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So Much Hot Air About California’s Wildfires

To hear Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tell it, the wildfires that ravaged California throughout October were the result of climate change. And nothing else.

“This is what climate change looks like,” the whangdoodle freshman New York Democrat tweeted. “The GOP like (sic) to mock scientific warnings about climate change as exaggeration. But just look around: it’s already starting. We have 10 years to cut carbon emissions in half. If we don’t, scenes like this can get much worse.”

Ocasio-Cortez echoed California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, whose torturous excursions into “science” seemed to have required the assistance of both Rube Goldberg and the Marquis de Sade after a hard week of California Dreamin’.

Last April, Newsom, whose climatological expertise is as stable as the San Andreas Fault, told reporters, “If anyone is wondering if climate change is real, come to California.”

Earlier this month, when President Trump blasted Newsom for his role in managing state forests—or lack of it—the whiny governor snapped back: “You don’t believe in climate change. You are excused from this conversation.”

Once again, the climate change alarmists show they haven’t the first clue about climatology, meteorology, forestry, or history for that matter—especially U.S. history.

So as Newsom and Ocasio-Cortez continue to spew mindless balderdash, the drivel of morons and dingbats, let me point out there were wildfires in California long before AOC learned the term “climate change,” way before her days as a bartender and waitress, and waaaaay before she was born in 1989.

California has been a semi-arid region rife with opportunities for wildfires for centuries.

Here are some examples of those fires:

The 1889 Santiago Canyon Fire consumed some 310,000 acres across Orange, Riverside, and San Diego counties.

The 1923 Berkeley Fire laid waste to more than 1,000 buildings and homes.

The 1939 Griffith Park fire destroyed vast acreage and killed 28 firefighters and perhaps as many 58 civilians.

Meanwhile, long before Gavin Newsom was demanding action on climate change and condemning the evils of Pacific Gas and Electric, the Santa Ana winds and their northern cousins, the Diablo Winds, blew their hot dry sirocco currents without respite every year between spring and late fall.

California’s wildfires and air currents were so well known, that in World War II, the Japanese Ninth Army Number Nine Research Laboratory under Major General Sueyoshi Kusaba came up with a way to exploit dry California and its winds to Japan’s advantage.

“Project Fu-Go” used novelistic fūsen bakudan (fire balloons) in a strategic air offensive against western North America. Fu-Go floated some 9,800 bomb- and incendiary-laden 33-foot-diameter-balloons across the Pacific Ocean on the jet stream, aimed at semi-arid California as well as the balance of the West Coast so as to cause huge fires and degrade America’s war effort. It was estimated that 10 percent actually landed.

To fight the threat, the United States and Canada engaged in censorship and deception to deny the Japanese any information and prevent panic on the West Coast. Along with fighter and anti-aircraft artillery defenses, the U.S. Army deployed the all-black 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion whose job it was to parachute into the impact zone to put out fires from the Fu-Go balloons and retrieve any of the devices that survived intact. (They were the very first smokejumpers.)

Given then that this was all known to our enemy decades before AOC was born, how is it now she fulminates that California’s fires are a result of climate change?

If the freshman congresswoman and the former San Francisco mayor had bothered to research it with methods beyond their Ouija board, they might have found that bad forestry management, inept water management, and wishful green lawmaking by a legislature dominated by their fellow Democrats have fostered a highly inflammatory environment up and down the Golden State. But cult members are often impervious to facts.

Oh! One more thing! Unlike Ocasio-Cortez and Newsom, General Kusaba floated his project with hydrogen rather than hot air.

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About Chuck de Caro

Chuck de Caro is a contributor to American Greatness. He was CNN's very first Special Assignments Correspondent. Educated at Marion Military Institute and the U.S. Air Force Academy, he later served with the 20th Special Forces Group (Airborne). He has taught information warfare (SOFTWAR) at the National Defense University and the National Intelligence University. He was an outside consultant for the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment for 25 years. A pilot since he was 17, he is currently working on a book about the World War I efforts of Fiorello La Guardia, Giulio Douhet, and Gianni Caproni, which led directly to today’s U.S. Air Force Global Strike Command.

Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

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