[dodobirdlord]

I think climate change is a red herring. Sure, it’s real, and sure, it has some effect on making California’s wildfires more intense. But California’s recent fires are “extreme and unusual” only in their intensity, not their extent. Crunching the numbers from historical burn frequencies before European colonization, California burned a lot more than we’ve allowed it to in the last century, and even in the last few years of “extreme” wildfires, we’re still far from reaching the amount of acreage that historically burned on a yearly basis. Anthropogenic climate change definitely wasn’t why California’s forests experienced a wildfire every couple of decades in the 1500s, and incorrectly blaming the issue on climate change just gives ammunition to opponents of climate change. People in California want to blame the problem on climate change because it absolved them of the need to admit that people really shouldn’t live in the woods, and that most people who live there need to move so that the locations currently containing communities built into woodland can be allowed to burn every 20-30 years.