François CholletVerified account

A thing about the California fires is that there are long stretches of drought in the American west's recent history (past few hundred years), "megadroughts" that can last for sixty years or more. European new arrivals just happened to settle the place during a rainy spell.

There are useful things we can learn from civilizations that write things down. But there's no such record in California and the Pacific Northwest. Even basic facts like "there are enormous subduction earthquakes under Seattle, don't build a city here" took too long to figure out

And part of figuring even that much out was thanks to good recordkeeping in Japan. So it's really hard to tell what 'normal' is on a scale much longer than the very brief history of modern recordkeeping. It's possible the whole idea of settling California was a mistake

It's also possible that an increase in wildfires has to do with anthropogenic global climate change, or is part of normal long-term variations that have nothing to do with human activity, or is a combination of one superimposed on the other.