[greentimer]

Many commentators have blamed climate change for the fires because it is fashionable, especially on the left, to do so. The reality is that the very small change in temperatures produced by climate change isn't sufficient to produce a change in the rate of fires. We'll have to wait a long time for climate change to produce such effects, if it ever does. I would lay the blame more on our society's technological stagnation in terms of its inability to come up with better technologies than those that have existed since the 1950s to fit fires. We haven't buried our power lines, we don't have strategically positioned water storage systems, we don't have huge drones specifically for firefighting that could dump more water on the fires than an ordinary helicopter could.

I'd say this article barely meets HN's standards of something that garners intellectual interest and is more the type of thing I'd expect to see on Reddit alongside cat videos. And then of course there is the environmentalist bent that the redwoods of at most sentimental value were the important thing that burned down, rather than things of material value to people. I wonder if anyone ended up homeless as a result of the fires.

According to the theory of radical skepticism it is very tough to put a probability bound on supposedly low probability disasters like fires, and so we must be prepared for them.

[rrrrrrrrrrrryan]

Today, there's more low hanging fruit in the world of fire prevention than fire fighting. It's mostly low-tech work that just needs adequate funding and the political will: manually clearing out brush, using grazing animals like goats, controlled burns. Ultimately, the overgrowth has to go, one way or another.

Controlled burns especially have become politically unpopular in recent decades, but they're tremendously effective. With controlled burns, we can burn small amounts of brush when the wind is blowing gently away from major population centers. If we want to fund technical solutions, I'd invest in software that models the best times and places to conduct these controlled burn operations FAR before we start discussing firefighting drones.

[leafboi]

You need to live in California where these fires have been ravaging the state year after year for the past decade.

[rconti]

[citation needed]