So here’s a new term. “It is maddening right now that when we have this cosmic challenge to our communities, with the entire West Coast of the United States on fire, to have a president to deny that these are not just wildfires, these are climate fires,” Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”
Forty years ago I paid my way through college fighting forest fires in the fall in California. It’s a fire-based ecosystem and decades-long droughts are the historic norms. With now massive expansion of the population building into this “fire ecosystem,” the resulting human/property loss is much greater. Combined with the failure of the states and cities to use known urban/wildland fire mitigation measures disaster follows. Any direct link between climate change and this fire ecosystem is speculative at best and political at its worst. Think about it. If “global” climate change is to blame why not have these events all across the board every year, or does “climate change” just affect California one year, Austrailia another, and so on?