Elon Musk is the new emperor of misinformation

Here's the latest from Elon Musk about the LA wildfires:

Every single thing on this list is either badly misleading or flat-out wrong:

1. Reservoirs and emergency water tanks were all full before the fires started.
2. The fire budget was increased by $50 million.
3. The donations to Ukraine were in 2022 and included only small amounts of unused surplus equipment such as boots, hoses, nozzles, body armor and medication. None of this had any impact on current fire fighting.
4. A grand total of 12 LAFD workers were fired for neither getting a COVID vaccine nor requesting an exemption. They have long since been replaced.
5. Brush clearing is problematic for sure, but I'm not sure who "they" is in this sentence.
6. California has a poor record of doing prescribed burns. That said, only the US Forest Service—not California—halted prescribed burns temporarily in October. Everyone else, including Cal Fire, the US Park Service, BLM, native tribes, and private property owners, kept on burning. Overall, California burns about 125,000 acres per year and increased that to 250,000 acres in 2023 with plans to burn 400,000 acres in 2025.
   
7. Storm water has always drained primarily to the sea in order to prevent flooding, especially in rainy years that produce too much water to be captured. However, a significant amount is captured to recharge groundwater aquifers, and that amount has been growing ever since LA voters approved a tax levy in 2018 that goes toward storm water capture projects.

As for climate change: yes, virtually all of the increase in California wildfires is due to warming. There's overwhelming evidence for this. Here's the conclusion of a recent study:

It was found that nearly all the observed increase in burned areas over the past half-century is due to human-caused climate change. It is estimated that from 1971 to 2021, human-caused climate change contributed to a +172% increase in burned areas, with a +320% increase from 1996 to 2021. In the coming decades, a further increase in annual forest burned areas is expected, ranging from 3% to 52%.

This is what Musk has become: a machine for reposting red meat for the MAGA base that he almost certainly knows to be bogus.

But he doesn't care. In addition to having an audience about a thousand times the size of mine, it took him only five seconds to repost that comment. It took me two hours to write this one. It's not possible to keep up with his firehose of lies and misinformation.