Also, the list of tornadoes the GP refers to in Europe are mostly F0-F2 severity. These don't often cause high fatalities and injuries in the US either (on par with what's reported there). The problem is that tornadoes in the US Midwest and Southeast are often in the F3-F5 range, which are much deadlier. An F3 tornado includes winds to 165 mph, which is considered a category 5 in the hurricane scale. They don't last nearly as long, but high intensity tornadoes can cause catastrophic damage in seconds where they hit directly, unless the shelter is literally underground.

Yes.

Tornadoes seem like a phenomenon for which insurance is actually a pretty good part of the solution. I mean, it is very unlikely for anything in particular to get hit by a tornado, but it is really devastating. It might take an unreasonable amount of work to build everything to the level where it can sustain a direct hit by a tornado. The expected value of tornado damage is quite low overall, we just need to deal with the individual catastrophes that occur.

Hurricanes… I mean, there are different sized hurricanes in different areas. For the ones that hit Florida, part of the solution is probably legitimately that we should have fewer people living there, because there’s going to be a widespread devastation there occasionally. And if you live in a hurricane-prone area, you are going to get hit by one eventually. (So like what’s the bet here? The insurance company knows they’ll probably have to pay out eventually).

Just to put a number to it, 2024 was apparently an unusually busy year for tornadoes, around $6B. That isn’t nothing! But one single hurricane cost $7B in 2024… and there was a $34B one… and a $79B one… who’s insuring the southern coast of the US? Seems rough.

> If their properties actually cost $200,000 per year to insure, then that's what they should have to pay! If they don't like it, they should either build something cheaper (that's the other half of the product) or move to somewhere with less risk.

Or build something adapted to the risk it faces. In my home town there are houses that were built on flood plains that have recently been flooding every 5 years or so. Luckily they are brick and in order to get these covered you now need to install flood barriers over the doors, and your ground floor has to be adapted to flood without sustaining damage (tile floors, special plaster etc.)

Now when we have a severe flood warning people will move their valuables upstairs if they're house floods they just have to clean out the mud. There are also a couple new houses right next to the river that float and rise and fall on stilts when the banks burst.

> we're politically/socially unwilling to transfer the risk to the people who are responsible for creating it

This is important. Insurance was invented 2000+ years ago but aggressively deploying technology that worsens floods, weather, and fires is only around ~100.

> The real problem is that we're politically/socially unwilling to transfer the risk to the people who are responsible for creating it

A lot of the responsibility falls upon governments who are lobbied by developers to zone areas for development that should never have been zoned for development in the first place.

I talked to somebody who owned a beach house in South Carolina about 5 years ago and if he wanted flood insurance it would cost $5,000 / month.

The real issue is global warming causing an exponential rise in tail risk events. It's exponential because even a linear shift in temperature causes an exponential rise at the tails (look at how a normal distribution works).

Insurance is based on statistics. The math they use assumes stationary distributions. Insurance companies can't deal with shifting distributions well so they take the losses and then exit markets.

Global warming is going to mess up insurance as we know it for that reason. Not sure property insurance, but all kinds of insurance.

>the US would avoid flood damage if they just built apartment buildings.

What do you mean by this?

Public insurance. For housing, healthcare, maybe even cars (since the coprorate political complex insists that we HAVE to drive everywhere). At some point, we have to accept that the middlemen are siphoning value, not providing any. Vanguard it and let elected admins set the codes.

It’s regulated, not illegal.

“Experts say the insurance landscape in California is particularly tricky because, in addition to the wildfire risk, the state has a law that adds extra approval measures, including board approval and review by the insurance commissioner, if an insurance company wants to raise the rate of insurance by more than 7%. That’s been in effect since the 1980s.” https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/05/what-homeowners-need-to-know...

Then why are private insurers being pushed out of California?

I'd finish your comment with "it's a goal of most US politicians ... to enrich the most wealthy Americans".

I thought that the idea that they did not understand property rights was a misconception. The different tribes had their own territories, and they clearly had an idea of the territory belonging to one or another. This is also why people negotiating with them for land would use underhanded negotiating tactics such as getting their leaders drunk for the negotiations so that they would agree to absurd deals. If they did not understand property rights, there would have been no point to doing that.

We had a lot of rain the last couple of years (before 2024), which got us out of severe drought for several years back into "moderate". 2024 has been QUITE dry, relatively speaking, but because of the previous years of a LOT of rain, it's only back to moderate drought status, AFAICT.

The years with lots of rain caused MUCH extra plant growth, and anyone who's been here a while expected several bad fires during our fire season in 2024 as the first "dry" year after a "wet" year. The fact that it's only been 1 major one and a few minor ones has actually been a bit of a surprise.

Yosemite NP, especially the iconic valley, looked vastly different when the Europeans first arrived in the nineteenth century. It was sparsely forested and had lots of meadows. After a 150 years of no controlled burns, it's a dense forest down there. It turns out the native peoples were managing the forest, after all.

> East coast native Indians

This is false. Fire was unambiguously part of the practice of native Californians.

> opportunists

What is this slander.

From the recent events in California I have seen many photos of burnt houses with unburnt trees around. I think those houses were especially flammable more than some vegetation around it seems. After the fire nothing remained but the chimneys. I have never seen any house burn like that in Europe.

I live along the Mediterranean sea in France, many wood fires every summer, with wind above 100km/h; never seen so many houses burn like in California even when most of our houses are concrete but with wooden framework.

I'm pretty sure that if houses were built like here (concrete / concrete blocks with terracota tiles on wooden framwork) at lot less would have burnt. Maybe those near the wooded slopes but not in the middle of a neighborhood block.

The reality is the fires didn't make it far into the city grid sections of LA proper. This is because these areas have less flammable material, and are more defensible.

> Despite these things the area still burned.

I suspect the rules for making a defensible house were wrong. For example, I read an article recently that posited that most of the fire was spread by burning embers on the wind, and not by intense heat from nearby flames.

The idea is to look at where embers accumulate and eliminate or fireproof those areas. For example, a low masonry wall a few feet from the house can stop a lot of heavier burning embers from piling up against the house. If you've got a swimming pool, add a pump to it that feeds sprinklers in the yard and on the rooftop.

There are a lot of homes that did not burn - look at them and figure out why they didn't burn.

For a related example, every airplane crash is looked at, and we always discover overlooked vulnerabilities. The tsunami that devastated Japan a few years ago also provided a lot of information about what worked and didn't work.

We're a long way from needing to give up. There's a lot of low hanging fruit.

>This was a black swan event that will require a thoughtful response.

Taleb would have a field day with this one. Broadly, I think a big part of the argument is driven by the assumption that the area will be rebuilt, despite being a known fire risk.

Those protections are all about keeping a structure from catching fire. That is different than designing a structure not to burn. A wooden house surrounded by fire protection is OK under current rules. But it is still wood and will, eventually, burn when faced by a wild fire on all sides. A house built out of rock/brick/concrete/sand will not. We need to go beyond flamability and start reducing the actual number of calories availible to be burned.

Partially because that story about Japan is incorrect.

In reality, it is Japanese condos that get gutted periodically or when sold, and it's driven by their real estate tax code.

Japan takes enormous effort to prevent and mitigate natural disasters.

There may have been some truth to it 200 years ago, with the idea that wood was the only economical way to build a house that could last.

Legal Eagle claims that embers can travel up to 2 miles:

https://youtu.be/5h1H36rdprs?t=1m51s

That would easily jump a 10' fire break.

That would only account for the small amount of homes right on the beach itself - the majority of Malibu is in the hills above

I would prefer no bailouts.

If insurance wants firebreaks for insurance, that is their choice.

If the city wants buy RE for access, that is between tax payers and the land owners. Cash talks

> the county acquiring and maintaining beach paths every few houses. Prescribed 10' wide fire breaks

Ooh, and make a bailout conditional on homeowners (or counties) agreeing to eminent domain.

That would not have solved the problem in this fire since wind speed was so high. The videos showed embers traveling far and fast. Having a 10 foot fire break would not have prevented the spread. One thing to look into is how the fire started and if the electrical equipment can be made safer, like being underground in some places.

The break would need a low masonry wall to stop embers from being pushed along the ground.

Hurricanes are common. The general case is they hit hundreds or thousands of square miles and destroy none or at worst a tiny fraction of the homes they hit.

Take Katrina from my friends and family living in New Orleans, you’ll find city streets where none of the houses go significantly damaged. They lost power long enough you don’t want to open the fridge, but most of the city was fine in the hardest hit city from one of the most expensive storms on record.

A lot has to do with infrastructure.

In most of South Florida basically anything left standing is pretty well built to withstand hurricanes.

A category 1 storm hitting NYC or North Carolina is an unbelievable disaster. A category 1 storm hitting Broward County is usually disruptive to everyday life but that’s it.

Hurricanes usually don't affect the structure of a house. They might damage the roof, parts of exterior cladding, perhaps windows, and the flooding which accompanies hurricanes destroys personal possessions, interior furnishing, electrical wiring, and appliances.

In the US, manual labor is very expensive, home construction or repair is highly regulated and requires permits and multiple inspections from the local government, and the amount of flood-destroyable stuff - material possessions, furnishings, appliances - in a typical home is massive. As a result, a cyclone which a poorer country would survive with a shrug in the US becomes an extremely expensive disaster.

The 50 km/h was sustained, not peak, but ok, I don't think we reached 100.

We have 7 million people living around, and yeah, only 6 months without a single drop of rain (19X days, where I don't remember what X was). Fire often destroys some homes, we got luck last year.

Look, the annual fire disasters in California are not a normal thing.

If people just point out it's not normal, people complain that nowhere else has fire so nobody else understands the problem. If people point out similar places, looks like it's "Four Yorkshiremen-ing" (whatever that is). So, yeah, let it keep burning, whatever.

I think you underestimate the frequency, strength, and geographic distribution of strong earthquakes in the US. There is nothing comparable in Europe. You have to engineer for the strongest earthquake, not the average one, and on the US west coast that is M8-9+ depending on the specific location. The construction techniques in Japan and US are very similar because both have similarly extreme earthquakes.

The entire western third of the US is has several M7+ earthquakes per century, with a M6 every couple years, and the occasional M8-9+. The 1964 Anchorage earthquake was stronger (M9.2) than the 2011 Japanese earthquake that caused the great tsunami.

In the eastern US, there is a giant seismic zone that had multiple M8+ earthquakes in the 19th century. These were so powerful they changed the path of the mighty Mississippi River. People forget about it because it hasn’t had a large earthquake in over a century.

A lot of R&D is done on new construction techniques for extreme earthquake risks. The challenge with reinforced concrete is the absurd amount of reinforcement and steel you need to make it survive an earthquake that strong, which makes construction slow and expensive. The state-of-the-art doesn’t use reinforced concrete at all, even in skyscrapers; they use specially designed welded steel plates and fill the empty spaces with poured concrete.

The US has an anomalously high exposure to natural disasters as an accident of geography. For example, people often forget just how many active volcanoes there are in the US, including multiple super-volcanoes. While I live in an area well-known for its M9+ earthquake and tsunami risk, I can see three active volcanoes from my kitchen window.

“Stick-built” is the name for it.

There are two main ways to build a house out of wood. You can go for stick-built construction or timber framing. Homes in the US were mostly timber framed until the early 1900s. Advancements in tools and manufacturing techniques has resulted in stick-built homes becoming dominant in the US since then.

If you search for “stick-built” you’ll see pictures and encyclopedia articles describing it. The basic idea is that you take standard dimensional lumber (like 2x4s), bring it onto the site, and assemble it into the frame for the house. Timber construction uses larger pieces of timber to make the house.

I’m not an expert but it seems to me that stick-built construction took over the country because of advancements in fasteners. If you tried to make a stick-built house in the 1800s it would fall apart, but this is the 2000s, and they make a million of them every year.

It draws a compelling portrait in people's minds. Everybody knows how easily sticks burn.

A lot of people do, in fact, talk like that about eastern european homes (them selves included).

Even single family homes are built from bricks and cement. Even large ones.

It's not just gas explosion, it's 'everything', fire, structural rigidity (only ground floor houses are rare, almost non existant here), and well.. they're built to last.

https://www.metropolitan.si/kronika/tovornjak-trcil-v-hiso-s... <- a truck hit a building, and old one, and you can see the damage... one wall. The girl in the room survived.

I mean... again.. you could build a home that is "fire resistant", and we do, but most americans don't, as we see in LA.

> So cooling a living space is always more costly than heating a living space. Simply because all the waste energy created by people living in the space reduces the total heating requirement of the space, but equally increases the cooling requirement of that same space.

This simply is not true for a furnace or electric resistive heat.

My furnace produces 0.9W of heat for every 1W of energy input. More efficient ones do 0.98, the best you get with electric resistive heat is 1W.

On the other hand my air conditioner moves 3.5W of heat outside for every 1W of energy input.

"cooling a living space is always more costly than heating a living space" Man I wish this was true but it definitely isn't in anyplace that gets significantly cold. Heat pumps are super super efficient at cooling but they get less efficient at heating the colder it gets. Humans and appliances create a pretty negligible amount of heat.

I also point out that Phoenix's "summer" last longer than Berlin's winter:

https://weatherspark.com/y/75981/Average-Weather-in-Berlin-G...

https://weatherspark.com/y/2460/Average-Weather-in-Phoenix-A...

Cooling takes less energy per BTU moved vs heating. In AC/heat pumps that's represented by SEER rating for cooling and HSPF rating for heating (heat pumps). Modern ACs have SEER ratings for 20+ and HSPF ratings for 8+. What it means is that on average, spending 1 BTU equivalent of electrical energy cools down the house by 20 BTU. Similarly for heat pump it means spending 1 BTU of electricity heats up the house by 8 BTU. Electric resistive heating is equivalent of HSPF 1.

Also in sunny climates it's easy to use solar energy for cooling making it carbon net-zero. Cold places typically burn natural gas for heating, it's much harder to make heating carbon net-zero.

A lot of what you said is intuitively/directionally correct, but misses a lot of important physics related to heat transfer in buildings and operational questions of space heating equipment.

This is your most accurate/relevant point:

> All of this is ignoring the fact that it’s easy to create a tiny personal heated environment around an individual (it’s called a woolly jumper).

Whereas this is plainly wrong:

> It’s much easier, and consumes less additional energy, to heat an occupied space, than to cool it.

And then the following is correct but the marginal reduction in load is minimal except in relatively crowded spaces (or spaces with very high equipment power densities):

> Thanks to the fact that your average human produces 80W of heat just to stay alive.

The truth is it is generally easier to cool not heat when you take into account the necessary energy input to achieve the desired action on the psychrometric chart, assuming by “ease” you mean energy (or emissions) used, given that you are operating over a large volume of air - which does align with your point about the jumper to be fair!

Generally speaking, an A/C uses approx. 1 unit of electricity for every 3 units of cooling that it produces since it uses heat transfer rather than heat generation (simplified ELI5). It is only spending energy to move heat, not make it. On the other hand, a boiler or furnace or resistance heat system generally uses around 1 unit of input energy for every 0.8-0.9 units of heating energy produced. Heat pumps achieve similar to coefficients of performance as A/Cs, because they are effectively just A/Cs operating in reverse.

Your point about a jumper is great, but there are local cooling strategies as well (tho not as effective), eg using a fan or an adiabatic cooling device (eg a mister in a hot dry climate).

> So cooling a living space is always more costly than heating a living space.

Once you move to cost, it now also depends on your fuel prices, not just your demand and system type. For instance, in America, nat gas is so cheap, that even with its inefficiencies relative to a heat pump, if electricity is expensive heating might still be cheaper than cooling per unit of thermal demand (this is true for instance in MA, since electricity is often 3x the price of NG). On the other hand, if elec is less than 3x the cost of nat gas, then cooling is probably cheaper than heating per unit of demand, assuming you use natural gas for your heating system.

Solar power works very well in summer and can be used for cooling.

It is true that heat is easier to generate. Berlin is considered mild while Phoenix is considered very hot. They just happen to have the same temperature deltas. On the whole, the world spends many, many times more energy heating living spaces than cooling them. The coldest cities people live in just have much larger room temperature deltas than the hottest.

This is a good point that I had not considered, and I will add a few additional thoughts:

* In cold weather, solar heat gain can work in your favor as well. Much of the effect will depend on the orientation, shading, and properties of your windows, though. On the other hand, as another commenter pointed out, more sun in southern, cooling-dominated climate can also mean more, cheaper electricity.

* If you have a heat pump water heater, it will actually _cool_ your space significantly. The heat is transferred from your home to your water and mostly goes down the drain with it.

* At 65F (18.3C), most people I know would already be wearing a jumper/sweater. That's why I chose a lower target temperature for Berlin. The best source I could find[1] indicates that in November-December of 2022 (in the context of rising energy prices due to Russia's war with Ukraine), Germans actually kept their houses at 19.4C, on average.

* Maybe I'm moving the goalposts a bit, but I chose Berlin mostly because the numbers worked out conveniently. As someone who grew up in the American upper midwest, I wouldn't consider Berlin to be particularly cold. Phoenix, on the other hand, is the hottest city in the country and its summers are some of the hottest in the world. In general, the hottest cities are still closer to what we'd consider room temperature than the coldest are.

[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/80-percent-german-house... (original report is on German)

> So cooling a living space is always more costly than heating a living space

Nope. That's precisely wrong. Tl;dr heating normally uses less efficient technology than cooling and has to work across a higher temperature difference.

In Alberta or Minnesota, where the delta in the winter can be as high as 60 degrees centigrade (-40 outside, +20 inside) but only 20 degrees centigrade at most in the summer (+45 outside, +25 inside), heating is far more costly. Even accounting for waste heat from appliances. Most heating is done with furnaces, not heat pumps. Air conditioners are heat pumps and are 3x as efficient as a furnace. There are also less energy intensive cooling methods - shading, fans, swamp coolers - commonly used in the developing world and continental Europe.

On the other hand in a place with warm winters and hot summers, such as south east Asia, obviously cooling is more expensive because heating is unnecessary.

The highest temperature ever recorded is around 60 degrees centrigrade, a mere 23 degrees above the human body. The low temperature record is like -90, 127 degrees below body temperature. Needing to heat large deltas is way more common than needing to cool high deltas. And cooling is done with heat pumps, which are more efficient than the technologies used most commonly for heating (resistive or combustion).

> when cooling a space, you have to cool everything, regardless of if it’ll impact the comfort of the occupants.

Keep the house at 25 degrees centigrade and run a ceiling fan. 23 if you're a multi-millionaire. You'll be far more comfortable outdoors if your house is closer to the outside temperature. The North American need to have sub-arctic temperatures in every air conditioned space in the summertime is bizarre (don't even get me started on ice water).

There's a big gap between "accept AC" and "build a megapolis in a city named after a bird that bursts into flames."

Phoenix is a slow-rolling disaster regardless of whether it's easier to heat or cool a room to comfort.

Yes, insulation works both ways. My garage is unheated and insulated. If I go out there to work on something in the winter I always compare the temperature outside. On a sunny day it might be pleasant outside and freezing in my garage - so I'll open the door and let it warm up.

Insulation makes the house more resistance to temperature change (relative to the inside and outside).

One thing people forget is the delta is very different in the summer and winter. Lets say your thermostat is on 70 year round. If it is 100 degrees out you only have to cool 30 degrees. When it is 0 F out you have a delta of 70 degrees. So for this scenario, expect to use more energy in the winter.

Yes

Many of the gouses burning weren't built to current codes, but the cost to retrofit houses to code was insurmountable by any of the owners and apparently by the state or even the nation. So they will just wait for them all to burn and then rebuild them I guess?

Mexico is in the middle of a crippling drought

Hy from Brazil... You know, a poor country.

We make single-level houses with a reinforced concrete structure, because it's cheap.

You know what isn't cheap? Wood. Wood is incredibly expensive to put into a shape, even if you are willing to cut forests down to get it.

> Residents who no longer have any insurers available can buy insurance from the state, but its far more expensive than the plans it rejected from private insurers

Sounds like a state-run racketeering business

Home values in Japan are somewhat anomalous. There are some good policies that contribute to this, but also other factors that make me reluctant to generalize from Japan. It’s a country with declining natural population, where houses are assets that rapidly decline in value to the point where they’re nearly worthless not that long after you buy them.

Average home age in Japan is 30 years. I think, maybe once or twice, I’ve lived in a building less than 30 years old in the US. I’ve spent most of my life in buildings built pre-war. There aren’t so many pre-war buildings in Japan, but the US takes the blame for that one :-(

The traditional materials used in Japanese construction of everyday homes aren't really in the "built to last" category: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1DP5xpM3Y8 . In some cases, trying to make a house that was resistant to floods, fires and earthquakes at the same time would have been prohibitively expensive. I'm sure that led to forming habits that have continued into more modern eras of building styles where it's less required.

They're also smaller, which makes construction costs cheaper which means people are more likely to make dramatic changes when fashion changes. And then there's more of a culture of prefab house building rather than extensions etc. Planning is also a lot more liberal which allows the rebuilt house to be more different and also reduces the cost of the process.

I think even in Europe some of the older houses are houses of theseus though. The exterior shell is the same, but there's plenty of buildings in the local city centre that were tenements, then small business offices, then apartments, with significant remodeling that occurred. Or the house I used to live in was built in the 1880s, extended in the 1950s and significantly modernised in the 2000s. Each time there would have involved largely gutting the interior and rebuilding.

Basically houses in Japan are treated like cars -- as something that doesn't appreciate in value as in most places but rather depreciate over time. Some of this is maybe cultural from the time when houses in Japan were literally constructed with paper.

https://www.learnedinjapan.com/no-buy-home-japan/

You could Google it and find out.

The problem is liability, to an extent; if you imagine a perfect market system, then maybe it would fix climate change; the parties responsible would be on the hook to pay for their externalities, so would be incentivised to stop producing them. In the real world, ah, not so much, though I do wonder if we'll see insurers/reinsurers attempting to sue big CO2 emitters in the near future.

1. Santa Ynez may have helped, however (a) you're still limited by the flow rate of the main to withdraw from the reservoir, but more critically (b) the situation was already well out of hand before any hyrdants ran dry and (c) Eaton had so such issues with hydrants, but a substantially similar outcome.

2. 'defunded' -> about a 2% reduction. Also it's not 100 fire engines, 100 appartus, which covers ambulance, command cars, etc, and it's not clear what exactly is waiting for maintainence.

3. The Mayor doesn't drive fire engines. LAFD and LACoFD prepositioned according to their models, per the chief.

4. most of the LA fire wasn't forest, but chaparral, which is lower, scruby-er, brushy-er terrain. It tends to burn on a 30-50 year cycle, but burning too much more often destroys the ecoology entirely. Indeninous practice and some research[1] suggest small patch-burning; others (NPS) avoid prescribed burns in chaparral in favor of natural fire and structure defense. So it's not clear that there's an unambiguously better management practice than "its gonna burn sometime" combined with aggressive brush clearance and defense around structures.

re: 2/3 Los Angeles (City mostly, but also County) clearly need a bigger fire department, with more people, stations, and equipment. But the specific complaints are ticky-tacky at best, and (AFAIK) no one asserts that a differnt pre-deployment, or a few more engines in service would have changed anything but the margins. I will say LAFD letting their first shift go off-duty as scheduled while LACoFD kept their shift on is an unfortunate unforced error.

re: 4 USFS (and maybe Cal Fire too? not sure). did halt prescribed burns in October 24 in the face of opposition on liability and air quality grounds. Hopefully the LA fires drive people to reconsider their resistance to prescribed burns, and creates the necessary risk-bearing structures for Cal Fire and USFS to actually perform them.

[1] https://www.fs.usda.gov/psw/publications/documents/psw_gtr05...

This is nonsense disinformation. Citations? This wasn't a forest fire so forest management isn't an issue. California makes massive investments in wild lands maintenance. It hasn't "stopped". Also most forest land in California is Federally owned. Perhaps our incoming president will invest some money in maintaining the peoples forests. This disaster deserves better responses.

re: point #1, the fire command team captain himself refuted this disinformation in an interview with Musk.

I don't know about the other three offhand, but it's absurd to claim that state and local governments in California are somehow not taking fire risk seriously. Do you seriously think that the state that has annual wildfire season just happens to be "incompetent" when it comes to preparing for wildfires?

It's a bit older, but see also [1] for a great survey of research on the topic.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Before-Wilderness-Environmental-Calif...

I don’t know but do they have ~7.9 earthquakes like California? I’ll bet they were not multi story homes with vaulted ceilings, giant glass windows with tons of natural light, and efficient insulation?

Wood is extremely cheap, and extremely earthquake resistant… it is an appropriate material for the area despite a slightly higher fire risk.

It works fine for commercial buildings and multi-family structures here too , there’s even a ton of brick buildings in Oregon (which are currently being retrofitted), but not as well for single family homes because of the cost.

There’s a lot of historical context to understand here. The neighborhood that just burned down in the Eaton fire (Altadena), was built up by African Americans and Latinos who were redlined out of Pasadena even after desegregation. Some of them built their houses on land that they bought for under $100 in the 1950s and 60s. They wouldn’t have been able to afford the kind of construction they’d need to be both earthquake and fire resistant. Their choice was between owning an old tinderbox or renting from slumlords.

What? What earthquake zone in Europe is similar to the fault lines in California? We are talking about entire cities wiped out by earthquakes just 120 years ago.

Japanese houses aren't built with brick.

Is that brick or is it reinforced masonry?

Bricks have to be manufactured and transported. In denser countries, the transportation cost is lower and there is a factory near you. In the US, you’re damn well sure you can find timber, the US is loaded with timber.

Brick also isn’t some magical building material that solves all your problems without drawbacks. Wood isn’t some evil building material that creates a bunch of problems without benefits.

This is less like "well, I could get the $10 pants and have to replace them in a few months, or the $70 pants and have them last a decade" sort of cheap, and more the "well, I've been saving a mortgage down-payment for 15 years in the top 30% of individual wage earners, and this is the best built house I can afford" kind.

The options are either pay more for this one thing than literally any other possession you or anyone you know will ever own, or live in a tent or worse.

I feel like criticizing people for pragmatism in the face of (literally) existential threats is some kind of next-level privilege.

Define "cheaply built". These houses are already hugely expensive, to the point that we cant even afford to build more.

Compared to the other challenges climate change poses those are fairly simple engineering problems. The Netherlands manage fine with large parts of the country below sea level.

[flagged]

I remember forest fires yearly in northern Spain in the 80s. Are they more violent now?

Why would a city like London or Paris burn down in a hot dry period?

And last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxqswOkZMSI

> What are you trying to say?

Perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataclysmic_pole_shift_hypothe...

Can there even be geodetic drift of the poles? I sort of assumed that our lat/lon system is based on the poles being fixed points as a matter of definition.

Nope. Last time I checked, they were in the business of spewing hate and misinformation (sorry: Alternative facts), undermining any sensible discussion.

Accusing thousands of people of being incompetent is more telling of you than them.