:
They Know How to Prevent Megafires. Why Won’t Anybody Listen?
This is a story about frustration, about watching the West burn when you fully understand why it’s burning — and understand why it did not need to be this bad.
by Elizabeth Weil, ProPublica | Aug. 28, 2020

“What’s it like?” Tim Ingalsbee repeated back to me, wearily, when I asked him what it was like to watch California this past week. In 1980, Ingalsbee started working as a wildland firefighter. In 1995, he earned a doctorate in environmental sociology. And in 2005, frustrated by the huge gap between what he was learning about fire management and seeing on the fire line, he started Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology. Since then FUSEE has been lobbying Congress, and trying to educate anybody who will listen, about the misguided fire policy that is leading to the megafires we are seeing today.

So what’s it like? “It’s just … well … it’s horrible. Horrible to see this happening when the science is so clear and has been clear for years. I suffer from Cassandra syndrome,” Ingalsbee said. “Every year I warn people: Disaster’s coming. We got to change. And no one listens. And then it happens.”

We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire.

The pattern is a form of insanity: We keep doing overzealous fire suppression across California landscapes where the fire poses little risk to people and structures. As a result, wildland fuels keep building up. At the same time, the climate grows hotter and drier. Then, boom: the inevitable.

A six-word California fire ecology primer: The state is in the hole.

A seventy-word primer: We dug ourselves into a deep, dangerous fuel imbalance due to one simple fact. We live in a Mediterranean climate that’s designed to burn, and we’ve prevented it from burning anywhere close to enough for well over a hundred years. Now climate change has made it hotter and drier than ever before, and the fire we’ve been forestalling is going to happen, fast, whether we plan for it or not.

How did we get here? Culture, greed, liability laws and good intentions gone awry.