Before people jump into a debate about the weather with veteran Swiss meteorologist Jörg Kachelmann, they’d first better make sure that they really paid close attention at school and did their science homework.
In a debate on Twitter, the high-profile, seasoned meteorologist inadvertently exposed that some of Germany’s top climate officials had a shocking lack of comprehension of fundamental physics, among them renewable-energy expert Prof Volker Quaschning.
Hat-tip: Axel Bojanowski
High temperatures do not cause droughts
The Twitter exchange was unleashed by Kachelmann blasting the recent junk-science-driven media hype over another year of potential drought over Central Europe, and especially the false claim made by Prof. Quaschning that higher temperatures lead to more drought and forest fires.
Kachelmann called this claim: false and “complete nonsense.” Kachelmann recently explained in a t-online article he penned:
Heat does not cause forest fires and is completely irrelevant. Forest fires are caused by the fact that it is dry longer, and then some fools – intentionally or not – throw something burning into the area, or park a very hot car over dry high grass and then drive away. The temperature on the day of the outbreak of forest fires does not matter.”
It’s the moisture, stupid
In other words, Kachelmann dumps cold water on Quaschning’s claim that higher temperature is the factor behind drought and thus forest fires and Biblical-scale misery of the sort prophesized by Green fanatics.
Kachelmann explains that temperature has nothing to do with the risk level of fire and that the factor behind it is air moisture.
Shockingly, this fundamental physics law seemed to be unknown to “top scientists” such as Quaschning and others.
The Fridays For Future activist and “renewable energy expert” Prof. Volker Quaschning kept insisting that temperature determined how dry soil would become, tweeting to Kachelmann: “Physics: More heat = more evaporation = drier ground = high forest fire risk = more forest fires.” To shore this up he dragged Stefan Rahmstorf into his side.
Confused about water vapor
Next, scientist Stefanie here tweeted a chart showing how much water a kg of air could hold versus temperature with the aim of showing Kachelmann he was wrong and that it was all about temperature:
But this backfired on Stefanie when Kachelmann correctly demonstrated she did not understand the chart at all and that she had no idea what she was talking about.
That these climate experts would not know that water vapor in the air is the driving factor behind drought makes one wonder what faulty physics may have gotten applied to the climate models.
Throughout the entire thread, there were attempts by the climate “experts” to assert their “academic authority”.
Other readers noted, for example, that despite extremely high temperatures in jungles, raging forest fires don’t break out in them. It’s not because of the temperature, but because of the moisture.
Climate alarmism becoming a sect
If any trend is emerging, it is that Kachelmann, a believer in man-made warming, is tiring of the fanaticism on both sides. He recently tweeted:
But unfortunately you can only stay in the sect if you join in the chattering of all the nonsense and depart from the grounds of science because of the purpose of saving the world allows all nonsense.
Green and browns are outbidding each other in terms of lack of seriousness. It is getting very wretched.”
Read more at No Tricks Zone
The first victim of war is the truth. “….the purpose of saving the world allows for all nonsense.” I remember hearing a story about children gathering milkweed pods during the war, supposedly to make parachutes for the troops. Everyone is expected to join the effort.
I again find it amazing that claims are being made on such a small temperature increase. If people like Quaschning are not motivated to support political agendas or get grant money, they are not using their common sense.
You don’t have to go to a jungle to find a place where moisture makes wild fires impossible. I was camping in August with my daughters in the Olympic Rain Forest. That particular year things were so wet a forest fire couldn’t have been started with a flame thrower. One only other group there had brought in dry fire wood. We used the charcoal we had and put wood from the forest on that. The charcoal dried it and then we have a regular camp fire.
The biggest factor in wild fires is the environmentalists have prevented the application of proper forest management. That needs to be corrected. Another factor is we have a lot more people than we did in 1960 (the base line year used by environmentalist), so more people means more opportunities for accidental fires. This is part of a bigger picture on how immigration is bad for the US.