California Gov. Gavin Newsom is in the news today, proclaiming wildfires in his state have left him with “no patience for climate change deniers.”
That is too bad. If Newsom had the patience to spend two minutes reviewing wildfire facts, he wouldn’t be advancing a fake climate scare.
Deadline, Politico, and many other media outlets are reporting on Newsom’s comments today.
Politico’s story, “Newsom: ‘No patience for climate change deniers’ amid historic wildfires,” was typical of the coverage, with Newsom linking the ongoing horrific wildfires and heat California is suffering under supposed human-caused climate change.
The problem is the data undermine his and the headlines’ assertions that the heat and wildfires are “historic.”
Research shows massive wildfires have regularly swept through California. Indeed, a 2007 paper in the journal Forest Ecology and Management reported that prior to European colonization in the 1800s, more than 4.4 million acres of California forest and shrub-land burned annually.
That is far more than the area of California that has burned cumulatively since 2000. As compared to the 4.4 million California acres that burned each year prior to European colonization, only 90,000 acres to 1.6 million California acres burn in a typical year now.
Wildfires have declined sharply over the course of the past century in the United States. As reported in Climate at a Glance: Wildfires, long-term data from the U.S. National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) show wildfires have declined in number and severity since the early 1900s.
Assessing data on U.S. wildfires from as far back as 1926, NIFC reports the numbers of acres burned is far less now than it was throughout the early 20th century, with the current acres burned running just 1/4th to 1/5th of the amount of land that typically burned in the 1930s (see the figure, below).
Graph by meteorologist Anthony Watts
Globally, the data on wildfires are just as clear. In his book False Alarm, Bjorn Lomborg observes:
“There is plenty of evidence for a reduction in the level of devastation caused by fire, with satellites showing a 25 percent reduction globally in burned area just over the past 18 years … In total, the global amount of area burned as declined by more than 540,000 square miles, from 1.9 million square miles in the early part of the last century to 1.4 million square miles today.”
Gavin Newsom has announced he has lost patience for practicing science and discovering the truth. Fortunately, climate realists still have the patience to do so.
Read more at Climate Realism
It makes the problem more fun when uninformed people are able to blame other people for their problems. If you take away the so-called “climate change deniers,” they are left having to blame Mother Nature or even god himself, and that’s just not nearly as handy a villain to take on.
Why the heck isn’t he properly outfitted in nomex or other proper fire clothing?? He should be following proper protocol and have the correct shirt or jacket at the very least. He is showing incredibly poor leadership by such a crummy example of ignoring safety procedures. He should have had boots on as well. Terrible terrible photo.
California has no logging, so the growth of trees/brush will eventually have to burn. There are a lot of fires, but the fires are only doing what logging used to do. More inconvenient truths.
Just like with another Liberal Democrat and member of the Stupid Jackass Party Newsom don’t want to be bothered by the facts
Fire and Water in California
California Governor Jerry Cv Brown continues to declare that all of this year’s forest fires were caused by climate change, while the Wall Street Journal continues to pour cold water on that argument (below). In fact, the WSJ points out that Sacramento and state politics have spent 10 times more on electric vehicles than on controlled forest fires and underbrush removal, $335 million to $30 million.
Then, there is the matter of spending billions and billions of dollars annually on the bullet train that is expected to cost north of $100 Billion: Many knowledgeable people suspect it will never be completed. Additionally, the California Wetlands Water District pumps enough water annually to sustain 6 million households by pumping the water from Sacramento-San Joaquin Rive Delta directly into the Pacific Ocean. The original theory was to protect smelt and salmon, but who knows?
In a February report by the Little Hoover Commission, the state oversight committee stated that the State of California has ignored the gathering underbrush and dead trees in their forests for 100 years by underfunding any systematic removal of it. As the Committee put it, these forest fires probably nullified California’s “hard-fought carbon reductions.”
If his recall is successful, he’ll have lots of time to cultivate patience.