SOURCE:
The inconvenient truth about France’s forest fires | The Spectator
Politicians are desperate to blame climate change
Last month the Prime Minister of France, Elisabeth Borne, visited the south-west of the country to offer her support to firefighters tackling a series of large forest fires.
It was also a good opportunity to broach a subject close to her heart. ‘More than ever,’ she warned, ‘we must continue to fight against climate change and to adapt. A new plan for adapting to climate change will be put out for consultation at the beginning of the autumn’.
Borne isn’t alone in connecting the forest fires that have ravaged much of France this summer to climate change. Newspapers such as Liberation have also linked the two.
Last week the paper published an article in which it referenced the United Nation’s World Meteorological Organization. According to the organisation’s general secretary, Petteri Taalas, ‘even if emissions are low, global warming is projected to cause an increase in forest fires’.
Meanwhile the French equivalent of National Geographic magazine, Geo, declared that the conflagrations ‘illustrate that global warming favours forest fires, which have already destroyed more land since the beginning of the year than in the entire year of 2021’. Over 50,000 hectares of forest have been lost to fires in France this year, the most since the infamous heatwave of 1976. Geo magazine quoted Jesus San Miguel, coordinator of the European system of information on forest fires, who said that the summer heatwave was a ‘decisive’ factor in the proliferation of fires and there was a ‘clearly a link to global warming’.
The problem with this theory, however, is the facts. From Bordeaux to Brittany to the Ardeche, investigations swiftly concluded that the majority of fires had nothing to do with climate change. In the 15 departments that comprise France’s Mediterranean region there have been 36 fires this summer that destroyed more than ten hectares of forest: 26 were man-made, of which 17 were started on purpose.
Éric Brocardi, the spokesman for the National Federation of Firefighters, told the current affairs magazine Marianne that 90 per cent of fires in France are of human origin, compared to 60 per cent in North America, where fires caused by lightning or dry storms are more common.
Many of the arsonists or pyromaniacs (arson being a criminal act and pyromania a psychological disorder) responsible for the forest fires in France this summer have been arrested. Two are firefighters; another is a 19-year-old reservist who has been charged with starting 31 fires between 29 July and 21 August this year in the Gironde region. The other, also a part-timer firefighter, has been charged with starting several fires over a number of years in the Herault, including eight this summer. The 37-year-old has confessed to his crimes, and says he did it for the ‘excitement of interventions’. He also admitted that he enjoyed the acclaim from the community for being a brave firefighter battling blazes.
But these facts have not been widely reported, and in the case of Borne and other politicians they have simply been ignored. Climate change is the bigger arsonist, in their view. Occasionally this narrative is challenged, by a magazine such as Marianne, or a politician like Louis Aliot. The mayor of Perpignan, who is running to replace Marine Le Pen as president of the National Rally, surprised a TV interviewer last week when he attributed the majority of the summer’s forest fires to ‘human stupidity’. The journalist was clearly taken aback. Aliot had gone off message. Surely he was mistaken.
Aliot stuck to his guns. No, he said, he is not a climate change denier but nor is he a climate change hysteric; he was just stating the facts. He then said that his preoccupation this winter will not be climate change but the growing number of people in Perpignan who are struggling with the rising costs of energy and food.
This anxiety among society’s most disadvantaged was expressed four years ago when the yellow vest movement was launched in France. A common refrain heard among protestors was: ‘Macron is concerned with the end of the world, we are concerned with the end of the week’. When Emmanuel Macron appointed Borne his PM in May his instructions to her were to act ‘faster and stronger’ in implementing France’s ecological transition policy, and she intends to do just that in the coming months.
And not a moment too soon, cry the environmentalists, who point to the outbreak of more forest fires this week in the Gironde and Charente departments as further evidence of the climate change crisis. The inconvenient truth, however, is that in both cases investigators believe the fires were started deliberately.