SCIENCE™:
I’m sure you’re wondering: “What the fuck?”
I know, it doesn’t make any sense.
But what really happened here was this “doctor” basically just said that this woman’s health problems (asthma, mainly) were caused by climate change:
It really is amazing that they’re still pushing this garbage years after all of Al Gore’s apocalyptic predictions failed to come true.
“But what about the wildfires!”
It’s reasonable to say that these wildfires were a primary cause of this woman’s asthma condition, but it’s far from clear that “climate change” is causing the wildfires.
For one thing, what percent of the wildfires were caused by arson? Or, maybe not even arson but inadvertent human activity, i.e. a campfire sending embers into a highly-flammable part of a forest?
Second, it’s more likely that these wildfires–which are mainly happening on federally-owned land–are being caused by poor land management than climate change. This video, an interview with a man named Dr. Bob Zybach, who has 50 years experience in land management in California, is great on this subject. Zybach says that basically all these fires are caused by poor land management over the past 30-40 years:
Zybach doesn’t really get into the specifics of what, exactly, constitutes good land management that prevents wildfires, so I want to refer to a 2018 article by a man I frequently refer to as “The GOAT” political commentator, the great Victor Davis Hanson, who has lived in the San Joaquin Valley in California his entire life, and has forgotten more about wildfires, land management and the environment in general than any of these climate change fanatics will ever know:
What is going on in California? Governor Jerry Brown, most of the Democratic-majority state legislature, the academy, and the administrative state have rushed to blame man-made global warming for the undeniable dry spell from May to mid-November that turned mountain canyons into tinderboxes. Usually autumn rains keep hillsides wet enough to prevent sudden combustions when the late autumn winds kick up. Not this year. Yet, if California has been arid and rainless these past months, two years ago we experienced near-record snow and rain that started in early fall and continued into late spring. Last year, we saw near-normal levels of precipitation.
…
Left unsaid is that more than 130 million trees died throughout the state’s foothills and mountain ranges during the drought of 2011–2016 and were not removed from the forest floor, providing an immensity of natural kindling for fires. To walk in a Sierra Nevada forest during summers requires navigating not just over fallen limbs and branches, but also rotting trees—all amid dead brush and dead but still-towering brown pines. Gone are the periodic meadows and open spaces of the 1960s and 1970s, when logging companies harvested trees, thinned out the forests, replanted what was cut, and cleaned up the forest floor.
Yet given California’s stringent anti-logging regulations of the last 20 years, there is no real California timber industry left, at least as it once was. And scavenging even dead trees prompts a great debate, as environmentalists lecture on the advantages of letting the dead wood be. Or, as Sierra Club organizer Daniel Barad put it in a January 2018 Sacramento Bee op-ed: “Dead trees are vital components of the forest ecosystem and should be removed only when necessary.” He added of the state’s millions of dead conifers: “Most are in remote areas, and removing them would be extremely costly and ecologically devastating. The black-backed woodpecker, northern fisher and northern spotted owl are among the species that rely on dead tree habitat . . . Also, dead trees store carbon for decades. As they decompose, much of their carbon returns to the soil, where it is held for thousands of years. In a large-scale removal, all that carbon is disturbed.” Perhaps Sierra Club environmental sensitivity is well-meant, but such orthodoxy ensures that the summer and autumn air that 40 million residents breathe, along with the lives of thousands living in the mountains, become secondary concerns to beetles and woodpeckers.
…. Given its length and long, parallel mountain ranges, California is a longitudinal state, with its rails and freeways mostly running north and south, such as the 101, I-5, and 99 corridors. It’s difficult to travel latitudinally across California. Environmentalists and no-growth activists cancelled many of the envisioned auxiliary trans-Sierra and trans-Coast Range routes long ago. Few good highways exist into and out of the coastal and Sierra Nevada mountain ranges that might allow quick and safe access for firefighting and evacuation teams.
Roads between mountain communities are windy, narrow, and often potholed and crumbling (California remains near last in state-by-state infrastructure ratings, though it will soon have the nation’s highest gas taxes). For many foothill residents, the ensuing lack of traffic and easy mountain access is seen as a sort of blessing, ensuring privacy and a lack of tourism. Unfortunately, the net result of both poor and too few roads was that when wind-swept fires leapt through canyons and up hillsides, it was almost impossible to escape rural communities and private residences with any rapidity. And so, homes burned down and people died.
These same paradoxes help explain the 2018 epidemic of destructive forest fires, a tragic consequence of ideology trumping reality and common sense. Once upon a time, the architects of state governance understood that living in paradise required constant investments and vigilance against the vagaries of both Mother Nature and human nature, whether that meant managed forestry, road construction, reasonable building codes, or water storage and transfers. In theory, at least, millions of dead trees may have been ecological assets for a near pristine, mid-twentieth-century California of 10 million people. But such natural kindling can pose an existential danger to a complex civilization of 40 million 21st century state residents.
Let’s just think logically about wildfires for a second here: Trees die and get dried out, creating a fire risk. Leaves fall to the ground and dry out, creating a fire risk.
If these dead trees and leaves are not routinely cleared out, then eventually they’ll probably catch fire, either due to lightning striking the ground or human activity or what have you. If that fire spreads, then you’ve got a wildfire on your hands.
The main way to deal with dead leaves and trees and branches is through controlled burns–basically periodic artificial forest fires that are designed to prevent larger wildfires by burning off flammable dead leaves and trees.
Societies all throughout history have known the benefits of controlled burns–even the “indigenous peoples” whose land we supposedly stole and raped, and who are supposedly so much more in tune with Mother Nature and Care About The Land more than us ignorant, consumerist Americans who are a cancer on the planet.
Farmers even use controlled burns to stop the spread of existing wildfires. They will burn off a section of their land, which leaves the terrain non-flammable, in order to halt an approaching wildfire.
Despite the media’s portrayal of forest fires, they’re actually a natural part of forest ecology. I mean, just think about it: if there were no humans at all, then forest fires would still happen. They’re the only natural way to clear out the dead leaves and trees off the forest floor. Once cleared out, a new, more fertile layer of soil is revealed, upon which seeds can land and being to sprout new trees.
The problem is that the Environmentalists came around in the 1960s and 1970s and, because they’re bleeding hearts, basically said, “Forest fires are bad! No more controlled burns!”
From the perspective of someone who learned about the environment in a classroom, or on the news, or on the internet, it seems self-evident that all fires in the forest are bad. But that’s because most of these “Environmental Activists” don’t actually live in the places they claim to be trying to protect, and they don’t actually have first-hand experience with land management.
The reality is that without controlled burns and proper land management, forest fires will be way worse, and wipe out so much more land and innocent Bambi critters like these guys:
The “well-intentioned” environmentalists–and not just in California, but all up the North American Pacific coast from Oregon to Washington, and even to British Columbia in Canada, where “climate change” is being blamed for a woman’s asthma–have, whether intentionally or inadvertently, caused many of the problems that they now blame on “climate change.”
Now, I know I talk a lot about the Deep State and the fact that democracy is largely an illusion in this country, and that the people who are really in control are not people we can vote out.
But the reality is there has always been a Deep State, or some form of an unelected elite pulling the strings. Prior to the era of “democracy” (late 1700s-present) there was simply a king who called all the shots, owned all the land and had essentially unlimited power in his nation. There was no need for a “shadow government” that was really calling the shots because there was no need to ever appeal to the voters. They didn’t have to try to obscure the reality of who was really in control. That’s the beautiful simplicity of monarchy.
If we still had a king today, and he wanted a vaccine mandate, he wouldn’t have to compel private businesses to implement it, he would just implement it.
Since “democracy” was introduced in most the world, however, the wealthy elites have had to find another way of maintaining their aristocratic system of rule. This is why they buy up the politicians and the media, and also have created The Permanent Bureaucratic State of unelected, unaccountable managers, directors, deputy directors, administrators, chiefs, and secretaries of this and that, and rule-makers and spies and federal agents: because they had to find another, less-obvious way of maintaining power and control. A system of control that accounts for the fact that, to the elites’ chagrin, every few years the unwashed masses are permitted to flock to the polls to vote for their leaders. The elite had to find a way around this.
For most of America’s history, this really wasn’t too big a problem for us, the average people. Sure, it would be ideal if the people were fully in control and held the power the way the Founders intended, but if we’re being honest and realistic, there’s always going to be a wealthy and powerful elite no matter what. Even if you were able to identify and locate every last person that constitutes “the elite” and confiscate all their money and imprison them for life–like the Communists did in Russia when they overthrew the Czar–in due time they’d be replaced by a new wealthy elite that would, eventually, start doing the same things the old wealthy elite was doing, or maybe even worse (again, like the Communists in Russia).
There’s always been a wealthy elite. There’s always going to be a wealthy elite. It’s a fact of life.
The problem today is that our elites are ideologues.
In other words, they’re delusional. Their policies are based on ideology, not on reality.
This epiphany hit me as I was reading Victor Davis Hanson’s piece about how the people in charge of California several generations back understood the critical importance of both maintaining the state’s water reservoirs and the role of land management in preventing forest fires.
Today’s leaders in California are insane ideologues whose policies have caused droughts and wildfires, which they then blame on climate change, which is like a secular pseudo-religion to them.
You can argue that they have perfectly rational, non-ideological ulterior motives for pushing climate change (i.e. accumulating more wealth and power, as always), but the fact that so many of them live in California and that their policies are actively destroying California–literally–indicate that they are in fact a bunch of largely delusional ideologues.
At least the Old Deep State was competent and knew how to properly manage the vital infrastructure upon which our society relies while they were murdering and plundering. As Hanson put it, “Once upon a time, the architects of state governance understood that living in paradise required constant investments and vigilance against the vagaries of both Mother Nature and human nature.”
The New Deep State we have today murders and plunders and can’t even maintain a basic infrastructure system that was built and implemented generations ago.
The Old Deep State built the Hoover Dam, the Panama Canal, the Golden Gate Bridge, Mount Rushmore, the Pentagon, the Interstate highway system, etc. California, under their watch, was not wildfire-ravaged and drought-stricken.
An ideologue is someone who continues pushing a set of policies even when reality has refuted them.
An ideologue doesn’t care if a policy works, in the objective sense; an ideologue only cares about implementing the policy in the first place.
An ideologue doesn’t implement a policy, and then observe the results to see if it actually works as intended. An ideologue implements policy under the assumption that it will work, then angrily attacks, vilifies and persecutes anyone who opposes it, even if the policy is an objective failure.
That doesn’t sound very scientific–in the sense of forming and testing hypotheses–does it?
The irony of it all is that it is impossible to be both an ideologue and a Believer In Science at the same time, and yet our ideologue elites call anyone who opposes their delusional policies a “Science Denier.”