Column: Rural climate skeptics are costing us time and money. Do we keep indulging them?
https://www.latimes.com/california/story...cost-time-money
By Erika D. Smith, Anita Chabria
Sept. 27, 2022 5 AM PT
GREENVILLE, Calif. —

Looking back, Bradley Bentz doesn’t know what took him so long to move out of Los Angeles County.

For decades, he’d lived a short walk from the Santa Anita Park racetrack in Arcadia and a few minutes drive to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. It was the typical city life.

“The cars and the smog. The noise. The lights that you can’t even tell when it’s dark,” Bentz said, shaking his head as if waking up from a nightmare. “I just couldn’t do it.”

So he headed to the sparsely populated mountains of Plumas County. He joined the U.S. Forest Service, started a family and eventually settled down just outside of Greenville, becoming the second-generation owner of his father-in-law’s business, Riley’s Jerky.

“I kind of just —,” Bentz said, searching for the right words to sum up his life, “fell in love.”

Even though it’s extraordinarily beautiful, with thick forests and pristine rivers, rural Northern California isn’t for everyone — nor should it be.

This is the part of the state where climate change has become a full-fledged existential threat. Sure, Southern California is prone to its fair share of disasters, but it is in Northern California where catastrophic wildfires aren’t just likely but are certain to destroy remote small towns for decades to come.

Greenville, which burned down in last year’s Dixie fire, should serve as a potent reminder of this risk. But maddeningly, the people who love living in these rural wildlands don’t see it that way. Instead, they look at it as just one more challenge to overcome, like spotty cellphone service and far-off grocery stores and hospitals.

It’s a belief so widespread, so divorced from the terrifying reality of climate change, that the rest of us in California can’t keep ignoring it. Doing so is simply costing too many lives and too much money, and wasting too much time. Soon, living in rural Northern California won’t be as safe, as sustainable or even as beautiful as it once was. The Dixie fire was just the beginning.

“I really think it would take a disaster to scare people away,” said Kaley Bentz, Bradley’s son and the third-generation owner of Riley’s Jerky. “And that was not the disaster.”

As he spoke, standing outside the new headquarters of his business, built about a mile from where the last one burned down, smoke from yet another wildfire wafted above the charred remains of Greenville.

The Sierra Nevada town of Greenville, devastated in the Dixie fire. Why the blaze was able to enter Greenville at all, tucked away in the Indian Valley about 100 miles northeast of Lake Tahoe, has become the stuff of conspiracy theories. But what it left behind is undisputed fact.

No one died in the Dixie fire, but as disasters go, it wasn’t minor.

Whipped up by extremely hot, dry and windy conditions, the wildfire has the gruesome distinction of being the second-largest in California’s history and the first to burn clear across the Sierra Nevada.

In a not-so-distant future ravaged by climate change, many of Northern California’s rural towns wiped out by wildfires might not get rebuilt at all.

Part 1: The case for calling it quits
Part 2: Do we keep indulging climate change skeptics?
Part 3: Raising tempers along with temperatures
Lead with science, not sentiment

It started in July of last year, when a tree fell onto a Pacific Gas & Electric distribution line. An armada of firefighters took until October to fully contain it. In the intervening months, the flames chewed through close to 1 million acres across five counties, invading forests that hadn’t seen fire in ages as well as crossing the footprints of other recent wildfires.

Why the Dixie fire was able to enter Greenville at all, tucked away in the Indian Valley about 100 miles northwest of Lake Tahoe, has become the stuff of conspiracy theories. But what it left behind is undisputed fact. -- excerpt, rest at link above --

These people are amazing: misuse science and facts to create and then misattribute a problem and then blame the people who actually understand and live in the areas where the problem has been created and misdiagnosed and accuse THEM of being stupid and wrongheaded.

With stiff competition of late (e.g., Covid hoax, "fair" elections), this "climate change" may prove to be the most damaging HOAX ever perpetrated on mankind....

Quote: EdJames wrote in post #2

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With stiff competition of late (e.g., Covid hoax, "fair" elections), this "climate change" may prove to be the most damaging HOAX ever perpetrated on mankind....

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