Climate Politics: Causation can be complex, often multi-layered, multi-faceted and with links between its elements. In the context of weather-related disasters, it has to be attributed with great care, and in recognition of the complicated thing that is the environment whether natural or human. And we need to note the motives of those who attribute causation; they can quickly politicise events and condition peoples views as to what underlies those events.

Take the current Los Angeles fires. President-elect Donald Trump was on the front foot from the outset, blaming Californian Governor Gavin Newsoms efforts at ensuring the endangered Delta smelt had adequate water in its native habitat. To Trump this was focussing on a trivial environmental concern, diverting water from fire-fighting purposes and in consequence causing the loss of thousands of houses to fires.

Trump was turning attention to a political enemy and away from other actors like nature. He did not blame the powerful Santa Ana winds blowing over a Los Angeles that had experienced little rain in its normal wet season. And he certainly did not recognise any possibility that human-induced climate change might have helped prime the conditions, for example by gradually exacerbating the drying of southern California over decades.

Trump distorted the reasons for the fires to meet his political objectives. He also failed to recognise the inevitability of the severity of the fires, or to see that Los Angeles was not completely prepared for them. No American city, indeed no city anywhere, is ever fully prepared for extreme events in nature.

Extremes happen, fortunately usually only rarely in the same place, but nevertheless inevitably at some stage. Resources, including water for fire-fighting, are inevitably stretched on occasions.

The truth is that urban water supplies are planned to meet a combination of domestic use and what might be called standard fire scenarios. They are bound to be insufficient when the fires are many and extreme. This is not a Los Angeles issue; it is an issue everywhere.

But Trumps need was to sheet the blame home to human beings specifically his political adversaries like Newsom who he painted as both incompetent and politically misdirected. He implied that Democrats care only about tiny, irrelevant things, like the smelt, not about human beings and their homes.

Others took a different but equally simplistic and inappropriate tack. The chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department, a gay women, became to some yet another proof that liberal equity, inclusion and diversity policies are ruining institutions and their capabilities. Just how those policies had that effect was not spelled out: it didnt need to be, given that many were preconditioned against DEI initiatives.

New South Wales saw an extreme flood three years ago, when Lismore was inundated by a flood vastly worse than had been seen there in its century and a half of existence. On that occasion the State Emergency Service had nowhere near the number of boats that were needed to rescue people, and a tinny army staffed by private citizens was called upon to do the job. Understandably, there was criticism of the SES but there was little understanding of the massive cost that would have been involved in having sufficient boats on hand to cover the need in a possibly once-in-centuries flood event.

Even had there been enough boats, there would not have been enough trained SES crews to operate them. And there was the problem of SES personnel getting to the boats through the flooded streets of Lismore, an impossibility soon after the flood had burst the rivers banks and well before it peaked at a level much higher than had ever previously been known in Lismore.

Many similar cases can be cited. Extremes happen everywhere, eventually, and our coping strategies are overwhelmed. Then the blaming starts, and political figures seek to seize the narrative. Any notion of complex causation, including climate change, tends to be overwhelmed as blame is sheeted home to individuals or organisations.

Trump in the Los Angeles case pandered to the nave community expectation that we can control any disaster if only we respond efficiently and in an appropriate political context as he defines it. He makes causation seem simple, and factors outside those he puts forward are relegated to insignificance or denied. Community understanding of the complexity of causation is not fostered.

The truth is that extremes often overwhelm management; they are the cases in which nature proves its ultimate superiority. In the cases of floods and fires, science increasingly points to the involvement of climate change, but this is lost by many in the seizing of the narrative in the public domain.

We need to understand extremes in nature, the limits of our readiness and the politics which underlie the attribution of causation.