‘Shoehorning’ a fire into the climate narrative  – Watts Up With That?

Note: This is a reprint of my op-ed “Editor for a Day” in the Chico Enterprise-Record, complete with links and graphs to factual references for the benefit of readers there who were directed to WUWT. The photo of the Park Fire pyrocumulus cloud above was taken by me as I observed the fire’s progress – Anthony

On July 30, The New York Times (NYT) ran an article titled “How Did the Park Fire Get So Big, So Fast?”that claims, “Heat has been breaking records all summer, and … records will probably continue to fall over the next several years as the burning of fossil fuels continues to add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.”

The article provides no data or citations supporting this claim but relies on opinions from so-called climate experts who have no connection to the fire. Last week, Professor Mark Stemen wrote in an op-ed “…it was climate change that pushed that fire to Tehama County overnight.” How absurd; climate doesn’t act on short time scales or local venues.

This sort of “causality shoehorning” (to coin a phrase) is becoming increasingly common among journalists and climate advocates as they strain to fit any weather event or catastrophe into the climate change narrative.

Like Stemen’s claim, NYT’s claim of “a very clear fingerprint of climate change” on dry vegetation that fueled the Park fire is little more than personal opinion, offering no scientific citation or basis for the claims.

While there was a heat wave prior to the Park fire, that had no bearing on the fire. The area where the fire spread, Butte and Tehama Counties, were not in drought conditions according to the U.S. Drought Monitor for July 23 – the day before the Park fire was ignited by a criminal arsonist.

So, “climate change caused drought” creating abnormally dry conditions didn’t figure into the Park fire at all. The fire wouldn’t exist without the act of arson.

The ignition point was in Bidwell Park. Just north of that point, huge acreages of grassland and scrub brush exist. Combine that ignition with the sustained southerly winds that day of 20-25 mph, and it is no surprise that the fire rapidly spread north. Rick Carhart, the Public Information Officer for CalFire in Butte County, confirmed in a telephone interview that the area “had not naturally burned in several decades, and had no control burns to reduce fuel loads.” He added that these “high fuel loads, combined with the wind that day made a very aggressive fire.”

If the fire happened now during below-normal temperatures (in California), would its slower spread be due to climate change too?

Climate change contributed nothing to ignition or rapid spread of the fire – local weather and a criminal act was at fault. The drying of grasses (which happens every spring) and the heat wave (which happens every summer) are both weather patterns that operate on short-term time scales as opposed to long-term climate change.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finds no climate signal, nor increasing trend, behind thunderstorms, or lightning occurrences spark fires. Also, NASA satellites have documented a global long-term decline in wildfires. NASA reports satellites have measured a 25-percent decrease in global lands burned since 2003.

A 2007 paper in the journal Forest Ecology and Management reported that prior to European colonization in the 1800s, more than 4.4 million acres of California forest and shrub-land burned annually. As compared to the 4.4 million California acres that burned each year prior to European colonization, only 90,000 acres to 1.6 million California acres burn in a typical year now.

Clearly, there is no climate change component to California wildfires. If there were, fires in the present would be consuming much more than 4.4 million acres annually – but this isn’t happening. The simple fact is: arsonists and lightning are responsible for most wildfires.

The intensity and coverage of wildfire varies greatly from year to year, as evidenced by the 2022 NYT story: Why California’s 2022 Wildfire Season Was Unexpectedly Quiet. A map of fires from year to year in the article demonstrates this well. Curiously, a data correlation between the Spotted Owl ruling and an increase in acreage burned from lack of forest management since 1990 exists.

The NYT believes that they can divine climate connections to the fire from offices in New York. At least Stemen was local, but still wrong.

It seems that climate activists and journalists care more about furthering their misguided climate agenda than they do about reporting the facts.

Factual references are published here: https://wattsupwiththat.com/newspaper-letter-references/

Anthony Watts is a former meteorologist at KHSL TV/ Action News Now. He does daily forecasts for KPAY Radio and is also a Senior Fellow for Climate and Environment at the Heartland Institute in Chicago. He also operates the most viewed climate related website in the world, wattsupwiththat.com