OT: Typical Globlist

Altadena is 60% non-white, providing high-quality emergency services to

Embers can fly up to 20 km depending on fuel and weather conditions, and during high winds fire breaks are useless.

Observe embers from this doorbell cam:

Well, I take your points on board. HOWEVER, there is still so many things which don't add up about these fires. Something stinks....

I don't doubt embers could have spread the original fires. What's puzzling is how the hell could they have got massive and out of control in the first place.

Bad idea. He'll start throwing in barbs and before you know it, you've been hooked and sucked in again. Old Bill's a master angler!

There's some dude called Gavin Newsome and he's done this *seriously* bizarre interview about the fires which throws up a *lot* of questions. The damn fire's not even out properly and he's said he's got some sort of plan to 'move forward' with some property speculators he's spoken with and the 'lawyers are already working on it' and so on! I'm thinking - 'WTAF??" This is all far too sudden. Has he got the agreement of the landowners for these plans? Has he even asked them?? I can't find the clip right now, due to the lateness of the hour and I have to go, but you *must* watch it! It's bound to be on YT somewhere.

The hills above Altadena/Pasadena have had lots of burns controlled and otherwise in recent years but after a certain percentage of the larger trees are gone (from climate change or logging/development or otherwise) they controlled burns don't do s*it except let even more flammable invasive species in. The hills up there were covered in foxtail:

the stuff burns like newsprint

As noted, his saying anything intelligent about electronic design is extremely improbable.

And all he does is fling coarse insults, whether I respond to him or not.

He doesn't matter.

Those little sparks should not set houses on fire.

No puzzle: dry wind and lots of fuel.

Maybe because we have thousands of times more sensors than we had in previous millenia.

But an increase of a maybe a hundred milliKelvins does not explain the LA fires.

and Los Angeles

It takes really stupidity to let a house to be burned up by a grass fire.

The word "Pasadena" means "valley" in Ojibwe, the nearest Ojibwe lived somewhere around Minnesota in the 1800s. it was chosen by white settlers from Indiana.

Other than its relatively mild climate the area was probably not super-duper ideal for large-scale human habitation, experiencing windstorms droughts and fires pretty regularly. It's not strictly desert but it's close.

Sort of the 1800s CA equivalent of selling Florida swampland but capital does as capital does.

The Santa Ana winds make conditions more like a fire hurricane, unless the buildings are made of fireproof materials what are you gonna do, spray every burning ember that the wind carries?

It isn't hard to build a house that won't ignite from an ember. Or to site it somewhere that's not likely to have a firestorm.

A hundred years of putting out small fires pretty much guarantees big fires.

In that picture you posted, there were substantial patches of unharmed vegitation right among the ashes of countless buildings. It doesn't make sense.

John Larkin's idea of "reality" is what his propaganda sources want to tell him.

Intense fires are unexpectedly good at igniting adjacent structures.

This was an unprecedented fire, and calling people criminally stupid for not anticipating how bad it was going to be is arm-chair quarter-backing.

The Great Fire of London happened in 1666 and Robert Hooke and Christopher Wren drew quite a few conclusions from it.

Australians learned quite a bit from the Black Friday on the 13th January 1939. That was 86 years ago - more than seven dozen years.

Commercial interests aren't always interested in putting into practice all stuff we know about making devastating fires less likely.

If you like living inside a mutual admiration society and approving each other's fatuous, but ever-so-emotionally-satisfying nonsense.

We didn't get to find out about the natural cyclical variation until anthropogenic global warming made looking carefully at the climate a matter of urgency.

The unnatural anthropogenic global warming the Cursitor Doom and John Larkin are foolishly skeptical about is an even bigger menace, but they prefer to ignore it.

What's even more improbable is that John Larkin would pay any attention to it if it happened. He's here to harvest praise for his own insights, and feels hurt when he doesn't get it. He doesn't take part in our little squabbles about circuit design.

But you don't catch John Larkin with posts about circuit design. He is only interested in the circuits he has slung together himself.

Cursitor Doom doesn't have a clue about that, because he doesn't follow that kind of thread.

Anything that John Larkin could recognise as intelligent.

Anything short of fulsome flattery strikes him as a coarse insult.

Not to John Larkin. I don't flatter him about his circuit design skills, and that what he is hunting for here.

It doesn't work that way.

The average global temperature was 1.5 Kelvin above the long term average (since the end of the last ice age), but fires reflect local temperatures, not the global average.

What it takes is a high wind and very dry grass. If you mowed a couple of miles of dry grass you you might be able to create an effective fire-break, but mowers need flat ground.