Daniel Swain in Wired: A Mass Power Outage, Twitter’s Data Misuse, and More News

On Wednesday night, PG&E started shuting off power for hundreds of thousands of California residents in an effort to prevent wildfires during a high-wind period. Though this may be necessary as a stopgap, shutoffs won’t save California from wildfires entirely. “Even if you prevent 90 percent of wildfire ignitions, the remaining fires could be just as bad or even worse,” notes Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA. “Even if we see fewer of them, we’ll still have catastrophic fires.”