Climate Sunday: Amateur Meteorology for Dummies

 

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has previously commented on Jewish Space Lasers and may believe in the Deep State Weather Machine, has suggested a rare and curious cure for the wildfires in California--just seed the clouds! It's an existing technology! We have the tools!

Problem is: we don't have the clouds. There is no moisture. The only moisture is what is being scooped up and thrown at the fires by brave airborne firefighters--like these Canadian and Mexican firefighters are doing:

We can't count on some god-like intervention--it's all sweat and tears from here. 

I'm singling out MTG as a uniquely obvious example of misinformation and studied ignorance, but there's so much more where that came from. Suddenly, right-wing commenters think they know exactly how the state of California should maintain a forest (oh! do you mean the mostly federal government-owned forest?) and how a drought-plagued state should have completely full reservoirs. And they suppose either a billionaire quasi-Democrat or some Republican somewhere would do better. 

Yes. Every problem California is experiencing is supposedly down to human-caused mismanagement, except for talking about anthropogenic climate change. This is the big tip-off that the people who talk this way don't have a clue. Aridification, drought, and increased wildfire activity are exactly what climate change has been predicting. Like the Santa Ana winds roaring at hurricane force--you can't adapt to something moving faster than you can move. An ember travelling many miles in the air and creating another fire.  Imagine a fire like a fungus casting out spores. It propagates while you try to kill it--a fire hydra. 

The Rich and Famous can get personalized fire care.  RW cranks like James Woods can audition for the cameras that he can still too act while pretending his house was lost, when miraculously, firefighters saved it. And he has nothing to complain about but the career he has. It's insulting to the people losing their homes, their property, their cherished memories, some even their lives, that people with no fucking clue have to opine on shit they don't know and muddy the situation with bullshit and demonize people doing their best. 

Let me tell you this: you don't need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. There has to be a penalty for people who just lie all the time or wallow in flagrant wrongness for political points. We faced this kind of opinionizing with the floods of Katrina, and the demonizing of those people facing that tragedy. But this is a different flavor of the same bullshit. 

Weather is an act of god, so-called, but human beings have made it worse, and for all the red tape, hard-heartedness, and lies, we keep making it worse. We don't need amateur meteorologists--we need smart people who can plan, think, and care enough about human life to consider how to preserve the world we are sharing.