I never liked the term 'new normal' as if something was made permanent because of an earthshaking event. It was used after 911, but, Osama bin Laden is dead and now we have a President that is a racist because of such phrases as 'new normal.'
The fact is obvious to any scientists one may speak to, this is NOT NORMAL. This is the climate crisis and while lamenting the reality opposed to occurrences of the past, there is no denying this climate is having it's way with California in general.
Southern California was never a paradise in it's past. It was honed into it's current lush and beauty by decades of settlement and irrigation. The idea Southern California would get away with harsh results from the climate crisis because it's people have fought hard against this outcome, both morally and legislatively, is not to deny this reality. Protest it and make others that have reeked havoc on climate laws realize their moral shortfalls.
This is not the time to disillusion people of these regions. When Russia lost 50,000 people to fire and France 10,000 to heat, the real tragedy besides the loss of such life is the USA never modified it's' laws in reflection of these realities because of two oceans AND SOVEREIGN BORDERS. Somehow, France and Russia and Australia's Barrier Reef are 'their problems,' rather than a global problem. That is what has devastated California. DENIAL by the USA federal government of very harsh realities of the climate crisis.
By Thomas Curwen
Southern California (click here) is the landscape of dreams, or so the mythology goes. Newcomers arrive. They raise the roof beam high over the simplest foundations and pass on to a new generation the hope that they too might believe in this sun-drenched paradise.
Time, however, has cast a shadow on this pact, and it sometimes feels like a distant romance. Yet glimpses of it can still be seen, as the fires of this last week have shown....
...“No place on earth offers greater security to life and greater freedom from natural disasters than Southern California,” wrote The Times wrote in 1934.
We’re learning otherwise....
...This story too has its heroes: the firefighters, of course, and their support crews, and a few strangers along the way.
They were five friends, high school buddies who, upon seeing a palm tree ablaze above an empty home in Ventura, grabbed garden hoses and went to work as embers rained upon them in the gusting wind. They had driven from Camarillo, drawn to the flames and to a neighborhood 15 miles away.
And they didn’t even know whose home it was.
