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By Jo Nova
The Los Angeles Fires seem to symbolize the great achievements of collectivist governance. It took decades to reach these Black Belt levels of incompetence: to weaponize the committees, neutralize the media, and to teach the people that fires are caused by hamburgers and stopped by solar panels.
Currently 150,000 people are still under evacuation orders in Los Angeles and some 10,000 buildings are estimated to have been destroyed. To twist the knife on the pain, some insurance companies have recently abandoned Californian clients due to a 1988 law called Proposition 103. The State government regulates price rises in insurance. It’s a form of price fixing. It means insurance companies can’t adjust their premiums to take the higher risks into account, so they do they only thing they can — stop offering insurance.
Then there is the irony that green activists have worked to stop fuel reduction burns. @MarioNawfal names the Sierra Club.
The Californian situation by Dennis Presiloski
In a form of Democrat maths — the LA mayor Karen Bass saved $18m from the fire department budget but the state lost $150 billion in damage (so far).
“The bluest people on the planet are going to […]
@bluebear73
By Jo Nova
Something awful is going down today in California. Pray tonight for the people of the Pacific Palisades, LA. The infamous Santa Ana wind phenomenon is running at 80 to 100 mph. 30,000 people have been ordered to evacuate, so far, and there are two deaths and 1,000 buildings destroyed. It’s winter, but there is no water in the fire hydrants, hardly any firefighting planes, and “it’s like a third world Armageddon”. The fire department can’t do a thing…
Two other fires have broken out around Los Angeles in other areas.
🚨🇺🇸 “OMG OMG”
“That’s a million dollar house – more – OMG”
This is Malibu – one of the wealthiest affluent places on the entire planet, now it’s being burnt to ashes.
Have you ever seen anything like this ever before? pic.twitter.com/XxgzzZ524E
— Concerned Citizen (@BGatesIsaPyscho) January 8, 2025
Then there are videos like this one, or a raging inferno surrounding the house, with a thousand comments below, wondering if they survived, and asking “why are they filming”? The men sounded far too calm, saying “I’ve turned off the gas”. “Oh Shit”. The scene is so surreal I wonder if […]
Luton airport carpark fire. From a Twitter video.
By Jo Nova
Geoff Buys Cars is a car nerd commentator who spent hours trying to find evidence that the Luton airport fire was caused by an EV. To recap — 1,200 cars died, the floor collapsed, the airport fielded 16,000 calls from people who needed help, answers, another flight, or their charred car. It was a big deal to a lot of people, and he argues, a turning point in the quest to get everyone driving an electric vehicle.
In the end officials say it was a diesel, and Geoff couldn’t definitively show it was or wasn’t an EV, but he said it doesn’t matter — everyone thought it was an EV anyway, and he argues — it will destroy electric car sales either way.
If everyone else thinks it’s an EV then there is no way people are walking into car dealerships this morning with that in the news and saying “you know what, I really fancy parking one of those lithium powered electric vehicles right outside my house. I think that’s exactly what I need to do to save the planet and look after my […]
By Jo Nova
All flights are currently suspended at Luton Airport, London after a major fire broke out last night at 9pm. No one at the BBC, apparently, can explain why it spread so fast (the mystery!). But everyone is grateful this was not an underground carpark below, say, a 20 story apartment building with babies sleeping upstairs, especially since part of the top floor of the carpark has collapsed.
The fire has, unfortunately demolished some dreams of carbon reduction.
UPDATE: Apparently the word is that it was a diesel car that started the fire. The question is then, if there were no EV’s on that floor, would it have spread just as fast, would the floor have collapsed, and would cars have exploded like popcorn in the microwave? Awaiting the BBC gurus…
UPDATE #2: Allegedly there were no sprinklers (which wouldn’t put out an EV battery fire anyway). Let’s try to imagine what kind of sprinkler system would contain those EV Fires — like drop-down glass-fibre spray that solidifies on contact or like jet sprayed asbestos?
UPDATE #3: As many as 1,500 cars were in the car park, it’s not clear how many […]
By Jo Nova
How many solar panels does it take to stop an arsonist?
For two weeks the global media circus has been blaming climate change for the fires in Greece. But finally, belatedly we find out it’s arson (again) and not because Europe doesn’t have enough solar panels yet.
The way the Guardian reports this, it’s as if arsonists hit Greece every year, but this year was different because of “climate change.” So if your civilization has thrill-seekers running amok, laying waste to land and property, the problem is not law and order, unemployment, or a sense of community, it’s “coal fired power plants”.
Can we stop calling them wildfires when they are synthetic?
Thanks to NetZeroWatch
Most fires in Greece were started ‘by human hand’, government says
Helena Smith in The Guardian
Most of the 667 fires that have erupted across Greece in recent weeks were started “by human hand”, the country’s senior climate crisis official has said.
Kikilias said that, in certain places, blazes had broken out at numerous points in close proximity at the same time, suggesting the involvement of arsonists intent on spreading fires further.
Arsonists are […]
By Jo Nova
Will EV’s cause more damage to the environment?
A freighter with nearly 3,000 cars on board is burning off the Netherlands. The Coastguard is working hard to try to stop the freighter sinking in a delicate environmental area. Only 25 cars are EV’s on a burning ship of 2,857 cars. No one is sure what started the fire, but a coastguard spokesperson told Reuters “it began near an electric car”. Firefighters estimate it may burn for days. Even if it didn’t start in an EV, the EV’s on board change the nature of the battle.
The fire spread so fast sadly one crew member was killed. Seven others leapt overboard and were rescued from the ocean. The ship carried a crew of 23.
UPDATE: As commenter James Murphy suggests — maybe they need to be transported like explosives can be – on the main deck, in a container that can be dumped overboard under its own weight. Just pull a pin or 2… more or less.
I’m thinking “ejection seats” for EV’s?
Just 25 EV’s among 3,000 cars
A freighter carrying nearly 3,000 cars catches fire in the North Sea and […]
Multiple Cyclones, Fires, Floods and Heatwaves striking Australians at same rate for last 55 years
Gissing et al looked at insurance losses and plotted all the times multiple disasters piled up on each other in a three month period in Australian history. Despite the monster headlines and three quarters of all human CO2 emissions occurring since 1966 there was no trend.
Three new studies affirm there has been no significant change in natural disasters, precipitation, or bushfire across Australia for the last several decades.
Kenneth Richard, NoTricksZone
From the paper:
“Here we utilise an Australian natural disaster database of normalised insurance losses to show compound disasters are responsible for the highest seasonal financial losses. … There has been no temporal trend in their frequency since 1966. “
The predominant and most predictable driver of climate-related disaster events is not anthropogenic global warming, or CO2 emissions, but the El Niño Southern Oscillation.
Bad things happen:
Global levels of CO2 rose from 320 to 405ppm and made no difference to Compound disasters.
h/t Neville and El Gordo
REFERENCE
Gissing et al (2021) Compound natural disasters in Australia: a historical analysis, Environmental Hazards, […]
Arson must be one of the easiest crimes to hide by anyone half competent, but in Greece arrests are already happening. People were caught with cans of gasoline. There are so many fires, the Supreme Court prosecutor has called for an investigation into possible organised arson and is asking for sweeping investigative powers. On social media people are blaming arsonists and slow or inept government responses.
In Media-World, people are blaming climate change, because if the world was a degree cooler, the fires would put themselves out or something. Who knows?
Coincidentally, over in Algeria, strange things are happening too. The Interior Minister says 50 fires were started at the same time. In Turkey, recent arson is suspected to be a terrorist activity. A few days ago the Israeli airforce bombed Hamas targets to “counter #arson attacks“. And in California a professor of criminology was actually tracked, caught and arrested for setting fires “on the edge” of the huge Dixie blaze. He might be nuts, but the others may have a plan. Has anyone asked them?
Apparently CO2 turns nice people into arsonists, but it’s surely also possible there may be other interests at work, or who knows, even […]
….
Who knew? Climate change causes horrible wildfires but these dump aerosols in the sky which causes cooling which will in theory, stop more bushfires. It’s another feedback loop the models got wrong.
One author even admits the models “have to take fires into account” — which is the same as saying that their robust settled science of the last thirty years was wrong.
It has all the hallmarks of high quality astrology. The science writing is full of colorful vagaries like “vast amounts of energy”, and “overwhelming evidence” without ever spelling them out. There is spooky inference: we “suspected the world might be witnessing something new”. And then there are the vague predictions: if we scale these fires up by (pick a number) we either set off a nuclear winter or we are turbo-charging climate change. That provides excuses for the next fail in any direction.
If only the ABC had real science reporters they could have asked real questions.
h/t Eric Worrall, WattsUpWithThat (and RicDre)
Super-outbreaks of fire thunderstorms could change Earth’s climate, Australian and US experts warn ABC Weather / By Ben Deacon Fire thunderstorms during Australia’s Black Summer released as much energy as about […]
Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone, found some studies showing Fires are less common today than in the past — including a ripper of an Australian study.
Emma Rehn et al went to a small lake in far North Australia and dug up about 6m of sediment core from the bottom. They looked at charcoal deposits and a bunch of different minerals. They discovered that the top most recent layers had the worst fires for a thousand years. It had all the makings of a Great Climate Change advert. But to their absolute credit, they kept going down and further back and uncovered a story of four thousand long years of wild blazes.
Despite millennia of prehistoric infernos, no media outlets in Australia have shown any interest in this study which came out a month ago — showing Sensationalism is not all its cracked up to be, and not as much fun as Confirmation Bias.
Look at the current blip (left hand side) since European settlement, compared to the fires of 4,000 years ago (right hand side). As Mr Dundee would say, “That’s not a fire…. ”
Carbon Flux showing the intensity of fires in Arnhem land for […]
Global carbon dioxide levels hit record highs in 2020. But through incredible luck, or perhaps a Pacific La Niña event, Australia is now less likely to get massive bushfires this summer.
Looks like carbon dioxide will now cause more floods and cyclones, not fires and droughts.
It’s just physics, you know.
La Niña set to bring cooler weather, more rain and cyclones to Australia
Lisa Cox, The Guardian
The last La Niña occurred from 2010-2012 and brought widespread flooding and record rainfall. The Bom said its modelling currently suggested the latest event would be strong but would not reach the same intensity.
[Andrew] Watkins said La Niña would likely bring increased rainfall in both northern and eastern Australia and increased risk of flooding. It also raises the chance of increased cyclone activity during the tropical cyclone season, with a typical season being nine to 11 cyclones.
He said an active La Niña would also reduce the bushfire risk this season slightly, but would not eliminate it.
Dr Joelle Griggs, a climate scientist at Australian National University, reminds us that even in La Niña years sometimes early rain produces bulk grass which, if […]
The sitation in California is just like the one in Australia
Tim Ingalsbee has been fighting fires or trying to prevent them since 1980. He founded Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology.
They know how to prevent megafires
Elizabeth Weil, ProRepublica
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.”
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.
This week we’ve seen both the second- and third-largest fires in California history. “The fire community, the progressives, are almost in a state of panic,” Ingalsbee said. There’s only one solution, the one we know yet still avoid. “We need to get good fire on the ground and whittle down some of that fuel load.”
Modern Californians are burning 0.1% of what […]
Since Europeans arrived Koalas have been booming and busting
The calls were out this week saying that koalas will be extinct in New South Wales in 30 years. But they didn’t mention that Koalas thrive and multiply so fast that in the right conditions scientists talk of ‘plagues’. On Kangaroo Island last year, there were so many koalas, the South Australian government has been trying to sterilize or relocate thousands of them over the last twenty years. Periodically scientists even discuss whether we have to cull them (the horror!).
They’ve survived twenty megafires in 200 years. They can recover. Ponder that Koalas were only introduced to Kangaroo Island in the 1930’s but by the 1990’s there were 14,000 of them and even though they are considered a tourism asset they are also considered a problem and pest too.
“Nearly everything you have read or heard about koalas, is wrong” — Vic Jurskis
Koalas favorite snack | Photo by pen_ash
Vic Jurskis is a veteran forester and fire expert who studied them for years. He’s written The Great Koala Scam, Green propaganda, junk science government waste and cruelty.
Jurskis estimates that thanks to European settlers there are more […]
The advertising wing for Big Government is out claiming that our cars cause extended fire seasons. Since they can’t claim that CO2 causes droughts or controls rainfall, there’s not much else they can claim.
But Fire-seasons don’t create bigger fires. The longest fire season in the world is possibly in Marble Bar but that’s not where the pyroconvective monster firestorms are.
If fuel loads were managed, longer fire seasons might allow for more small fires, but they wouldn’t be big bad ones. Plus, there’s the thing that a high fuel load without lightning or an arsonist, is just a forest.
At one point 42% of fires last summer in NSW were man-made. 9% were “natural.
Fire season extends by almost four months in parts of Australia
The fire season in parts of eastern Australia has lengthened by almost four months since the 1950s, with climate change a prominent driver in the trend, the Bureau of Meteorology says.
Karl Braganza, head of the bureau’s climate monitoring, told the first day of public hearings for the Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements on Monday that the South Coast of NSW and eastern […]
Here’s one for all the history-deniers from 1885
Mr N Bartley understood Australias climate 134 years ago better than some climate scientists appear to now.
After the fire came the floods, Feb 2020.
Even then Australia already had a century-long rolling cycle of floods, fires and droughts. One natural disaster after another back when CO2 levels were perfect.
These go back to the earliest dates of European settlement. Wherever Captain Flinders landed in 1782 — 1792 he found “found traces of drought and bush fires invariably”. In 1839, the drought was so bad that fish “putrefied” in the big Murrumbidgee River even though there was not one coal fired power plant on Earth.
The author laments that the droughts “become forgotten in the flood intervals.”
In the modern Wifi era humans can forget even faster.
Below is my summary list of the events described in the story.
Below that, the full letter. From The Queenslander, Sept 19th, 1885.
*Since Captain Flinders was born in 1774 I assume those dates were wrong and he wasn’t commanding a ship when he was 8 years old. Any other suggestions welcome.(thanks Gee Aye, SteveD, James West and Peter Fitzroy)
(1795 onwards?)* […]
Who needs studies? CSIRO doesn’t need any evidence to tell Australians how things work
Senator Matt Canavan asks Dr Peter Mayfield of CSIRO why an explainer document they put out about the bushfires didn’t include a sentence he found in another CSIRO study.
“No studies explicitly attributing the Australian increase in fire weather to climate change have been performed at this time.”
A record breaking ten long seconds of silence in Senate estimates this week.
The CSIRO only needed to say There are no studies showing man-made climate change has increased either droughts or bush fires. (References at the link).
Matt Canavan has recently given up his role as a Cabinet Minister to support a leadership challenge by Barnaby Joyce in the Nationals party. Unleashed!
Amazing what people can achieve from the back bench. Make this man PM!
9.7 out of 10 based on 73 ratings
More lies by omission from the Bureau of Misinformation
When a PM gets it totally wrong, where is the BOM…
“What this royal commission is looking at are the practical things that must be done to keep Australians safer and safe in longer, hotter, drier summers.” — Scott Morrison. — ABC
The BoM, like Prof Andy Pitman of UNSW, and all other climate scientists know that “climate change” will make the world a hotter wetter place. Who are the evaporation deniers among us? Yet, apart from one momentary candid admission from Professor Andy Pitman, which of our paid public servants will correct the PM when he says things that are flagrantly, 100% wrong? Will a Royal Commission really be forced to accept a complete myth?
Looks like extra CO2 “causes” Summer rainfall in Australia to increase
Apparently, we should burn fossil fuels to stop fires. You know it makes sense…
Australian rainfall trends, Bureau of Meteorology,
But wait, what about Southern Australia?
To cover every last caveat, it’s possible that “climate change” could change where rain falls, or when rain falls — so lets look at the BoM’s own rainfall records.
CO2 apparently makes summers wetter across […]
From the other side of the world comes this extraordinary collection of data that few in Australia seem aware of.
File this fact away: Satellite datasets show that in an average year 50 million hectares burns around Australia. In a quiet year, it’s only 20 million hectares, but in a busy year it gets close to 100 million hectares. A lot of this land area is in the far north and western part of the continent, which is hot and often arid. It’s not the same as the cool wet corner of South East Australia which has some of the tallest trees in the world. The fuel loads in the north are much lower (like the trees).
Some parts of the top end burn nearly 100%, year after year. It’s no accident that the awful devastation this year was not in the red hot firezone on the map below, but in the South East corner where less than 5% of the area burns each year. The rarely burnt is the risky zone where there is a 20 year build up of fuel. Some areas are on a 1 in 100 year rotation or even slower. There were places this year […]
Ten times the fuel means 100 times the intensity
Hardly anyone is talking about these numbers yet they show just how far beyond our control the pyroconvective firestorms are and why we need to be so much smarter at preventing them. They also show how irrelevant temperatures onsite are, compared to fuel load and wind speed.
Controllable fires are 3MW per meter, but we now have loads of 70MW/m
Not only are these fires obscenely, catastrophically intense, it doesn’t matter how much fire fighting equipment we buy, how many dams we empty, they are a man-made disaster, and we’ve known for years how to prevent them. (Some would say, thousands of years). The message in here is that cool controllable burns are tiny, less damaging, and far less intense. The pyroconvective monsters are totally different creatures.
Andrew Bolt interviewed fire expert David Packham in November:
Top fire expert David Packham says forget global warming. It’s the reckless failure to burn-off fuel loads that have turned parts of Australia into death traps. Near Melbourne “we’re looking down the barrel in these areas at 1000 deaths”.
His key point is that if we increase the fuel by ten, […]
It’s an arson epidemic
Holy Smoke Batman! An astonishing 12,000 fires have started in New South Wales since August. The police have investigated 1700 so far. Of those, fully 42% are described as “deliberately lit” which includes both intentional and accidental and at the moment police refuse to put a number on how many are truly arson, as opposed to people deliberately lighting a campfire which ran amok. Only 156 fires of the total investigated, or 9%, were caused naturally (presumably that means by lightning).
Another 745 fires of the 1700 are not yet determined. There seems plenty of scope to increase the number of man-made fires but I would assume the extent of lightning strikes are already known.
‘Like nothing we’ve ever seen before’: police step up bushfire investigations
Forty specialist police officers will investigate to zero in on and profile would-be arsonists. “Strike Force Tronto is about profiling. It’s about zeroing in on serial arsonist behaviours that occurs during the bushfire period,” he said.
“That sets the framework for the next fire season so that we do zero in on and target those individuals who we believe may be involved in arsonist behaviour. “This […]
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