Those fires have existend since forever, they only get bigger every year.
Personally I have always wondered why people would build entire cities in such a dangerous region.
Totally independent from climate change as the main driver that makes these fires ever bigger, it's like people forgetting within a couple of decades that what has happened there before can happen any time again and next time can always be bigger than last time.
California isn't the only region in the world doing this, there are countless examples all over the world where people build cities despite obvious danger.
The city of Naples, Italy is located at the foot of an active volcano and they don't have the slightest clue how to get people out of there in case it erupts.
The city of Kobe, Japan is located in one of the most seismically active areas in the world, in 1995 an earthquake killed 60,000 people there, and what did they do? The've made some laws to build stronger houses and then rebuilt the city in the same place.
Over 60% of all cities with more than 8 million citizens are located at a coast that is frequently flooded by storm surges.
All of these are catastrophes waiting to happen.
A German economist once called this "Schönwetter-Politik" which translates to "nice weather politics" and has nothing to do with politics, but means the human habit of looking at some place when it has nice weather, imagining it would always be like this and then building houses there, disregarding what will happen there during times of bad weather.
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rootvegetables (1899)
a month ago
I think that people have a tendency to spread out, explore new places, settle in those places and then spread out from there again and again.
As a species, we will live anywhere if we think we can make a life for ourselves there.
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MarkPh (1044)
a month ago
Correct, but essentially says the same thing I said.
"... we will live anywhere if we think we can make a life ..." is an exact match to my "nice weather politics"
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chilidoggg (14597)
a month ago
Another uberwealthy community in SoCal is "Rolling Hills" on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, about 30 minutes south of Pacific Palisades. (Tiger Woods was living on a different part of the peninsula when he crashed his car.)
It's friggin' named "Rolling Hills" and probably has been named that for 1,000 years before the Spanish came... the land shifts... people build multimillion dollar mansions because the land didn't shift yesterday....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palos_Verdes_Peninsula
Can't beat the views.
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