What fire mitigations are there for these kind of disasters besides complete depopulation? There are already 15k firefighters working on this one. It's just gonna get worse with climate change.
1. In parts of the Pacific Palisades/Malibu, as the article points out, yes, there are firestorms that are going to happen there pretty much inevitably. But even then, if you look at some places that had both the money and motivation to really invest in fire prevention (e.g. the Getty Villa), they escaped the worst of the damage - no structures in the Getty Villa, smack dab in the middle of the Palisades, burned.
2. What happened in Altadena was entirely different. It shouldn't go unnoticed that in many pictures and videos that lots of trees are still standing unscathed while the homes are all burnt to the ground. Most of these homes went up long before adequate fire protection was deemed a necessity, and given land values there now (even with it being in the state it's in), it should be possible to rebuild in a much more fire resistant state than what existed previously.
It will get worse no matter what. Even if we went carbon-negative tomorrow, California in currently in a historically wet period. The music will stop no matter what, unless we acquire planetary weather control.
> Across the Californian region, paleoclimate records dating back more than 1,000 years show more significant dry periods compared to the latest century. Ancient data reveals two mega-droughts that endured for well over a century, one lasting 220 years and one for 140 years. The 20th century was fraught with numerous droughts, yet this era could be considered relatively "wet" compared against an expansive 3,500 year history. In recent times, droughts lasting five to 10 years have raised concern, but are not anomalous. Rather, decade long droughts are an ordinary feature of the state's innate climate. Based on scientific evidence, dry spells as severe as the mega-droughts detected from the distant past are likely to recur, even in absence of anthropogenic climate change.
I say this because people should not confuse the issues. Fighting climate change won't stop California from burning. This was always going to happen; even in the best-case massively carbon-negative future, we at best defer the burning a few years. So we shouldn't have the attitude "California will just be OK if we can go carbon negative." It won't.
It's the water that allows the fuel build up though.
So a drier California might actually not burn as much, because, as the article points out, there's not much to burn in a desert ?
Also, this being more about human behavior, people might be much less interested to build in a desert (in this case, I doubt it, see also : Saudi Arabia). (Up to a point of course, worst case climate change scenarios involving these latitudes becoming uninhabitable in the next centuries.)
Otherwise, I was wondering whether, under a still "wet" California, but under still mild climate change, the more frequent both rains and droughts, might increase the frequency of firestorms just high enough so that humans actually start taking them seriously.
(EDIT : And looks like they already did, if those 2007 building code changes aren't just for show ? How is the correlation between the post-2007 buildings and those that survived firestorms?)
