Germans Trying to Tell the Napa Valley Fire

I had to sit last night and watch some German journalist make a fool out of himself as they did a US story on the wildfire episodes out near the Napa Valley area of California, and the connection of climate change to the wildfire.  It was a bit amusing to see his eyebrows do the upward slant, and he really wanted you to believe him.

The problem with this story is that this is wine territory.....which means that it gets a limited amount of rainfall on average anyway.  Historically, the Napa region averages around 25 to 30 inches per year....which this spread out over 70-odd days a year. Most people will tell that the bulk of this....probably 75-percent....occurs in the fall or winter.  While you might view the numbers and think that it rains once every five days, with a third-to-a-half inch of rain...it really rains every three days in November to March, and then barely rains the remaining seven months. 

If you go and talk to anyone who lives around the Napa Valley, they will tell you that there is a fairly long and drawn out dry season which arrives each year around the spring, and runs through to fall (typically ending in October).  Come November to March?  The bulk of this 25 to 30 inches occur. 

In this particular year, an added feature occurred....a high pressure system anchored itself down on the eastern side of California.  This triggered up winds to blow from east to west....for an extended period.  Those winds that came from the east?  Well....they came over the mountains, into the valley, and bought warm dry air, which makes a low-rainfall situation a bit worse.

Then you add the cherry to this cake....intense building of houses and suburbs throughout the Napa Valley right next to wooded areas.  So when the fire process started, the homes lay right in the path and burned to the ground. If you went back fifty years ago?  Most of those suburbs would not have existed.  It's part of the urbanization problem of California and what went unchecked for decades.

But the intellectual journalist for ZDF wouldn't care....he's focused on one single issue and unable to grasp much beyond that.