by Tom Harris, America Outloud:
Taking advantage of other people’s suffering to boost their crusades is par for the course for climate alarmists and their allies in government. Echoing sentiments from White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, President Joe Biden said forest fires are “intensifying” because of man-made climate change. Far-left extremist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., linked the smoke that is coming into the U.S. from the fires in Canada to the “climate crisis.” Other leading democrats are doing the same, with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer even saying,
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“Climate change continues to make these disasters worse. This smoke and smog over New York and the rest of the northeast is a warning from nature that we have a lot of work to do to reverse the destruction of climate change.”
Canadian politicians are just as bad. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau blamed climate change for the fires, and Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault asserted:
“We know that because of increased global temperatures and climate change, we will have more episodes like forest fires.”
Guilbeault is wrong. When temperatures rise, evaporation increases, causing more precipitation which increases soil moisture and lessens fire risk. Also, with the ignition temperature of wood being in the neighborhood of 500 deg F (300°C), depending on the wood type and moisture content, the relatively tiny temperature change climate activists blame on human-induced climate change would obviously have no measurable direct impact on wildfires.
Yet former Canadian environment minister Catherine McKenna agreed with Guilbeault and tweeted: “Climate change is real and having a huge impact on Canadians right now with forest fires burning across the country.”
Green Party leader Elizabeth May and Nova Scotia Member of Parliament Sean Fraser really take the cake when it comes to sensationalist wildfire nonsense. May tweeted: “Trying to find forgiveness for the arsonists – politicians (sic) who pile on subsidies for fossil fuels.” And Fraser used the issue to attack the Conservative opposition party:
“The Conservatives are peddling policies that they know will increase the level of pollution that is causing these severe weather events.”
Of course, carbon dioxide, the gas the Liberals blame for climate change, is not pollution. And wildfires are not “extreme weather,” which is not increasing anyways. If significant global warming due to CO2 was to occur, extreme weather would reduce since warming would occur most at high latitudes, lessening the pressure gradients that cause extreme weather. Three mistakes in one sentence would have earned Fraser a “climate change blooper of the week” in the climate course I taught at Carleton University here in Ottawa.
A quick look at real-world data shows what is really happening. While 2023 is on track to be a worse year than average in Canada for wildfires (2022 was one of the least active years for fires), the following graph from the National Forestry Database for all of Canada demonstrates that generally speaking, the number of fires has dropped while the area burned shows no significant trend.
The situation in the U.S. is even better, with recent years showing a massive reduction in area burned in comparison with the first half of the 20th century.
In its latest omnibus climate report, even the usually alarmist United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assigns only “medium confidence” to the hypothesis that climate change has caused increased “fire weather” in some regions around the world.
In reality, forest fires are caused by nature (lightning being a major contributor) and careless (and criminal) human actions.
A common practice in rural communities in countries around the world, including Canada and the U.S., is to burn trash in “burn barrels.” This is because there is often no garbage service in these areas, and the only (legal) alternative would be to haul it all to a dump, a time-consuming nuisance. However, when burning garbage like this, wind may pick up embers and then start fires in other locations.
Then there are things like people dragging trailer chains, causing sparks that ignite fires. Or people using machinery in tall, dry grass where the heat of the engines is enough to start fires.
Then you have careless campers and hikers and, finally, arsonists, often mentally unstable individuals, as well as eco-terrorists who are creating problems to blame on climate change when their forecasts do not come true. Award-winning author and filmmaker Michael Crichton wrote about this in his outstanding 2004 novel “State of Fear.”
Governments in Chile and Spain claim that eco-terrorists start wildfires in their countries. Chile put in a military curfew to stop people from traveling on trains to slow their movement during critical fire weather. They knew people were starting fires on purpose, some of them anti-timber industry activists.
It is important to understand that forest fires are an essential part of the natural cycle and, in fact, necessary for the health of the forests. It clears off dead debris as plants go through their lifecycle. There is an area of botany referred to as Fire Ecology that studies the role and importance of fire in ecosystems. In most ecologies, particularly forests, many plants require fire to soften or open the seeds to start life, although the seed shell must survive the fire first, of course.
One example of such a seed is found in vegetation in a “Mediterranean climate,” for example, in California. This climate is unique because 70% of the precipitation occurs in the winter, while all other climate types have either 70% in summer or even distribution throughout the year.
A unique vegetation called Maquis in Europe and Chaparral in California occurs in a Mediterranean climate. The annual climate cycle makes this an area that needs fire to be healthy. At the end of the summer, lightning strikes as rain clouds form, triggering fires that burn off the plants but leave many seeds intact. Mudslides follow as the rainy season progresses, but fortunately, the seeds germinate rapidly and stabilize the soil. The natural cycle of forest fires creates what are called crown fires that move through quickly, burning off dead debris but leaving most of the plants alive.
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