Many media outlets are blaming “climate change” for the increased number of wildfires in the western United States in the last two years.
For example, this article from Vox: “The West is burning. Climate change is making it worse.”
Such a headline has become typical in recent years. Climate change has become the new universal boogeyman, applied as the cause of almost anything.
For example, “animals are shrinking. Blame climate change.” Climate change has been used as the reason for shrinking crop yields, glaciers, fish, and even shrinking the planet.
When it comes to wildfires, climate change is supposedly making them larger, more catastrophic, and more frequent.
Often, those stories also have a social agenda attached; we need to drive less, eat less, fly less, and buy less stuff to avoid the looming boogeyman of climate change.
But data, which doesn’t have an agenda, tells an entirely different story. More on that below.
Full disclosure. I live in California’s forested mountains. I previously lived in Paradise, California, the town that was burned to the ground in 2018 by the Camp Fire, due to lack of maintenance on Pacific Gas and Electric power lines.
The home I owned there over a decade ago was reduced to ashes. But, “climate change” never entered my mind as a cause.
This past summer, my new Lake Almanor home was threatened by the Dixie Fire – again caused by PG&E issues, certainly not “climate change.”
The Dixie Fire is approaching one million acres burned, and it was still burning two months after ignition.
California’s drought is certainly a contributing factor, though this phenomenon has been a historically continuous affliction caused by weather patterns in the Pacific Ocean.
These patterns have been occurring for millennia, and are not a feature of man-made climate change. In fact, tree ring studies of the western United States show past mega-droughts lasting as long as 200 years.
Since 1950, there have been 25 years during which Pacific weather patterns have been classified as El Niño. Conversely, there have been 24 years with patterns classified as La Niña.
This bi-polar pattern is endemic to California’s natural climate cycles; wet years cause forests to flourish, and dry years often taper that growth back via wildfires. This is the balance of nature.
Forest flammability is primarily caused by the lack of water, i.e. fuel moisture. The same pattern of dryness we have experienced today also contributed to the Great Fire of 1910.
The U.S. Forest Service says this about it:
“No official cause was ever listed for the 1910 fire. But 1910 was also the driest year in anyone’s memory. Snows melted early and the spring rains never came. By June, the woods were on fire in a hundred different places.”
Sound familiar?
As I said earlier, data tell a different story: in this case, it is one of the unintended consequences. Increasing forest biomass, also known as “fuel load,” has been prevalent due to forest management issues. Fuel loads also figure greatly in wildfire potential and spread.
In 1990, the spotted owl was listed as endangered. As a result, the western logging industry and the associated forest management practices essentially evaporated.
As seen in the figure below, data suggests the protected owl habitat has directly caused an increase in forest fuel load (and increased acreage burned) in the absence of effective forest management post-1990.
Fire science tells us increasing fuel load directly correlates with greater fire intensity and rate of spread, increasing the acreage burned.
Clearly, the 1990 law suppressing timber harvesting and management is correlated to the increasing amount of burned acreage. The “do not touch” policy favored by environmentalists has apparently contributed to the increase in wildfires.
A report from California State University notes active forest management is a key practice in preventing wildfire.
“One of the reasons we’re observing more fires is because of 100 years of poor Forest Service policy where we didn’t allow prescribed fire or wildfires to burn,” says Dr. Craig Clements, a San Jose State University meteorology and climate science professor and director of the school’s Fire Weather Research Laboratory.
It seems clear to me that poor forest management, not climate change, has led to this ever-expanding wildfire devastation afflicting California and much of the West.
It is also clear the practice of leaving federal forests unmanaged will result in continued catastrophic wildfires in the western United States.
Read more at Climate Realism
A few months ago, the property next door changed hands. The new owners are nature lovers, organic vegetarians. They do not own a lawnmower, and until recently, never touched a chain saw. Two weeks ago, a cold front blew through here and sorted out the old and weak trees. The new neighbour’s yard is now a bonfire looking for a spark. They thought that home owners insurance was a luxury, despite the old maples above the house. What a mess. The house was once a school, built circa 1862. It was bought by environmentalists and is now junk. I should have bought it.
An ounce of prevention is worth a ton of money.
Blaming Global Warming/Climate Change rom everything from the Taliban to burnt Toast this Nations Media has become far left Propaganda and not ral news Time and Newsweek back in the 1970’s it was Global Cooling and a New Ice Age
Note that depending which year with which, American wildfires were five to ten times more extensive than today. Why don’t we all know this?
Sorry – in the 1930s
I have told this story here before but it’s worth repeating. A relative of mine had a helicopter in Colorado. He was “on call” for forest fire prevention. If smoke was spotted, his helicopter would fly in a firefighter to snuff it out asap. Worked well. Then something changed. Response needed bureaucratic approval first. Took hours . If he flew out to stop a fire without the OK, he might not get paid. My uncle mentioned the Sierra Club when he told us this.
Exactly the same circumstances exist in Australia. Prior to European settlement, the aboriginals who were here for around 45,000 years knew how to look after the Australian bush. They lit a lot of cool burn fires in areas they hunted and given they were nomadic hunter gatherers, this meant a lot of the Australian landmass was burnt from time to time.
Then, along came Europeans with their ideas. Governments created (more) national parks which meant large areas of bush were literally locked up and humans prevented from entering. Access tracks became overgrown and in some locations, bulldozers built huge mounds on the tracks to prevent bikes / 4×4’s from entering.
Within a few years, these national parks became overgrown, heaps of dead material accumulated on the forest floor, creating the foundation for massive fires, just waiting for lightening strike or the local fire bug to set it off.
There’s a book written by a very talented Australian Forester named Vic Jurskis. His book “Firestick Ecology” – Fairdinkum Science in Plain Language – explains everything we need to know about how to prevent massive fires Australia has experienced over the past 10 or so years, but as usual, no one in the bureaucracy wants to listen to people like Vic. The politicians listen to the bureaucrats so nothing happens and we all wait for the next big fire.
The people I feel sorry for are the volunteers who risk their lives every summer, trying to control these fires. As we know from news reports, they don’t really stand a chance in the face of such massive fires.