THE BIG PICTURE:
"The debate is over, around climate change,” ... “This is a climate damn emergency. This is real and it’s happening.” California Governor gruesome Newsom told reporters. But there was no debate. Because leftists don't debate. They assert general conclusions without data or specific details. They feel. They believe. They lie about past climate change. They "adjust" and "readjust" historical temperatures to create more warming out of thin air.
Leftists have predicted a coming climate crisis for the past 50 years, and probably will for the next 50 years. Leftists don't change their minds, except to move further left. I've said that for decades and it is becoming very obvious in recent years. Changing a position just before an election, such as Biden on hydraulic fracturing, aka fracking, because polls say that will help him win Pennsylvania, is NOT a real changing of a mind.
“ ... I quite literally have no patience for climate change deniers,” the California governor continued. He skeptics’ are “completely inconsistent…with the reality on the ground.” He briefly mentioned a lack of forest management in recent decades, but added: “That’s one point, but it’s not the point.”
Wildfire intensity correlates mainly with irresponsible forest and brush management, obscured by the usual leftist blame climate change propaganda. Fire-prone conditions are worsened by NOT building fire breaks, NOT clearing undergrowth, and NOT clearing of vegetation around housing and electric transmission lines. Wildfires are more dangerous to humans when there is a high fuel load in the forest. Management of forest fuel load is far more important than having "natural" forests. Another problem in California is the continued spread of invasive grasses, which dry out quickly in CA weather. They provide “fine fuels” for fires in the grasslands and chaparral, particularly along the coast.
The odd California policy of "road diets", narrowing roads to handle less traffic “for safety,” caused traffic jams when residents tried to flee Paradise, California -- 85 people were killed in the Camp Fire of 2018 ... started by a faulty electric transmission line.
The August 2020 fires have been ignited by dry lightning, lightning that occurs without rain hitting the ground. That is unusual weather, but has nothing to do with climate change. It is claimed that 90 percent of US wildfires are man made, and some of them are arson.
A few tenths of a degree of global warming, or even two degrees of warming, is NOT going to make dry, ready to burn, grass, weeds and shrubs any drier. Global warming and California temperatures have no correlation with total acres that burned in a year. A few tenths of a degree warming does not create more lightening, or cause people to go into the forests and accidentally or deliberately start more fires.
About 90 percent of forest fires are 'man made'. California’s population grew by about 20 million people, to 39 million people, from 1970 to 2010. With 90 percent of fires started by people, adding 20 million people to California in 40 years, means more man made fires should be expected.
DETAILS:
Forestry mismanagement turned too much of California into a dry and dead wood fuel dump. Environmentalists have prevented most “controlled burns” of dead wood and brush. You clear and burn the dead wood to reduce natures tinderbox, just waiting for a lightening strike, a spark from a tree branch downed power line, human carelessness, or human arson, to ignite a raging fire in the dry season. And every CA year has a dry season !
The US and California governments suppressed an old practice of hundreds of tribes in the region, setting small, intentional fires to prevent larger wildfires. Today we call that “prescribed burns”. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability said California would need prescribed burns for 20 million acres, after many decades of forest neglect. That's about the size of the state of Maine. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers' prescribed burns, on average, were only about 30,000 acres per year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an average of only 13,000 acres per year.
Fire expert Nick Goulette, executive director of the Watershed Research and Training Center, says California has less than 20,000 acres of prescribed burns in a year, but needs to get to one million acres a year. Reforms after the 2017 and 2018 fire seasons loosened the California (CARB) prescribed fire rules, but not much.
Tim Ingalsbee started working as a firefighter, and in 1995 he earned a doctorate in environmental sociology. in 2005 he started Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology (FUSEE). It has been lobbying Congress, about the misguided fire policy that is leading to today’s mega-fires. “We need to get good (prescribed) fires on the ground and whittle down some of that fuel load.” Fire professionals should let fires that pose little risk burn up some of the fuel stockpiles. But they don't. They put out all fires.
Official commission reports after bad "brushfires" in Australia repeatedly say the same thing -- Australia needs forest management. I think there was one report written long ago. Maybe they just change the date after every bad "brushfire", because no politicians ever listen.
Unlike California and Oregon, the U.S. as a whole is having one of the weakest wildfire years since 2010. You'll never hear that from the U.S. mainstream media. But you will hear it here. As of August 24 for each year, the 10-year average burn has been 5.1 million acres across the US, but this year was 28% lower at 3.7 million acres. From 2.7 million burned acres in 2010, to 7.2 million acres in 2012, then back to 3.9 million acres last year, and 3.7 million acres this year -- there's no correlation with the average temperature, but wildfire "perfessor", nasty Nancy Pelosi, claims 'the planet is angry'. That must be the cause -- the planet is angry!
Scientists believe between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. 2019 In California had just 280,000 acres burned compared to 1.3 million and 1.6 million in 2017 and 2018, respectively, and 775,000 acres, on average, over the last decade. there is no correlation with the average California temperature.
Californians have built many homes too close to forests that are prone to fires, and they continue to do so. That means more and more power lines are required to reach those homes. Environmentalists had PG&E building renewable wind and solar energy facilities, when they should have been repairing old power lines and trimming back tinder and tree branches from around all their power lines.
The Diablo winds in the North, and Santa Ana winds in the South, can reach hurricane force. As wind moves West over California mountains, and down toward the coast, it compresses, warms and intensifies. The winds blow flames and carry embers, spreading the fires quickly before they can be contained. The periodic, natural La Nina Pacific Ocean cooling trend tends to bring dry weather across portions of California. These weather patterns did not start suddenly after 1980 when Al Gore “discovered" global warming”.
When California was occupied by indigenous communities, wildfires would burn up some 4.5 million acres a year. That’s nearly 6x the 2010-2019 period, when wildfires burned an average of just 775,000 acres annually in California. Scientists believe before Europeans arrived, fires burned up woody biomass in California’s forests every 10 to 20 years, preventing the accumulation of (wood) fuel, and burned out the shrub-lands every 50 to 120 years. Redwood forests before Europeans arrived burned every 6 to 25 years. The evidence comes from fire scars on barks and the tree rings near the bases of massive ancient trees.
In the chart below, the rising level of forest fire acres burned (red bars) in the Western U.S. does NOT correlate with the global average surface temperature anomaly trend (black line), but there is positive correlation with Western U.S. quantity of timber harvested (blue line), which has been cut in half since the late 1980s.
The collapse of the forest clearing timber harvest, plus a drop in the forest clearing active forest management practices, resulted in the area burned by wildfires getting larger.
Before 1999, Cal Fire never spent more than $100 million a year fighting wildfires. In 2007-08, $524 million, then $773 million in 2017-18, and this year could be the first $1 billion season. And on top of all the state money, federal disaster funds flow into California. Over a quarter of U.S. Forest Service fire suppression spending goes to aviation – planes and helicopters used to put out fires. You can now call in a 747 to drop 19,200 gallons of retardant. Or a purpose-designed Lockheed Martin FireHerc, a cousin of the C-130. Only 30 percent of retardant is dropped within 2,000 yards of a neighborhood, however, meaning that 30 percent won't save a home.
Fire fighting is a big business. Much of the fire-suppression team -- the crews and the infrastructure that supports them – is contracted out to private firms. Cal Fire staff firefighters are also very well paid, especially relative to thousands of California prison inmates who serve on fire crews for a little money, and good time credit. An article here earlier this year explained CA prisoner firefighter numbers were significantly cut by COVID-19 infections, which would hinder firefighting this year.
The California Policy Center reported back in 2017 that the median compensation package – base pay, special pay, overtime and benefits – for the average full time Cal Fire firefighter, was more than $148,000 a year. It's a difficult and dangerous job, but they are not busy all year.
Economic growth near weather station sites means only 410 of 1,218 US NOAA weather stations were not warmed by nearby heat concentrating structures such as an asphalt parking lot and building built near what was once a weather station located in a grass field. Weather stations in California and Nevada were particularly affected by their unusually fast economic and population growth. In California and Nevada, the temperature increase per decade from 1979 to 2008 was only +0.04 degrees centigrade, when using unchanged sites, versus the OFFICIAL record increase of +0.24 degrees per decade with all sites, including the warming effect of economic growth near weather stations, a six-fold difference!