The anti-science culture that is growing in the USA is very troubling. Some of it has been aided and abetted by big business. I refer to the resistance to tobacco as a cause of cancer and the attacks on global warming science. Sadly there are a huge number of people who have been conditioned to believe almost anything. Skepticism is a virtue that has fallen out of fashion.
Some of it is aided by media bias towards a “scientific narrative” that plays to an audience or philosophy. The wildfires are a case in point. Is is trendy to blame everything bad on “Global Warming”, and there is credible evidence that above average temperatures and drier than average weather patterns have exacerbated the wildfire problem. However no news network is talking about how decades of protests from environmentalists has led to a banning of controlled burns which has resulted in those same forests having more fuel on the ground to feed a wildfire than any time in the last 1000 years (according to a 2015 Forest Service Report on the danger of uncontrollable fires due to the lack of controlled burns).
California touts its lead in Electric vehicles, but makes no mention of the fact that it needs to import the electricity to power its cities from other states because it’s laws make it impossible to generate the electricity they need. So there is no real conversations about what is necessary and what is possible ... there are just talking points and sound bytes. The gap between the narrative and reality cause people to become skeptical of any “expert” being pushed in front of a camera to “explain” what we should do (to immediately be followed by a counterpoint on another network).
It is hard to take seriously that everyone needs to abandon their car and use electric mass transit (which will make my 30 minute trip to work, 2 hours) to stop pollution causing global warming, as western forests burn releasing more greenhouse gasses than 100 years of automobile use ... or 1 volcanic eruption releases more greenhouse gas than all human activities ... EVER! The narrative needs to reflect reality rather than fantasy.
I have an example from my home state of Florida. Agriculture and Industry use 90% of all of the water consumed in the state. Of the 10% that is used by Residences, 8% is used by the people and 2% is used to water lawns. So when the state enters a drought, the Water Management Districts immediately respond in the only way a reasonable person could ... they declare a water emergency and pass draconian fines for watering your lawns more than one day a week and on any day except your approved day. The most common grass for Florida Lawns, pre-drought was St Augustine Floatam Sod. It is pest and disease resistant, shade tolerant, thick and a beautiful shade of green. It also dies in the summer heat unless watered at least twice per week. So for a 1% reduction in water usage, the Government inflicted maximum inconvenience on every Florida Homeowner and wiped out all of their lawns. However, they made no mandated efforts to reduce the other 99% of the water usage. That suggests to me that the “SCIENCE” of drought management is being guided by “POLITICS”. A symbolic gesture that made it clear that the Government was doing “something” about the problem.
(Of course the Wealthy all installed private wells that were exempt from watering restrictions, to the result has been an increase in irrigation wells across the state and thin, brown, drought resistant lawns for non-well owners (Bahia Sod is drought Tolerant).
