Many of the most damaging fires here in southern California have been started by people doing things during a red flag warning that they absolutely should not be doing. Loss of property, loss of life.

More evidence that people get numb to the warnings and ignore them.

The problem really is that the baseline is adjusting so that formerly routine activities can quickly become dangerous, but people do not want to adjust their expectations on what they should do.

It’s a tough problem; people love campfires and they love fireworks, but it is legitimately becoming risky to do that without starting a large forest fire for large parts of the year in places.

Well, that, and your corrupt state's government squandering its unthinkably massive budget as usual, instead of spending it on adequate fire prevention.

(For those saying Californian forests are federally managed—what is https://www.fire.ca.gov ?)

The majority of forest in CA is federally owned and managed.

A non-trivial number of these fires in recent years have been traced to homeless encampments as well.

That can't be true—those are all responsible, upstanding Californians!

I grew up in a world being told marijuana kills and Halloween candy contains razor blades. At least these warnings are based on facts.

Facts? lol!

When a meteorologist says there will be unusually high temperatures, or unusually low temperatures, do you deny these facts? Do you just laugh with your silly little "lol" as the elderly die from these abnormally extreme temperatures? I do hope you respond and tell me, in great detail, the facts behind your gruesome and morbid laughter.

lol

Yes, except that summers are hotter and hotter and hotter. The alert was there even during August, the difference is that the August weather is the baseline now

People say this very often - but government temperature charts do not support this notion.

If the average summer temperature has increased by about 1F over 30 years... can you even tell the difference? Can you go outside right now and determine the difference between 88 and 89 degrees? I think not.

So, what's changed? Constant fearmongering alerts on your phone and computer every day. You've convinced yourself, against all government evidence, that August truly is unbearably hot compared to years past. That's just not reality.

The average is rather useless if weather gets more extreme.

One hand on the stove and one in an ice bucket is isn't so bad on average.

Though you're kind of right, some years have a hotter August on average than other years and I believe this one was hotter for much of America. As in noticeably hotter for many days.

I assume the government charts are aware of this, so that 1F degree higher is measured by averaging ~5 Augusts together thirty years ago and comparing them to the most recent few Augusts.

Not only in America. The Mediterranean boiled this year with an average of 30 degrees Celsius, which for a sea is a lot

I'm not sure what is driving the recent anti-intellectual and anti-scientific viewpoints here lately on HN, but your conclusion of

> So, what's changed? Constant fearmongering alerts on your phone and computer every day.

Is just flat out wrong.

Sea surface temperatures are rising year over year [1].

> You've convinced yourself, against all government evidence, that August truly is unbearably hot compared to years past

Also wrong. Have some government evidence [2]

On top of that, the hand waving about one degree difference is ignorant. Nobody cares if you feel just as comfortable at 89 degrees where you live. For the people experiencing higher and longer heat waves at their most extreme, it's a survival issue. For people experiencing higher numbers of major category hurricanes, it's a survival issue. For people experiencing changes in rainfall patterns, shrinking groundwater reserves, shrinking fish populations, and dozens of other problems directly connected to climate change, it's a survival issue.

I swear in the last couple of months there has been a dramatic increase of hot takes from the common clay here that really exhaust the amount of time the rest of us want to spend correcting this garbage.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/1979-_Da...

[2] https://www.epa.gov/system/files/styles/large/private/images...

Yeah. The worst is that it is not alarmism, it’s literally what it already is. According to a rather new research, things may get even worse than predicted

Can you please not post in the flamewar style to HN and just make your substantive points thoughtfully? The amount of bile and meta noise you've included in this comment puts it well outside the range of curious conversation.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Note that among other things they ask you to eschew flamebait, not call names, not fulminate, and not sneer at the rest of the community.

(This is not a comment about the underlying topic—just thread quality.)

It sounds like you're leaning into the trend and doing a large part of it to yourself? First with your phone running software that you apparently do not feel works in your interests, and then secondly using a tiny agency-limiting phone as your "primary computing device", or at the very least normalizing that it's what kids should be doing? If the lock screen of my desktop/laptop/phone were to start saying weird messages like that, I would investigate it as the security lapse that it is.