Right on cue, CBS news 60 minutes is expected link the recent California fires to “global warming”. Never mind that the fire was caused by arson, or that the area hadn’t burned in 40-60 years, leading up to a collection of dry dead underbrush which is part of the natural fire cycle. Never mind that La Nina made for a dry couple of years exacerbating the problem. Never mind that we get fires in California about this time every year. No, its the “Age of Megafires”:
THE AGE OF MEGAFIRES – Global warming is increasing the intensity and number of forest fires across the American West. Scott Pelley goes to the fire line to report. David Gelber and Joel Bach are the producers. Watch a preview http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=5285410n
UPDATE: WUWT reader Jason writes to tell us that this story is a rerun, and originally aired in 2007. See it here. I’ll bet the intro will mention the California fires though. They may have even “freshened up” the report a bit for the current situation.
I wonder if CBS borrowed the title from the Christian Science Monitor 2007 report?
Here is a top 20 report from CDF, note that they poo-poo 1932. Note also that there were quite a number of 100,00+ acre fires more than 10 years ago, directly contradicting the interview in the CBS trailer.
NYT was saying it is all getting worse back in 1996. Curiously though, you won’t find a single mention of “global warming” or “climate change” in that story. It was all about forest management issues:
But the recent methods used to control the growth of Western forests has also been blamed. In view of this summer’s debacle, debate is intensifying on how to better manage these forests.
Loggers correlate today’s wildfires with a Federally mandated cut in timber harvests from national forests, from a peak of 12 billion board feet a year in the 1980’s to about 4 billion this year.
…
But after World War II, a Smokey the Bear ethic took hold in the West, and total fire suppression became a national goal. Without regular low-level fires, Western forests grew dense, and massive amounts of fuel built up.
Today, when a Western forest ignites, it often explodes with a force unknown in earlier times. Racing from tree crown to tree crown, fires last longer and travel farther.
Scott Pelley is the same reporter that went to Antarctic in 2007 at the height of the melt season to tell us that “Antarctica is Melting”. They called that one the “The Age of Warming” Of course Scott never told his viewers that it was the peak melt season or that Antarctic ice is above normal.
And finally, never mind that 100 years ago, we didn’t have CNN or 60 minutes or “Action News” to regularly scare us to death with dramatic visual linkages. Back then, fire were just another part of the natural landscape.
From my perspective , we live in the “Age of MegaFUD“
I have been reading ‘Ubiquity’ by Mark Buchanan. In he mentions the work of Bruce Malamud et al who studied fires in the USA and Australia over the last century. Their work revealed that fire size follows a power law. Further they developed a mathematical game that emulated the power law that the data showed. It also showed that the way to reduce severe fires was with practices such as controlled burns, or as it is sometimes called fuel reduction burns. Fire is an inescapable feature of the landscape in many parts of the world. We need to understand that fire has a place in the landscape and how to best manage it.
Those living on the west coast all understand that Global Warming means wet wet wet (did I say wet?), yeah… very wet weather. Since the planet has been cooling down, the air is not picking as much moisture and it has been dry… bone dry.
Is the Press slowly waking up….?
http://www.climatedepot.com/a/2803/Media-Tipping-Point-Houston-Chronicle-Reporter-Reconsiders-Science-is-Settled-Climate-Claims-I-am-confused-4-years-ago-this-all-seemed-like-a-fait-accompli
Is this a rerun from 1491?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_savannas_of_North_America
One thing-as a former Aerial Firefighter and I still keep up with the industry,there is now a ‘let burn’ mentality in the USFS and BLM.CDF(Cal Fire) is a somewhat different story,but.As stated above the Forest/Urban interface has _got_ to be delt with sooner of later.One of the biggest problems is the idea of Xeriscaping-the use of native plants to landscape property,low water requirement,high fire danger.Another is,simply,
not enough clear space, use concrete if you want but get rid of the trees and vegitation.-if you are allowed to-which leads to the biggest problem government
stupidity.-in the name of the environment,and planning.I have witnessed ,more than once, a firetruck unable to get to a property-due to too narrow roads,-not good.
Another thing the Big Burns of the 1910-14 period(note at a low end of Solar
Cycle) were far more devastating than anything like it to day the big Burn of 1910
would’ve had been an example of Global Warming.(Along with the open NW passage
in the earlier part of the 20th century a Wiki on the Big Burn of 1910:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fire_of_1910
Looking forward to the fire season here in Australia. I wonder, if like last year, most of the fires will be started by people.
Guess they didn’t learn from the clowns that reprinted the “Wilkins Ice Sheet Collapse” story. The water-toting scoundrels are shameless.
It seems to me that “60 Minutes” has had to pay some huge libel judgements over its life to people like Ariel Sharon, to Audi, etc., etc. There is a reason for this. They are un-careful reporters with axes to grind.
Stephen Pyne has a great book on fires in North America. During the 1870s and 1930s, huge fires raged for months across much of the US.
Up until the 1870s, prairie fires used to burn from Canada down to Texas every few years.
Take a look at this list.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wildfires#North_America
Bill Illis (16:28:21) : Canada & fires
When I was young in western Pennsylvania we went into church one day and came out two hours later and the sky was nearly dark. We were told smoke from fires in Canada was the cause. Don’t know for sure. It would have been about 1953 + or – a couple of years.
When Mt. St. Helens blew I witnessed a similar thing but was in northern Idaho at the time. I think for this one the sky was blacker. The first one was a long time ago so I might not have it quite right.
My family did not have a television then. Amazing how communications have changed. Today there would be a webcam (as at Mt. Wilson this past week) and we would have seen color video.
“The western US seems to have a lot of arson. ”
We have a very long and predictable fire season. In any given place there are a number of “fire bugs”. They just have a greater opportunity to get their jollies in California.
Take look at the Peshtigo fire.
Worst fire ever.
1871.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peshtigo_Fire
John Silver (16:11:26) :
Alar on apples was a Fenton Communications project. Follow the FUD.
I always enjoyed getting that little bit of extra protein in my apples that a post-Alar worm provides. Thank goodness we’re getting ‘organic’ foods in the grocery stores now.
I’m just an old-fashioned guy who also misses cyclamates, hexachlorophene, ddt, tetraethyl lead, and diving boards. At least there’s mercury in the curly-cue fluorescents. I can’t imagine why NBCBS hasn’t gone after that danger to civilization yet.
Yes, my wife and I like to watch these type of shows, and we both remember it as a re-run.
In my own neck of the woods, a group of eco-types once again sued the Forest Service trying to get the standing dead timber out to pay for the restoration of a burned area.
The eco-groups won, and by the time the appeals process is exhausted, there will be no salvage, the timber useless. Even worse, the dead vegetation will remain for the better part of a decade, during which time any type of lightning strike will find plenty of fuel to support an even bigger fire, taking out more forest.
The groups know this, and prefer the forest to burn uncontrolled. The judge gives them thier way, and the USFS is legally prevented from doing it’s federally mandated job, managing the forest.
The excuse is always the same, the result the same. They allege the USFS short-circuited the EIR.
The blame is then tranferred to Global Warming, when it fact it is legal wrangling over papers that amounts to frivolous technicalities.
The end result is Fire Terror ripping through renewable resources, economic waste, and a shortage of a truly green building product: Wood.
Watch the building shows. They are going green with all manner of plastics, glues, resins, foams, laminates, etc. that have a petrochemical base. Your new house has a new car smell, and you sleep with it.
But, it’s Global Warming that is the news, and a re-run at that.
Jaxa has finally updated with the following values:
09/04 5,365,781
09/05 5,340,156
A quote from 1836 about Santa Barbara California:
“The town is certainly finely situated, with a bay in front, and an amphitheatre of hills behind. The only thing which diminishes its beauty is, that the hills have no large trees upon them, they having been all burnt by a great fire which swept them off about a dozen years before, and they had not yet grown up again. The fire was described to me by an inhabitant, as having been a very terrible and magnificent sight. The air of the whole valley was so heated that the people were obliged to leave the town and take up their quarters for several days upon the beach.”
Richard Dana: Two Years Before the Mast
Yeah those fires are a new event.
I guess the Victorian bushfires of 2009 (our summer in Australia) didn’t rate a mention. We have since had a Royal Commission into the tragedy and I believe a lot of evidence pointed to poor forest management (i.e. lack of controlled, fuel-reducing burns) and arsonists. The details and interim reports are here:
http://www.royalcommission.vic.gov.au/
The global warming causes catastrophic fires reminds me a bit of Crichton’s (RIP) Aliens Cause Global Warming title:
http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speech-alienscauseglobalwarming.html
Difference being that his argument made sense.
Ah, the AGW propaganda machine in full swing.
It’s kinda sad watching it. This is the culmination of over twenty years of propaganda and climate catastrophism….. over 50 billion dollars of tax payer funded research…… There have been no catastrophes. There will be no catastrophes. The next ten years won’t see the sky fall….. That is the trouble with false claims, eventually it is clear nothing has happened, nor will.
Also the AGW people are on a hiding to nothing. The news mob, perverse to the end, will turn on the AGW proponents in the next few years and will sensationalize this period as the greatest hoax on Earth. They will then be sooling the mob onto the AGW scientists and driving a campaign to “bring them to justice”.
There’ll be lots of politicians and Journalists ducking for cover and blaming scientists for bad facts.
The news media will be only too happy to oblige… After all, their sole concern is selling newspapers…. not facts.
agesilaus (20:15:39) :
The only thing I can think of when I hear “we must act quickly” is to get out of the way of large, powerful moving things. Like raging forest fires, hurricanes, tsunamis and volcaones.
It’s the deliberate stuff that worries me, like arsonists and legally strangled forest management.
I thought at least part of the problem with California was they’ve been importing good but highly flammable Eucalyptus trees from Australia since the 1850’s.
From wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Sequoia
[edit]
“Ecology
Two giant sequoias, Sequoia National Park. Note the large fire scar at
the base of the right-hand tree; fires do not kill the trees but do
remove competing thin-barked species, and aid giant sequoia
regeneration.The giant sequoias are having difficulty reproducing in
their original habitat (and very rarely reproduce in cultivation) due
to the seeds only being able to grow successfully in mineral soils in
full sunlight, free from competing vegetation. Although the seeds can
germinate in moist needle humus in the spring, these seedlings will
die as the duff dries in the summer. They therefore require periodic
wildfire to clear competing vegetation and soil humus before
successful regeneration can occur. Without fire, shade-loving species
will crowd out young sequoia seedlings, and sequoia seeds will not
germinate. When fully grown, these trees typically require large
amounts of water and are therefore often concentrated near streams.
Fires also bring hot air high into the canopy via convection, which in
turn dries and opens the cones. The subsequent release of large
quantities of seeds coincides with the optimal post-fire seedbed
conditions. Loose ground ash may also act as a cover to protect the
fallen seeds from ultraviolet radiation damage.
Due to fire suppression efforts and livestock grazing during the early
and mid 20th century, low-intensity fires no longer occurred naturally
in many groves, and still do not occur in some groves today.”
Obviously human intervention unnaturally reduced the amount of fires to
BELOW natural levels over the course of the 20th century. These conflagrations are caused by unnatural worship of “Smokey the Bear”, and the suppression of
naturally occurring fires.
– A. McIntire
A few years ago, I had the cool opportunity to go out a few times to help a friend with data collection in a Northern California forest for his phd work at a California university. His plots were in a demonstration forest, meaning, as well as I understand it, that it’s set aside for academic and Forest Service research of a wide range, including research into forest-management for increased and more environmentally sound timber production, and into best-forestry practices for fire management.
One of the days we were out there, he talked about how local and quasi-local residents, as well as certain prominent environmental groups, had been filing endless lawsuits to stop any cutting of trees or management-in-general within the demonstration forest, despite the fact the activity would have been for research rather than profit. He was very concerned about what it was doing to the potential fire danger in the forest, and completely dismissive of the rationales of the lawsuits, despite being the most environmentally conscientious (in an intelligent and informed way I truly, fully respect and admire) person I know.
I just bring up this up since the blog-post mentions the federal cut in timber harvests. While I’m sure this has to be a great element of the recent propensity for the West to burn, if the kind of prevalent obstructionist litigation that my friend described is going on in academic research forests, I have to assume that it’s going on ALL OVER the West, and it seems to me it could likely be a significant contributing factor to any recent “mega-fires”…
Uhm, didn’t this strike anyone as being just a little “odd” that all these towns should burn on the same day in the same general region (upper midwest)?
Douglas DC, thanks for the input. Yes, its all in the policies of how the land is taken care of and getting firefighters to their positions to save houses! Not much you can do when Arsonists are involved. It’s a shame that CBS continues to favor the Alarmists and use the “Scare” tactics to get their point across. These people have to be shown for who and what they are….Why don’t insurance companies put their foot down out there. If property management is not done then “No” insurance coverage! Period. Insurance companies are doing this along the Mississippi and along the Gulf and Atlantic. As with the Federal Government!
My great-grandfather built a cabin near Aptos, CA, in a redwood forest. One of the trees very close to the cabin had a huge fire scar at the base, went up about 15-20 feet, like a concave divot taken out of the trunk. But the tree was strong and tall ( a few hundred feet, as I recall).