F*CK MANDATORY EVACUATIONS

Climate change? “… ALL of Southern California is a desert surrounded by a drier desert. The little bits that don’t appear to be deserts, around to the North of LA, are high mountain tops…”

See

The climate “in parts of the West” discussed above is the result of the current interglacial period, which began about 15,000 years ago, and has nothing to do with a trace increase in an atmospheric trace gas component as the result of the purposeful combustion of petrochemical fuels.

Drawing yet again from Mr. Hansen’s “Perspective” article:

“What do we know about the causes of the water problems in California?

“1. The population in the Los Angeles=>San Diego Megapolis grew by almost 2 million people in the last ten years, and contains almost 21 million persons today.

“2. The SF-SJ-Sacramento Megapolis saw equivalent population growth of over 10% but contains only 8.8 million persons.

“3. Altogether, California garnered a total 3.7 million extra souls in ten years. That’s a lot of people to provide water for.

“4. An atmospheric high pressure ridge has been more-or-less parked off the California coast for much of the last three years and such a ridge tends to push moisture-bearing winds to the north, so that the water falls closer to Seattle than Sacramento (pencil sketch explanation – reality is a lot more complicated). Many would like to blame this phenomenon on climate change; it is possible but unlikely to be true.

“5. Much of California is a desert – measured by precipitation levels. The most people live in the drier, southern part of the state; the population of the drier part of the state is growing the fastest.

“6. California is an agricultural state that depends on irrigation to grow nearly half of America’s fruits and vegetables. That’s a lot of water.

“7. California is prone to short-term (1-2 year) droughts (recently: 1958-59, 1961, 1976-77, 1986-91, 2001-02, 2006-07). Historically, the American Southwest is prone to periodic mega-droughts, the last one in the 13th century (and possibly the 14th and 16th centuries, opinions vary).

“8. The first seven items point up to this: True demand for water likely exceeds supply and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future – and will nearly always be borderline – as populations and agriculture continue to increase demand.

“9. All problems of water supply in California are exacerbated by the convoluted politics of water policy unique to California and understood only by a few true insiders – complicated by interference from various Federal agencies on behalf on various non-human species – and almost continually under litigation. Don’t forget the inter-state treaties and agreements and international agreements over Colorado River water.”

Gotta love how the AGW fraudsters keep pounding that climate change meme in their effort to get their thumbs around the throats of industrial civilization by making everybody’;s “electricity rates necesarily skyrocket.”[img?w=450&h=570[/img]

Talk about complacency and a sense of entitlement- the old fart sitting on that porch, blithely chewing his cud, is pretty representative of the attitudes of mega-rich home owners who build their mansions in the fire belt in the blithe assumption that we will always be able to muster $30 million or more in manpower and equipment to save their sorry asses when these inevitable fires tear through the forests and chaparral in the middle of one of the worst droughts of the past 100 years.

There are a multitude of factors that could be contributing to the increase in wild fires besides “climate change”.

When you look at the wild fires that have occurred on the west coast, especially in CA, since the area became settled around the turn of the last century, certain things stand out. First, that the entire Malibu coast has been burned over 3 times since 1920, and that if you live there long enough, you are going to be facing flames one time or the other. Second, that each major fire is substantially worse in its scope and the damage it does, than the last. Third, after each major fire, humans rebuild with much bigger and more expensive houses, and build deeper into the chaparral built, thus putting more property and lives at risk, and the risk from much larger accumulations of old fuel increases greatly.

You have to ask why anyone even lives in the chaparral belt, in spite of the known hazard and near-certainty that your house will burn down some time or the other. And it will burn FAST, often spontaneously combusting as the temperature from a rapidly-approaching fire combines with oxygen and fuel (that would be your house) in just the right mix for combustion to happen. What is even stranger, is that after every major fire, the replacement houses built are much larger and more expensive than those that burned, even though the builders know that these palatial homes are at similar risk. Who has so much money that he can watch a $5M house burn like a match and then go build a $25M house on the same site, knowing that in another decade or so, it could meet the same fate?

The answer, of course, is one of our country’s multitude of “hidden” welfare programs that Americans rely on without thinking much about it, and that have made it possible for us to pretend that night is day and that the laws of nature do not apply to us. That program is the California Fair Plan, which makes property insurance available at reasonable rates ,for high-risk properties that private insurers either charge prohibitively high rates to insure… like houses in the middle of fire-prone chaparral and forests. Every state has a Fair Plan. Fair Plans were promulgated to make it possible to insure slum properties and other high risk properties everywhere, and, like all welfare programs, encourage bad behavior, such as building in high risk zones, and torching your slum building for the insurance payout.

And every time our politicians suffer an attack of sanity, and do something to scale back or eliminate these types of subsidies, they are attacked by powerful lobbies and citizens’ groups. For example, the Biggert-Waters Act of 2012, which would have eliminated the massive national subsidies for flood insurance in low-lying coastal areas after the National Flood Insurance program was bankrupted by Katrina and other disasters, would, in its original form, have made it prohibitively risky to build and live in low-lying coastal areas because property owners there would have to actually pay their way, and pay premiums that reflected the risk to property.. and which most of them could not afford. However, Americans, especially rich Americans, are accustomed to being able to pass the risks and costs of their bad behavior and uneconomical practices to someone else, so, after pressure from politicians representing high-risk areas, the Act was substantially watered down and subsidies for homeowners remained, guaranteeing that the taxpayers will be footing another massive bill for emergency services and rebuild after the next flood disaster.

Thus we set ourselves up for evermore expensive and intractable disasters, but there isn’t anything “natural” about any of them.

Chicago, you should get an Economic and Social Nobel Prize. We have the same problem in Florida with Elites building their second mansion on the coasts that periodically get destroyed by hurricanes. Flyover folks inland and upstate have to pay about triple the insurance rate so the Elite can pay about one third what they should pay. Then the Elite block access and the beaches so the Goy have to use small public reservations set aside for us. New Orleans is stupid too: a city build below sea level should be abandoned as well as homes built in periodic flood plains. While in Germany as a soldier, I saw their houses are built on the hills and their valleys are farmland. Since the Elite run America and have first place at the money printing spigots, they make the rules and the rules always give the Elites first choice and the Goy get Hobson’s choice.