Tag Archives: Wildfires

Two Charts Destroy Big Lie About ‘Climate Change’ And Wildfires, by the I and I Editorial Board

Posted on August 14, 2021 | Leave a comment

In the twentieth century, there were a lot more wildfires in the early part of the century, before there could have been much man-made global warming. From the Issues and Insights Editorial Board at issuesinsights.com:

Wildfire threatens Santa Clarita, California. Photo: Jeff Turner, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en).

It’s that time of year again, the season of headlines routinely screaming about “record” amounts of acreage burned from out-of-control wildfires caused by, of course, “climate change.” But is it true? Is global warming driving a surge in wildfires? The answer is no.

The media started again this week with the release of the United Nation’s latest dire climate change report, based on the same faulty models and filled with more apocalyptic predictions that won’t come true.

Recent screaming headlines tell the tale:

Wildfires rage across the world as U.N. releases damning climate change report — Yahoo News

Why the Dixie Fire won’t stop burning — Mashable

Dry, hot, windy: Explosive wildfires in Northern California could burn until winter — USA Today

Greek wildfires are the ‘harsh reality of climate change,’ experts warn — NBC News

We could go on. It’s become an annual summer mantra from the media, this time driven by large wildfires that happen to coincide with the release of the U.N. report.

The truth is, in the U.S. we are not at a “record” for wildfire burning by a longshot. As the charts below show, wildfire burns were far worse in the early- to mid-20th century, with massive amounts of acreage charred before there was any significant global warming to speak of.

So based on 20th century history, the most recent fires are way below the levels in the 1920s and 1930s, when more than 50 million acres burned in some years. (The chart ends at 2017; more recent data show that from 2018 through 2020, wildfires averaged just under 7.9 million acres burned each year).

Further underscoring the spurious correlation between wildfires and climate change is a related chart presented to Congress several years back during testimony by David B. South, an emeritus professor of forestry at Auburn University. It too is enlightening, because it’s one you’ll never see in the mainstream media. It shows the same wildfire data charted above against CO2 increases back to 1926.

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Climate Change Is Not Driving Western Wildfires, Government Mismanagement Is To Blame, by H. Sterling Burnett

Posted on August 10, 2021 | 3 comments

Every time there’s a big fire someone yells “Climate change!” There are ways to mitigate wildfires, but they’re a natural part of the ecosystem and like the Covid virus, you can’t get rid of them. From H. Sterling Burnett at The Epoch Times via zerohedge.com:

In late July, President Joe Biden held a virtual joint planning meeting and press conference with the governors of various Western states to discuss how to handle 2021’s wildfire season.

Every leader blamed catastrophic human climate change for the severity of recent wildfire seasons.

The New York Times allowed Oregon’s Democratic Gov. Kate Brown to follow up that event with an editorial titled “The West Is on Fire, It’s Past Time to Act on Climate Change.”

Biden and the governors are wrong.

Wildfires have been common throughout the West historically, often burning more acres than they’ve burned in recent years. To the extent that wildfires have increased in intensity recently, it isn’t due to modest warming, but rather to decades of federal and state mismanagement of publicly owned forests throughout the Western United States, leaving those forests in tinderbox conditions.

It has been more than a century since California experienced wildfires of the magnitude it has suffered recently. But research published in Forest Ecology and Management reported that prior to European colonization, more than 4.4 million acres of California forest and shrub-land burned annually. And those huge wildfires came when the Earth was cooler than it is today.

Had Brown studied history a bit, she would have found Oregon has suffered large fires throughout its history.

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California Burnin’ – A Warning Against One-Party Rule, by Niall Ferguson

Posted on September 21, 2020 | Leave a comment

Liberals want all sorts of power but by and large, they do a lousy job of managing things. California is a perfect example. From Niall Ferguson at bloomberg.com via zerohedge.com:

Authored by Niall Ferguson, op-ed via Bloomberg.com,

Fires, blackouts, high taxes, poverty, scarce housing, urban squalor, lousy schools – it’s a wonder anybody stays.

“California, folks, is America fast forward.” Thus Governor Gavin Newsom, hoarsely, amid brown smoke at the North Complex Fire on Sept. 11.

“What we’re experiencing right here is coming to a community all across the United States of America… unless we get our act together on climate change.”

I was with him all the way until he said the words “on climate change.”

As my Hoover Institution colleague Victor Davis Hanson put it last month, California is “the progressive model of the future: a once-innovative, rich state that is now a civilization in near ruins. The nation should watch us this election year and learn of its possible future.”

Let’s start with the fires. So far this year, they have torched more than five times as much land as the average of the previous 33 years, killing 25 people and forcing about 100,000 people from their homes. At one point, three of the largest fires in the state’s history were burning simultaneously in a ring around the San Francisco Bay Area. According to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or CAL FIRE, of the 10 largest fires since 1970, five broke out this year. Nine out of 10 have occurred since 2012.

No doubt high temperatures and unusual thunderstorms bear some of the responsibility for this year’s terrifying wildfires on the West Coast. It is deeply misleading to claim, as some diehard deniers still do, that temperatures aren’t rising and making wildfires more likely. But it is equally misleading to claim, as the New York Times did last week, that “scientists say” climate change “is the primary cause of the conflagration.”

In reality, as Stanford’s Rebecca Miller, Christopher Field and Katharine J. Mach argue in a recent article in Nature Sustainability, this crisis has at least as much to do with disastrous land mismanagement as with climate change, and perhaps more. Anyone who thinks solar panels, Teslas and a $3.3 billion white elephant of a high-speed rail line will avoid comparable or worse fires next year (and the year after and the year after) doesn’t understand what the scientists are really saying.

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California’s Housing Nightmare Is Only Getting Worse, by Tyler Durden

Posted on November 9, 2019 | 1 comment

California has only its Democrats to blame for its housing woes. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

When historians look back on contemporary California, one thing they’ll be bound to make note of is that the state’s developers bet on the wrong model.

Endless, suburban sprawl is coming back to haunt California in ways both major and minor. In densely populated communities across the state, traffic is horrible thanks to underdeveloped public transportation (this is especially true in LA). Most residents have accepted that deadly, devastating wildfires are just part of the deal now – bound to recur endlessly until the state’s population shrinks to the point that it no longer intermingles with the state’s vast swaths of woodland.

But it’s not just the apocalyptic images of fiery doom that have some of the state’s residents rethinking their decision to settle in California. The wildfires have had all kinds of ancillary effects: In parts of the state, PG&E is essentially shutting down large portions of the power grid in disruptive distributed blackouts intended to lower the fire risk.

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Self-induced DISASTER: California fires the direct result of shortsighted environmentalist policies that prohibit forest management, by Mike Adams

Posted on November 13, 2018 | 1 comment

A possible degree and a fraction increase in the earth’s temperature explains California’s brutal fires, and fire-suppression policies have nothing to do with it. That’s the line out of Sacramento, and California’s pols are sticking with it, any contrary evidence be damned. From Mike Adams at naturalnews.com:

Image: Self-induced DISASTER: California fires the direct result of shortsighted environmentalist policies that prohibit forest management

Actions have consequences, and bad actions often have bad consequences. In much the same way that liberal policies have burned Venezuela’s economy to the ground, California environmentalist policies have unleashed a catastrophic fire that has so far claimed the lives of 11 people and countless animals.

This is what liberal policies always lead to: Destruction, pain, suffering and death.

We pray for those who are suffering through this catastrophe, but above all we pray that the people of California might wake up and realize this disaster is self-inflicted and can be prevented. But that can only happen if dangerous liberal policies that promote these catastrophes are finally stopped.

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Could California Flame Out? by John McNellis

Posted on August 5, 2018 | Leave a comment

California definitely could flame out, and probably will. From John McNellis at wolfstreet.com:

High housing costs & taxes lead to this: “Once we decided we had to get our employees out of California, we went about our search systematically.”

The phone rang early the other day. “Well, our center’s still standing,” my partner said. “The fire’s only a couple blocks from us, the whole town of Lakeport’s been evacuated. I think we’ll be ok, but it’s out of control.”

That fire is still raging as of this writing, the town is empty, the stores are closed, our shopkeepers are suffering daily losses that, while nothing compared to the loss of life and home that California’s wildfires are claiming, will never be recovered.

Not so very long ago I thought that global warming was a tragedy of epic proportions, but that it would have at least a few winners: Southern California might become truly unbearable, but Eureka would be the next Laguna Beach. I was wrong again. Writing in the New York Times about Montana, Sara Vowell summarized it like this, “Here in the Mountain West, there are no longer four seasons, only two: winter and wildfire.”

While not that apocalyptic, California’s wildfire season has been starting earlier and ending later. In the past, the season lasted a couple months, August through early October. This year it began the first week of July and last year–the deadliest and costliest wildfire season ever–it went on forever, finally petering out in the north in November and still devastating the south as late as December. The Thomas fire in Southern California, the largest single fire ever, broke out on December 4th.

In California, we pay the highest taxes in America. No other state has a base sales tax as high as our 7.25% nor does any state match our top marginal income tax rate of 13.3% (Hawaii’s a distant second at 11%). One resigned pundit called it a “Shangri-La tax,” the price we must pay to live in the Golden State. And thanks to what passes for political brilliance in Congress, Shangri-La became way more expensive as of January 1st when the Republicans eliminated the deductibility of state income taxes at the federal level, smacking the high-tax Democratic states they already had no chance of winning. All things being equal (they never are), a rich liberal will pay another 6.5% or so in federal taxes for the privilege of living in California this year.

To continue reading: Could California Flame Out?

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