The New York Times (NYT), on July 30Th the story is titled “How Did a Garden Fire Get Big, So Fast?” claims that “(h) eating has broken all the heat records, and Dr. Williams said records will probably continue to fall in the next few years as the burning of fossil fuels continues to add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.”
This is false. The article itself provides no data or citations to support this claim, instead relying on the opinion of climate experts who have nothing to do with the fire.
After spending 35 years in Chico, CA, the Park fire is one of three recent wildfires that I have personal hands-on and boots on the ground experience. The other two are the Camp Fire in 2018, and the Dixie fire in 2021. All of these fires have affected me and the people around me.
But somehow the NYT and the so-called experts were able to find out the cause and circumstances of the fire from their office from afar. In each case, the NYT has blamed climate change as one of the drivers or contributors to these three fires without so much as a shred of evidence. In fact, the NYT refutes its own claim in its article on a table of the top ten fires in California by acres burned:
Climate change is not listed as a cause anyone. However, that didn’t stop the “experts” interviewed for the story from trying to make climate connections that didn’t exist:
July 22, two days before the fire started, was the hottest day on earth. June is the 13th month in a row to break global heat records. Some areas burned by the Park fire saw the hottest 30-day period on record before the blaze.
Dr. Williams compared the drought to what preceded California’s second-largest wildfire, the 2021 Dixie fire, which started during a drought and burned nearly one million acres. The country is beginning to emerge from drought, which makes the effect of heat on fuel even more important, he said.
“It was an incredible heat wave, and an incredible drying of vegetation,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The rainy season leads to a less severe fire season in 2022 and 2023. But this extreme heat, with hotter weather in the forecast, means “we have kiln-dried all the extra fuel,” Dr. Swain said.
The Park Fire started with arson, according to Cal Fire. Dry vegetation that allows it to burn quickly has a very clear fingerprint on climate change, Dr Swain said.
According to my observation, this is the breed causality shoehorning (to coin a phrase) is becoming increasingly common among journalists and climate advocates as they try to fit weather events or disasters into the climate change narrative.
Swain’s claim about the “very clear fingerprint of climate change” on the dry vegetation that caused the Park fire is nothing more than his personal opinion. He provided no scientific citations or basis for his claim.
Although there was a heat wave before the Taman fire, that had no effect on the fire. The area where the fire is burning, California’s Butte County and the most burned area of Tehama County are not in drought conditions according to the US Drought Monitor for July 23.rd – the day before the Park fire ignited by a criminal arsonist.
So “climate change causes drought” and abnormally dry conditions did not occur in the Park fire. Fire would not exist without the criminal act of arson. I will not be surprised if the next episode of shoehorning causality is a story that states “Climate Change Causes Another Fire.”
The flash point, in Chico’s Bidwell Park, is in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. To the north of the point there are acreages of grass and scrub brush. Combine that ignition with the sustained southerly wind of 20-25 mph, and it’s no surprise that the fire quickly spread north. Rick Carhart, Public Information Officer for CalFire in Butte County and a decades-long resident of Chico, confirmed in a phone interview that the area “hasn’t burned naturally in decades, and has no burn controls to reduce the fuel load.” He added that “the high fuel load, combined with the wind that day made for a very aggressive fire.”
Climate change does not contribute anything to the actual situation or the rapid spread of fires – local weather and criminal activity are at fault. Grass drying (which happens every spring) and heat waves (which happen every summer) are both weather patterns that operate on short-term time scales rather than long-term climate change.
My colleague, Heartland Institute researcher Linnea Lueken, published a factual argument last year about the case with The Sacramento Bee makes similar but baseless claims as the NYT when trying to link climate change to wildfires and natural drivers, such as lightning. He wrote:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found no climate signal, or an increasing trend, behind storms, or lightning events. Also, NASA satellites have recorded a long-term global decline in wildfires. NASA reports satellites have measured a 25 percent decrease in global land that has burned since 2003.
Looking at wildfires in California in particular, research shows massive wildfires have regularly swept through the state. Indeed, the 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 scrubland were burned annually. Compared to the 4.4 million acres of California burned annually before European colonization, only 90,000 acres to 1.6 million acres of California burned in a typical year today.
Clearly, there is no driving component of climate change to the California wildfires. If there were, fires would now consume more than 4.4 million hectares per year – but this is not the case. The simple fact is, Arsonists are Responsible for More Wildfires than Climate Change. The intensity and coverage of wildfires varies from year to year, as evidenced in the 2022 NYT story, Why California’s 2022 Fire Season Is Unexpectedly Quiet. The fire map from the years in the article shows this:
Of course, in the article, he can’t deny blaming climate change, only providing cherry-picked data from 1990 to bolster his claim, while ignoring the big fires of the past.
The NYT believes that, like some remote diagnostic “telemedicine” calls, it and experts can figure out the climate connection to the fire from an office in New York and from so-called “climate experts” sitting in offices elsewhere who know better. what happened to the man with his boots on the ground.
This is a shameful and clear demonstration that the NYT cares more about its climate agenda, than reporting the facts.
Originally published on ClimateRealism.
Anthony Watts
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at the Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and now does daily radio forecasts. He has created a weather graphic presentation system for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as peer-reviewed papers together on climate issues. He operates the world’s most viewed website on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.
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