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Updated August 27, 2010 This paper is, as intended, a work in progress as a compilation of what’s current and important relative to the data sets used for formulating and implementing unprecedented policy decisions seeking a radical transformation of our society and institutions.
Authors veteran meteorologists Joe D’Aleo and Anthony Watts analyzed temperature records from all around the world for a major SPPI paper, Surface Temperature Records ‚Äì Policy-driven Deception? The startling conclusion that we cannot tell whether there was any significant “global warming” at all in the 20th century is based on numerous astonishing examples of manipulation and exaggeration of the true level and rate of “global warming”.
That is to say, leading meteorological institutions in the USA and around the world have so systematically tampered with instrumental temperature data that it cannot be safely said that there has been any significant net “global warming” in the 20th century.
“Sen. Feinstein blames Sierra Club for blocking wildfire bill,” reads the provocative headline on a 2002 story in California’s Napa Valley Register. Feinstein had brokered a congressional consensus on legislation to thin “overstocked” forests close to homes and communities, but could not overcome the environmental lobby’s disagreement over expediting the permit process to thin forests everywhere else. Fire suppression along with too many environmentalist-inspired bureaucratic barriers to controlled burns and undergrowth removal turned the hillsides and canyons of Southern California into tinderboxes.
Climate change spares private forests: Katy Grimes, editor of the California Globe, points out that the disparate impact of climate change on public and private forests suggests another factor is at play, namely the lack of proper forest management in government-run forests: For decades, traditional forest management was scientific and successful, until ideological, preservationist zealots wormed their way into government and began the 40-year overhaul of sound federal forest management through abuse of the Endangered Species Act and the no-use movement…
While Edward Ring blames environmentalists for the “destruction of California forests,” echoing Trump’s criticism of California’s forest management practices, both Ring and Trump fail to point out that the federal government owns 47% of all California land:
According to the Congressional Research Service, the state of California has a total acreage of 100.2 million acres. Of that total, 47.70 percent, or 47.8 million acres, belongs to the federal government.
These lands are managed by the U.S. Forest Service (43%), U.S. National Park Service (16%), U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (0.6%), U.S. Bureau of Land Management (32%) and the U.S. Department of Defense (8%).
Accordingly, much of the blame for any deficiencies in forest management rests with the Trump administration, now nearing its fourth year in office. While the administration has unilaterally changed land management practices in Utah and Alaska, opening federal lands to private oil companies, it has done nothing to reduce the fire hazard on federal lands in California. Why has the administration not similarly opened up federal forests to selective timber harvesting? As Mr. Ring points out, the Forest Service operated as a profit center selling timber to the private sector. So why haven’t they used profits from harvesting timber to pay for clearing the underbrush and controlled burns? Is this just another manifestation of President Trump’s antipathy toward liberal California?
While Messrs. Ring and Trump are busy blaming environmentalists for California’s plight, the blame more properly rests with the administration for its inaction in modifying its forest management practices in half the state, and, even more fundamentally, for failure to address (or even acknowledge) climate change as the root cause of the wildfires.