One thing about leftists
that I expect:
When they make false claims about any
subject, you can not change their minds,
with facts, data and logic ... but they are
always willing to character attack anyone
who disagrees with them, and move
even further left !
Leftists' fact-free claims about wildfires
are no different than their wild guesses
about the future climate
( wild guesses about the future
average global temperature,
that have been wrong for three decades so far,
but they'll continue to make the same "dangerous
man made global warming" predictions,
year after year, using the same wild guess
about the warming effect of CO2,
first published in 1979, and never revised,
in spite of strong contrary evidence ! )
Here's what
you need to know
about California:
( 1987 to 2016 data )
--CAL FIRE data show
the number of wildfires
over the past 30 years
has dropped roughly in half.
-- For the
same 30 years,
wildfire area burned
has grown slightly,
with huge peaks
and troughs from
year to year.
-- During the 1930s
Dust Bowl years,
20% to 35% of
the US and Mexico,
were in extreme drought.
California has been
in a drought, on-and-off,
for at least the past
one hundred years !
See related charts
in my prior August 2018 article
on California wildfires:
https://elonionbloggle.blogspot.com/2018/08/california-wildfires-in-long-term.html
See related charts
in my prior August 2018 article
on California wildfires:
https://elonionbloggle.blogspot.com/2018/08/california-wildfires-in-long-term.html
Here's all you
really need to know
about wildfires,
in general:
(1)
90% of wildfires are started by
humans, usually unintentionally.
(2)
Wildfires have no relationship
to measured changes of the
average global temperature,
no matter what anyone claims !
(3)
A forest burns
because it is dry —
and forests were already dry,
and susceptible to fires
BEFORE global warming.
For one example:
Without any additional
global warming, the fuels
in late summer and fall
are dry enough to burn
in California forests,
and always have been !
It doesn’t matter
if the weather / climate
got a little warmer
over the years,
becasue the fuel for fires
would be still there,
with or without
a few tenths of a degree
of global warming.
(4)
Environmental policies designed
to protect forests, including the 2012
Obama regulations, are responsible
for increasing the fuel load for wildfires.
In recent times, the number of
deliberate, prescribed burns
have been severely restricted,
so they have greatly decreased.
Smarmy environmentalists
demanded "natural forests",
and severely limited the season
when clearing and burning
of dry underbrush, is allowed,
and they also restricted
prescribed burns
because those
might create smoke that
might eventually
reach a hospital or school.
Environmentalist policies
result in more "natural" forests
with more fuel available
for hotter, faster moving fires,
that burn more acres,
and kill more people,
before they can be controlled !
After an analysis,
I now believe
US acres burned
data collection
before 1960,
was different than
data collection
after 1960,
and I apologize
for using
the chart below
in an August article
The "US Forest Area Burned"
chart shown below
seemed extraordinary
back in August 2018,
but it was from the
National Interagency
Fire Center, so I used it.
With the new November
California wildfires,
I saw the chart again and
it was still hard to believe.
Between 1930 and 1950,
15 million or more US acres
were burned by wildfires annually.
Most of the area burned
during this period was in the
Southeastern United States
(South RPA Region),
and were primarily
incendiary forest fires.
In case you didn’t know,
an incendiary forest fire is one
that is set intentionally
to burn dry, dead plant matter
that would otherwise be
very susceptible to wildfires.
It appears that
much of the pre-1960 data
were related to those
incendiary forest fires,
and not to true wildfires.
For the post-1960 data,
the National Interagency
Fire Center explicitly separates
wildfire data from the incendiary,
prescribed fire data.
That’s why I believe the chart above
is comparing "apples to oranges".
Pre-1960 data
should be ignored,
should be ignored,
in my opinion.
There were two different
wildfire acres burned trends
AFTER 1960:
(1)
US acres burned flat trend,
from 1960 to 1998,
in a period which included
almost all the measured
GLOBAL warming
since 1940
( that warming was almost entirely
in the 1975 to 2003 period).
(2)
US acres burned uptrend,
from 1998 to 2018,
a period which included
almost no
GLOBAL warming,
except for a brief
intense, local
El Nino Pacific Ocean
heat release
in late 2015,
and early 2016,
that has nothing
to do with CO2
greenhouse warming.
There is no correlation
of the US acres burned
and GLOBAL warming
measurements since 1960
( using weather satellite temperature data,
since first available in 1979 ).