Weaponized Wildfires: California Burns 2.0

Originally published on www.medium.com

Over the past thirteen months California has suffered four of its five worst, deadliest, and costliest wildfires in state history. How could that happen with the ‘Golden State’ suffering deeper droughts in the past?

Did the mismanagement of forests, as President Trump claimed, play a leading role in the intensity of the wildfires? Or was the ferocity of the firestorms bewitched by climate change, as Governor Brown has firmly stated?

On October 8, 2017, the Wine Country Fires that flared up on a clear night didn’t so much spread as they started up at once across thirteen counties. The blazes leapt from house to house in many subdivisions, burning from the roofs down and from the inside out, leaving the adjacent greenery unscathed. The cause of those unnatural fires, which burned at temperatures far greater than typical forest fires, as evidenced by the debris field of melted alloy wheel rims, warped bodies and burnout windshields of cars, remains a mystery a year later. How else can one explain the heat deformation of metal frames, steel beams, and other structural elements that supported houses incinerated to their foundation.

In a detailed article this author wrote last year, many people who were interviewed arrived at the same strange feel of the local climate leading up to the fires in Napa, Sonoma, Santa Rosa, and Tubbs Counties. The air was dry. Extra dry. Thirst was great. As a result, many needed to rehydrate; bottles of water were raked off the shelves of gas stations and convenience stores in greater quantities than normal. Yet the temperature — in the low 80s — matched historical averages for the first week of October.

Over the same period, California began rolling out its new 5G-antenna network and thus, in some of the areas, switched out low radiation 4G systems mounted on cell towers to the microwave radiation of the smaller but more powerful 5G antennas being installed near houses on telephone and light poles.

With 77 cell towers and 8,800 structures burnt overnight, a solar flare striking the invisible microwave field from the cellular networks became a viable reason to why the fires raged so hot and furious. That cause of the fires drilled closer to the truth than PG&E’s obligatory answers of faulty “power lines” and “transformers” igniting the fires across thirteen counties.

PG&E’s plausible deniability didn’t pass the sniff test.

PG&E Findings Fall Far Short

On June 8, 2018, the Associated Press reported:

“PG&E equipment was blamed Friday by Cal Fire for a dozen more Northern California wildfires last fall, including three that killed a total of 18 people.

“The agency said Friday in a report that investigators determined the fires ‘were caused by electric power and distribution lines, conductors and the failure of power poles.’

“PG&E said in a statement Friday that its programs met California’s high standards, including rules for maintaining power poles, inspections and monitoring vegetation in areas where the company has power lines. It said it prunes or removes 1.4 million trees a year.

“But the company says years of drought and climate change in California are forcing it to take new steps. They include creating a wildfire operations center to monitor fire conditions, adding a weather station network and boosting vegetation management.”

In Pacific Gas & Electric’s findings, nothing in the way of concrete evidence or even circumstantial evidence explained how the fires started, how they ignited at virtually the same time, and how they grew in superheated intensity far beyond similar fires. PG&E’s pat answers didn’t instill confidence in the suddenly thousands of homeless people either, especially those living in the hard hit city of Santa Rosa. That led to several lawsuits.

Although the 2017 lawsuits blame negligence on PG&E’s part for the Wine Country Fires, if the public utility failed to enact the fixes it promised to make in its own report for the three giant fires that followed in July and November 2018, then lawyers for new class action lawsuits should have a field day in a court. With it, the PG&E board of directors should be summarily swept out of office for failing in its oversight of the power company.

The questions for the lawyers to discover:

> Did PG&E “prune 1.4 million trees” in 2018, as it claimed?”

> Did PG&E “create wildfire operations center to monitor fire conditions?”

> Did PG&E “add a weather station network?”

> Did PG&E “boost vegetation management?”

The answers will either expose or confirm whether PG&E managed the forests better or the same as last year — if the former, it would be a stake that would back Trump’s assertion of poor forest management.

PG&E in its folly and incompetence is not alone. California’s Office of State Fire Marshall, in its 192-page detailed report of the fires at watershed forests around Butte County, on three occasions used a disclaimer that its report was based on “observations are not intended to be comprehensive and conclusive, but rather to serve as a preliminary tool to assist emergency response agencies.”

Right. Copouts by the state fire safety agencies, PG&E, and the California Public Utility Commission, now compounded by three new horrific fires, must have Californians wondering what the hell is happening to their state.

‘Climate Change’ Umbrella Story

The schism in the political divide between President Trump and Governor Brown came to a head during their tour of the fire-ravaged regions in Northern and Southern California on November 17. Trump held onto the belief that the wildfires were a result of poor forest management, while Brown was adamant that Climate Change was the key after five years of drought.

Climate Change is such an unquantifiable and unverifiable claim with respect to the fires that it ends up being a red herring on two levels. The first being the “science is settled” on Climate Change. Today, that argument falls short since a major “math error” was uncovered in the recent IPCC Climate Change Special Report, invalidating its conclusions of “time running out.”

The second fallacy is the world is entering a solar minimum, with the sun generating fewer sunspots that will send the planet into a global cooling over the next forty years. These scientific observations on how changes in the sun’s power were not calculated into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report.

Nowhere in its 800 pages of FAQs, recommendations to policymakers, supplements and chapter reports do the words “sunspots” or “solar minimum” turn up. Moreover, the recent discovery of the Marianas Trench swallowing more ocean water below the earth’s mantle than previously understood was not include in the climate report, as well.

So when politicians claim they should “agree to the outline of Global Warming of 1.5°C” and that the “global mean sea level rise will be around 0.1 m less by the end of the century in a 1.5°C world as compared to a 2°C warmer world (medium confidence),” how can such declarations be made when the IPCC Special Report suffers from math errors and excludes two major contributing factors — solar minimum and ocean eating seafloor — in its climate model?

It can’t.

Dissecting Governor Brown’s Beliefs

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Special Report’s ten lead authors, fourteen contributing authors, and four editors need to go back and recalculate its climate models, not just on its math errors but on the exclusions.

Governor Brown’s assertion that Climate Change was the main cause of California’s four great fires is wrong. Nowhere else in the world has similar fires torched the environment vanquishing vehicles and houses in hours. If Climate Change was the driving factor, we would see more similar catastrophic fires elsewhere. But we don’t.

Instead of waiting on the lawyers to work through the courts on PG&E discovery or for another deadly fire to erupt in 2019, there are a few manmade culprits that might be at fault. They belong to California’s climate engineering program and rollout of its new communication system.

The suspects are the new 5G networks, California’s Cloud Seeding at low altitude to enhance more rain or snowfall, and the state’s Solar Radiation Management up in the stratosphere.

If these culprits bear out, even in concert, Governor Brown would be right after all — and sunbathing with irony in ways he never imagined.