Authored by Michael Bastasch via The Daily Caller,
With wildfires engulfing over 620,000 acres of California, there’s been a concerted media campaign to single out man-made global warming as the primary force behind the deadly blazes.
But that’s not what the data suggests, according to University of Washington climate scientist Cliff Mass.
“So there is a lot misinformation going around in the media, some environmental advocacy groups, and some politicians,” Mass wrote in the first of a series of blog posts analyzing the California wildfires.
“The story can’t be simply that warming is increasing the numbers of wildfires in California because the number of fires is declining. And area burned has not been increasing either,” Mass wrote.
Firefighters are struggling to put out the largest fire in recent decades, the Mendocino Complex fire, that’s consumed over 300,000 acres in northern California. Environmentalists and some scientists have pushed a media narrative that blazes across the state to global warming.
“Climate change is making wildfires more extreme. Here’s how,” PBS Newshour warned viewers on Monday, quoting Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann.
“You warm the planet, you’re going to get more frequent and intense heat waves. You warm the soils, you dry them out, you get worst drought,” Mann said.
“You bring all that together, and those are all the ingredients for unprecedented wildfires.”
The San Francisco Chronicle ran with similar coverage: “Scientists see fingerprints of climate change all over California’s wildfires.”
The Chronicle also quoted Mann, who further argued global warming weakened the jet stream, causing extreme weather patterns to persist.
“These factors work together to produce the sorts of persistent extreme weather events — droughts, floods, heat waves, wildfires — that we’re seeing across the Northern Hemisphere right now,” Mann said.
However, Mass combed through California wildfire statistics, finding state figures showed a decrease in acres burned in four out of five regions. U.S. Forest Service data for public forests and lands in California shows mixed trends, with some regions having just as big of fires as in the 1920s.
“The bottom line of the real fire data produced by the State of California and in the peer-reviewed literature is clear: there has been no upward trend in the number of wildfires in California during the past decades,” Mass wrote on his blog.
“In fact, the frequency of fires has declined,” he wrote. “And in most of the state, there has not been an increasing trend in area burned during the past several decades.”
“Clearly, climate change is only one possible factor in controlling fire frequency and may not be the most important,” Mass wrote.
While seasonal weather is an important ingredient for wildfires, it’s not the only factor, making it particularly hard to attribute fires to global warming. Land management and population growth are also major factors, since most fires are started by humans.
A recent study found the risk of fire increased in once rural areas as populations increased, putting more buildings, plants, vehicles and other ignition sources in fire-prone areas that were once sparsely populated.
“This is a people problem,” U.S. Geological Survey fire scientist Jon Keeley told The San Jose Mercury News. “What’s changing is not the fires themselves but the fact that we have more and more people at risk.”
Mass authored a similar analysis of California’s 2017 wildfire season when many media outlets suggested the blazes were driven by man-made warming.
“Those that are claiming the global warming is having an impact are doing so either out of ignorance or their wish to use coastal wildfires for their own purposes,” Mass wrote in 2017.
“Wildfires are not a global warming issue, but a sustainable and resilience issue that our society, on both sides of the political spectrum, must deal with,” Mass wrote.
The Wrath of God to a Liberal state
If the fires get any bigger, California’s going to have a major marijuana shortage.
Michael Mann wrote the “hockey stick” algorithm that found a sudden, recent increase in “Global average temperatures” a few years back, right?
[Mike Mann leapt from relative obscurity to international fame with his “hockey stick”, a graph of global temperatures from 1000 AD to the present, which was the showpiece at the launching of the 2001 IPCC Third Assessment Report in Shanghai in January 2001. The hockey stick became a corporate logo for the IPCC, but because it rubbed out the Mediaeval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age from the historical record, it was subjected to a US congressional inquiry. Eventually it was shown that random data fed into the algorithms used by Mann to produce his hockey stick from bristle cone pine tree ring data, also yielded hockey stick results. – http://leftexposed.org/2016/07/michael-e-mann/ ]
So why are we being exposed to his unsubstantiable ravings again?
Good point, and interesting. It doesn’t necessarily make him wrong in this case. What’s important here is the narrative manufacturing that is not based on reason.
I thought that fire was deliberately set??
Yes, but the person who set the fire was sweating and lightheaded because of global warming. He cannot be blamed. It wasn’t his fault. It’s the increase in CO2.
Think whatever you want. Anthropogenic abrupt climate change is here.
Grossly speaking, human survival depends on trees. The trees are all. Kill the trees in whatever fashion and you have desert. Very hard, if not impossible, to recuperate desertified lands. Mostly because asshole people want to cut down trees and set goats upon them.
https://www.popsci.com/sahara-desert-drought-humans#page-9
Imagine the passion you could bring to the fight if you knew what you were talking about.
No this is due to environmental whacko’s who will not allow dead undergrowth to be cleared from older forests because it is “habitat” for some animals. Well if you will not allow man to come in and clear the dead undergrowth then mother nature will do it with FIRE. It’s that simple.
There is NO man-made globull warming. CO2 is plant food. Look up the chemical equation for photosynthesis. CO2 is pumped into green houses to increase production. CO2 greens the planet. AND the REAL kicker is, man is responsible for less than 5% of global CO2 emissions! That’s right, mother nature does the rest… Chip
My sister lives out in San Francisco. After visiting I learned years ago that people out there don’t like to cut grass and brush. They’ll allow grass right next to their house to grow waist high then die off to where it’s very combustible. They’ll let brush grow right up to point where it scratches the walls. They’ll mumble about it being natural. I think they’re really lazy. No one other than a dead ass would allow things that flammable to grow around their house.