> Sorry if this offends you.

Actually, it caused me to chuckle. In your image you erased the US but kept the biggest piece of the pie - China. As it happens China is moving to to renewables faster than the USA, or most of the rest of the world for that matter.

I wish I could say China and the the other countries that are replacing fossil because they place the future of mankind above all else. To think we could respond to looming catastrophe in a sane and robust way would bode well. The reality is renewables are cheaper. The reduction of CO2 is being driven by bankers, not greenies. Even if it was a net negative for the planet I don't think you could stop it. A sharp reduction in mankind's CO2 provision looks more like its inevitable as opposed to impossible.

As for your rant about fires, I'm Australian. We've seen a few fires overrunning cities here recently. The California fires are causing a bit of hand wringing here, believe it or not. We have been saving costs by sharing man power and equipment with California. During our winter we send stuff to California's summer, and visa versa. Now you're having fires in the winter - so that's going to end.

As you said much earlier fires, well summer fires have always happened. Australia reacted a decade or so ago with very stringent building codes to cope with fire. I'm building a house and it raised the cost of the house by about 10% and limits what sort of things you can build. In the light of that you're railing on about dry fire hydrants is kinda funny. Australia's solution to that is it's mandatory for any dwelling in a fire zone to have 3000 gallons of water on the property. A pool will do. Plus a whole lot of other stuff that I won't bore you with, but when I looked at the aftermath of the recent fires if California they looked to be largely absent in the homes that burnt down.

I can't tell you the reason for that, but I can tell you that the same would be true for many Australian suburbs, despite the rules. They are only a decade or so old, and houses last a lot longer than that. So why didn't we have them before? After all we have mandatory building codes that insist every home built after 1960 or so withstand a category 5 cyclone, and as a consequence most of our housing stock in cyclone prone areas is cyclone proof. (Those codes were introduced when an entire city, Darwin, was literally flattened as if a steam roller had run over the place.)

But does raise the question doesn't it? Evidently Australia has no problem with imposing strict building codes when catastrophe's like fire can wipe out entire suburbs, so why then didn't we do for fires 60 years ago, as we did for cyclones? It wasn't if as bush fires burning down houses hasn't always been a thing, as you say. The thing is - those houses that burnt down were always where in the middle of nowhere and often where some idiot built on a ridge line for the view.

Then we got hit by the Canberra fire in 2003. It was emitting 2 mega watts / meter. It literally sterilised the ground by burning the underground roots. It eventually stopped on its own accord just before it hit Canberra (the nation's capital). Which was just as well, as the fire fighters said it was unstoppable. You can see a video of it here: https://esa.act.gov.au/cbr-be-emergency-ready/bushfires/fire... Then we had another one outside of Sydney (our biggest city) in a national park of about the same intensity. Again nothing survived. The seeds of Eucalypt's that rely on fire to reproduce were incinerated. Nothing grew back for years - in what had been a lush national park. (East Australia averages over 1 meter of rain per year, so it's pretty wet - more than enough to support a rain forest. But climate change predicts more extremes including cold and dry. That year it was very dry.) But it also stopped of its own accord before it hit suburbs. Then the inevitable happened. It seemed like 1/2 of Australia was on fire at the time, and this time suburbs were wiped out and people died. Now we've got ourselves a new building code.

Australia has had Western civilization for 200 years, yet it's only since 2000 or so that we've seen fires anything like this. Rather unfortunately for you, that happens to neatly correspond to the went we started to feel the effects of climate change. We didn't need those bush fire building codes before. Now we do.

I guess there are some out there who would say we should have introduced those codes in the 1970's when Hansen predicted what was going to happen. It definitely seems like you have it in for your local pollies for not predicting and making allowances for wild fires in winter. I disagree, theories are just theories. I'm all in favour of waiting until a few houses burn down proving the theory true. But now it's flaming obvious. Some places are getting less habbitable, some more.

Interestingly, Northern Australia, the place that needed those cyclone building codes, doesn't suffer from forest fires, yet. But as I said earlier, the monsoon is moving north. We used to get cyclones every year. But this the hottest year on record with the summer 2/3's gone - nothing. Not even a hint of one. Maybe we won't need those cyclone building codes soon. But another consequence is the top end is drying out. A famine could happen in Papua New Guinea - almost unheard of. And North Queensland may need to introduce stronger fire codes for buildings. I'd lay odds it won't happen until we lose a suburb or two.

But back to you and California. You've just had a unique event - a wild fire in winter. You rave about how dumb the pollies are for not preparing for this unique event. You attack them for leaving a weir empty for repairs in the middle of your low fire season. Yet if someone had said here "hey climate change is a thing, bad fires in winter are going to be a thing, we need that weir fixed" the red haze would have descended and you would have called them a moron right? You would do that despite the fact the very year they said that was the hottest ever recorded by a thermometer. That's nothing special you say. Instead what was special was an idiot banging a metal stakes into ground. Seriously? You are blaming metal stakes, when every year you have bigger idiots deliberately lighting bush fires? There is nothing special about idiots, empty weirs or any of the other things you list. All have been with us for centuries.

If a politician said "we have an outbreak of special circumstances like fire bugs, ergo I'm going to impose building codes that raise the price new homes by 10%" I would be a little concerned. But when ours said "the recent worsening bush fires are apparently driven by climate change and the science says it's going to get worse, so we are raising building standards" I thought "very prudent". You seem to want your pollies use the former excuse. That's just ... weird.