From ClimateRealism

By Linnea Lueken

On a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, comedian Adam Carolla and host, Joe Rogan, pointed out that Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) wrongly blamed climate change for wildfires in California, when, in fact, wildfires are natural and the severity of the one in Los Angeles was largely due to flawed actions taken by the state and local governments. Rogan and Corolla are right, the natural climate of southern California has always been prone to wildfires, but responsible government action could have mitigated the horrific one that struck Los Angeles.

On episode 2,412 of The Joe Rogan Experience, Carolla, a Los Angeles resident, criticized Newsom and the state of California’s response and excuses with regards to wildfires, particularly those from last winter in the Palisades.

To excuse his own failures, Newsom will “just blame everything on climate change, which is insane,” Carolla said. He went on to give examples of other locations where natural disasters are common and yet have been mitigated by human effort and civil engineering, like air conditioning making Nevada livable, and New Orleans’ levees.

“So we did not prepare for the fires, we didn’t clear the brush, we didn’t fill the reservoirs,” Carolla said. He also argued that, even if he granted Newsom’s position on climate change causing the fires, “now do something!”

Rogan added that the real cause is not climate change, though, “because L.A.’s had the same climate forever, there’s been fires that happened through L.A. where L.A. burns half to the ground […] It doesn’t rain there ever, and it’s been like that forever, that’s why they film movies there. It’s not climate change, you [explicative], it’s poor preparation.”

Carolla joked that it only rains after the fires so that the area can have mudslides.

Carolla and Rogan are both correct. Climate change was not responsible for the devastating fires. Natural factors and poor brush and water management were.

As covered by Climate Realism at the time of the fires, here and here, fire is a natural part of the southern California landscape. In the past, frequent low temperature wildfires would spread through the brush and small trees, burning them up and preventing the build-up of large amounts of fuel for major fires. Now, every wildfire is put out as soon as possible, and the brush is never cleared. It grows more densely, dries out during periods of drought, and can fuel larger, hotter fires once the right conditions line up. California exercises poor land and forest management, particularly under Newsom, during whose watch the state and U.S. Forest service has not met prescribed burn targets or forest thinning. Carolla’s complaint of “do something,” hits home amid these issues.

In fact, it seems the podcast struck a nerve with Newsom’s office. The spokesperson for Newsom pushed back, and claimed that extreme winds and dry terrain from climate change aided the fire’s spread.

While it is true that those conditions made fires worse, it is not true that they are caused by climate change. High, dry winds are so common to Los Angeles that they even have a name, the Santa Ana winds, which are natural, well documented, and driven by pressure systems over the Great Basin. They have not changed amid the modest warming of the past century. The dry conditions referenced are also not unusual.

What has changed is the huge growth in population in southern California. More people living in the Los Angeles area means more people are impacted by fires when they occur. It has also set up a situation where arson is more common. This was the case in the fires that preceded and ended up leading to the Palisades fires; a 29-year-old man has been indicted for maliciously setting the fire. Climate change didn’t do that, human evil did. And climate change didn’t cause the fire to flare-up again; state government did by interfering with the Fire Department’s efforts to ensure the fire that was still smoldering on state land was completely extinguished. It’s all on tape!

What is true and unusual is the fact that despite having nearly full reservoirs just a month before the fires started, the Santa Ynez reservoir in the Palisades was offline and empty in January. A large amount of snowpack water in California was wasted because it was allowed to flow into the Pacific. Thus, when the fires started, hydrants ran dry.

California has an infrastructure and water management problem, not a climate change problem. Hence, Rogan and Carolla are right, it is a government problem – more particularly, in this instance, a Gov. Newsom problem. The public is fortunate to have popular podcasters like Rogan promoting climate realism, rather than toeing the line for government failures and its use of climate change as a scapegoat for its poor management decisions.