While fires raged across California, the world’s press was on scene to find the footage required to sustain the climate narrative. And waiting in the wings for their moment in the spotlight, naturally, were the experts. This ghoulish spectacle is now part of the climate politics calendar, as various parts of the world experience the seasonal conditions that make fires possible. Yet plenty of evidence speaks against the claim that climate change is having any influence on wildfires. So why does this story now dominate so much of the news agenda?
There is no denying the very basics of the phenomenon. The images produced by news agencies are absolutely terrifying. And it is hard not to see them and put oneself in such a maelstrom. And this seems to be the point. News producers are attracted to such drama, and drawn to augmenting the reality with the climate narrative. Indeed, TV news producers are among the most tragic victims of ideological narratives, their tendency to amplify ‘experts’ on the fringes tending to destroy rather than inform public debate. After all, debate is boring, compared to the sensation of harnessing their audiences’ sympathy for the helpless victims of unstoppable infernos.
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Why Won’t the Climate Change-Wildfire Link Die..?
…Because we live in an Age of Unreason, when feelings and rigid ideas are too much in ascendancy over clear thinking, and a glib fable about the trace atmospheric gas of life counts for more than the practicalities of land management, economics, fire prevention and arson.
As Daniel Defoe wrote sixty years later of the era of Great Fire and Great Plague, “We had no such thing as printed newspapers in those days to spread rumours and reports of things, and to improve them by the invention of men, as I have lived to see practised since.”
Lie, Truth, Travel and All That.
Emissions cuts come first, and telling the truth about what the climate is really doing comes LAST.—– In order to get emission’s cut there must be scary stories encouraging the public to accept the draconian climate policies being imposed on them. To accept Smart Meters that will ration energy use, to accept heat pumps that will cost a fortune, not just the purchase price, but the running costs as well. We are to accept getting rid of our perfectly good petrol and diesel cars, stop eating beef, stop flying and actually cut our consumption of EVERYTHING. —Wild Fires are the perfect scare story that gets beamed into every person in the worlds house by satellite TV ——-When cutting emissions of CO2 comes before everything else then everything else can be abandoned and that is what is happening.
Exactly. Cue again the old H.L. Mencken quote from this time last century, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
The narrative of the brain dead climate cult pays, and pays well. Look at Mannpig. Studying for his pretty happy dude degree in 1998, comes out with the hockey stick fraud, erasing medieval warm and cooling epochs, based on 3 bristlecone pine trees and presto, now earns well over $1 million a year and is fully tenured, access to the great and good, published, invited to the gabfests as a feted speaker. Reminds me of that fraud Einstein another conjurer of cheap tricks.
many scientists’ laziness, arrogance and craven adherence to green ideology, despite the very clear facts contradicting it, allows them to sustain the narrative.
And money. Add the lucre. If you want ‘the science’ find out who funds it.
Upticked with conviction, but inclined to differ on Einstein. Idea of riding a beam of light still beckons as much as it ever did.
You cannot travel in space without taking into account one of Einstein’s “cheap tricks”. I am also fond of that other “cheap trick” that says “Space tells mass how to move, and mass tells space how to curve”—Abracadabra. ——–You say “If you want the science, find out who funds it”—–But you will find that Einstein mostly funded himself while working as a Patent Clerk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sW9mJ5qdO3E
We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period!
Yes I know all about that, but thanks for your reply.
One consultation Mann has a recent significant legal costs bill sitting on his desk. Hopefully this shows him he can’t ride rough shod over people with differing opinions.
Uncontrolled fires worldwide: biggest cause by far = human activity being it arson(the biggest cause of all) or accidental (broken bottle bottom magnifying glass scenario)
It’s quite rare ,compared to human activity, for nature to cause fires and materials in nature don’t spontaneously combust at 40°c!, even paper manages a toasty 233°c before it combusts I would imagine a dry leaf to be about the same (300°c) and dry grass (500°c)
Climate change?…my arse
I would say that many of the wildfires in developed countries are due to human inactivity. The environmentalists oppose clearance of flammable underbrush in forest areas (including traditional controlled burning) with the consequence that any subsequent fire is more intense, covers wider areas and produces massive atmospheric pollution.
True too! Especially where humans have moved into once dry desert scrub land and called it home, without proper management of such a habitat your moving into a firetrap, the palisades for example
Wildfires? Climate change?
‘John Abatzoglou, a professor of climatology at the University of California, Merced, examined 30 years’ worth of government fire occurrence data from Los Angeles County. It showed that the most common causes of wildfires from 1992 to 2020 were mishaps related to vehicles and other equipment.
“More than 95% of these are human-ignited fires,” he wrote in an email. “Arson is among the causes, but most human-caused fires are not intentional.”
Is there a lot of expensive stuff, would you think, in those houses that are evacuated when a fire breaks out in close proximity to Millionaires homes?
Oops!
‘Despite the record-breaking wildfires of recent years, the Western U.S. still has a fire deficit. Millions of acres once burned every year, either in fires caused by lightning or set by Native American tribes who used fire to shape the landscape. Over millennia, forest ecosystems were accustomed to these low-grade fires, but that changed when the era of fire suppression began. For much of the last century, the Forest Service actively stopped all fires, adopting the “10am rule,” where fires had to be extinguished by 10am the next day.
That policy helped set the stage for the extreme wildfires today, which have burned hotter and more intensely than many forests are adapted to.
“The amount of fuel that’s built up over that time period is bigger than anything these forests have experienced in recent millennia,” says Keala Hagmann, research ecologist at the University of Washington. “We do have tools at our disposal to change the ways these fires are burning and the window of opportunity is closing rapidly.”
“Every time I’ve been out on a large wildfire, the only thing that has moderated fire spread has been past fire footprints on the landscape,” says Mike Beasley, a retired fire manager who worked for the National Park Service and Forest Service for decades.’
https://www.npr.org/2021/08/09/1026137249/with-extreme-fires-burning-forest-service-stops-good-fires-too
‘In a December memo, Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley warned that a $7 million budget reduction for the department’s overtime hours constrained the ability to carry out inspections on whether homeowners were following brush clearance rules.
And local leaders have long warned that individuals sometimes resist buffer rules, not wanting to tear out the gardens, fences, and plants that define the landscaping in the high-end areas where some of the fires did their worst damage.’
Josh Marcus
Extensive post.
The only weakness in that argument may be the eruption of fires in many different locations around LA at the same time
Some arson starts many if not all of the fires.
As with so much, ignorance, incompetence does the rest
‘The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office released footage of looting and arson suspects charged amid the Southern California wildfires. Authorities say the arson case is “not connected with the origination of the major fires.”
Of course it isn’t………
Three things are needed for a fire: Fuel, Oxygen and an ignition source. A hot day isn’t one of them and an extended drought makes no difference because once a fuel, such as dry undergrowth is dry and devoid of moisture it cannot become more dry. Wood will spontaneously combust at 371C so an outsider air temperature of 50C, in the ‘worst’ case, is no where near enough to start a fire.
Here are some likely contenders for ‘fire starter’.
Lightning – 28,000C
Electrical Arc – 2,800C to 19,000 °C
Magnifying Glass – 5,000C
Blowtorch – 1,500C
Matches – 700C
Once a forest or brush fire gets hold temperatures can reach over 1,000C and at that point it doesn’t matter how dry the vegetation especially if there is a lot of dry tinder. Also it doesn’t matter if there is a wind or not because the fire will make it’s own wind, simply because of the huge amount of heat generated will rise rapidly drawing in surrounding air.
About 4 or so years back I came across a number of YouTube videos about Aboriginal cultural burning of the land to avoid ‘hot burns’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM72NtXxyLs
Indigenous fire methods protect land before and after the Tathra bushfire | ABC Australia
Perhaps these videos provided useful knowledge for the ‘environmentalists’ to create dramatic and disastrous fires. Within the last 4 or so years has seen the introduction of environmental laws forbidding controlled burning so as ‘to protect the environment’, often with punitive fines.
“The only way to get our society to truly change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe”
Daniel Botkin – emeritus professor.
“It’s unlikely that the U.S. is going to take serious action on climate change until there are observable, dramatic events, almost catastrophic in nature, that drive public opinion and drive the political process in that direction”
Robert Stavins Head of Harvard’s Environmental Economics program
“That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have”
Stephen Schneider Stanford Univ., environmentalist:
“If we want a good environmental policy in the future we’ll have to have a disaster”
Sir John Houghton Lead editor of first three IPCC reports:
They desperately need to sustain the lie and the scam and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if these fires were staged. There was an interview with Mel Gibson saying how those in his neighbourhood had seen suspiciously professional looking and well equipped people going round starting these fires. They were apprehended and the police arrested them but they were released without charge.
Add this to their long term agenda of diverting all the northern water out into the Pacific and keeping the reservoirs dry thus ensuring California remains a permanent tinderbox with no way of extinguishing infernos, and you’ve got another poster child for the ‘climate emergency’ that the soup-brained Socialists and the media will lap up.
The climate scam needs flames, floods and chaos to survive and if nature is not playing ball, throw it a bone. Or a zippo.
“Why do fake claims about wildfires persist? It’s because many scientists’ laziness, arrogance and craven adherence to green ideology”…
Not really, it’s about funding. The climate emergency conspiracy is a top down fraud. When the Rockefellers alone have set up around 1000 climate change institutions and activist groups it would be a brave scientist to go against all their influence. It tends to be just the older ones at the end of their career who have the guts to do it.
https://elizabethnickson.substack.com/p/the-rockefellers-created-990-climate?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=30495&post_id=146315255&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=i14cc&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
In answer to the headline: for the same reason the whole climate change/Net Zero won’t – it’s a global-scale racket for vested interests.
Wildfires not Caused by Climate
So-called scientists who produce this sort of pseudo-scientific quackery need to be named and shamed. Maybe we need to keep a register of all those whose supposed ”research” can’t be trusted, so we know next time they produce anything it will be crap.
97% of climate scientists would be unemployed if there was no climate crisis. Follow the money
.
It was said that the Australian wild fires were due to lack of brush clearance and river flooding in the UK due to lack of dredging. The climate narrative shifts the blame and enables money saving because it is no longer the governments fault.
Some years ago I read an article that said that wildfires in the sparsely populated high sierras had not increased. The only increase observed was in the densely populated fringe of forest areas. The conclusion was Firestarters caused the increase.