By Michael Bastasch
With wildfires engulfing over 620,000 acres of California, there’s been a concerted media campaign to single out man-made global warming as the primary force behind the deadly blazes.
But that’s not what the data suggests, according to University of Washington climate scientist Cliff Mass.
“So there is a lot of misinformation going around in the media, some environmental advocacy groups, and some politicians,” Mass wrote in the first of a series of blog posts analyzing the California wildfires.
“The story can’t be a simply that warming is increasing the numbers of wildfires in California because the number of fires is declining. And area burned has not been increasing either,” Mass wrote.
Firefighters are struggling to put out the largest fire in recent decades, the Mendocino Complex fire, that’s consumed over 300,000 acres in northern California. Environmentalists and some scientists have pushed a media narrative that blazes across the state to global warming.
“Climate change is making wildfires more extreme. Here’s how,” PBS Newshour warned viewers on Monday, quoting Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann.
“You warm the planet, you’re going to get more frequent and intense heat waves. You warm the soils, you dry them out, you get worst drought,” Mann said. “You bring all that together, and those are all the ingredients for unprecedented wildfires.”
The San Francisco Chronicle ran with similar coverage: “Scientists see fingerprints of climate change all over California’s wildfires.” The Chronicle also quoted Mann, who further argued global warming weakened the jet stream, causing extreme weather patterns to persist.
“These factors work together to produce the sorts of persistent extreme weather events — droughts, floods, heat waves, wildfires — that we’re seeing across the Northern Hemisphere right now,” Mann said.
However, Mass combed through California wildfire statistics, finding state figures showed a decrease in acres burned in four out of five regions. U.S. Forest Service data for public forests and lands in California shows mixed trends, with some regions having just as big of fires as in the 1920s.
“The bottom line of the real fire data produced by the State of California and in the peer-reviewed literature is clear: there has been no upward trend in the number of wildfires in California during the past decades,” Mass wrote on his blog.
“In fact, the frequency of fires has declined,” he wrote. “And in most of the state, there has not been an increasing trend in area burned during the past several decades.”
“Clearly, climate change is only one possible factor in controlling fire frequency and may not be the most important,” Mass wrote.
While the seasonal weather is an important ingredient for wildfires, it’s not the only factor, making it particularly hard to attribute fires to global warming. Land management and population growth are also major factors since most fires are started by humans.
A recent study found the risk of fire increased in once-rural areas as populations increased, putting more buildings, plants, vehicles and other ignition sources in fire-prone areas that were once sparsely populated.
“This is a people problem,” U.S. Geological Survey fire scientist Jon Keeley told The San Jose Mercury News. “What’s changing is not the fires themselves but the fact that we have more and more people at risk.”
Mass authored a similar analysis of California’s 2017 wildfire season when many media outlets suggested the blazes were driven by man-made warming.
“Those that are claiming the global warming is having an impact are doing so either out of ignorance or their wish to use coastal wildfires for their own purposes,” Mass wrote in 2017.
“Wildfires are not a global warming issue, but a sustainable and resilience issue that our society, on both sides of the political spectrum, must deal with,” Mass wrote.
Full story here at the Daily Caller
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Admitting that the weakened polar jet stream was a contributor to changes in the climate is a big step forward for Prof M Mann. Now that we have agreed upon that, let’s look into the cause(s) of a lazy polar jet stream. It would soon be established, about two minutes into the investigation, that it is related to solar activity. Whether or not it is related to temperature is a different matter. It isn’t. It is related to solar activity whatever the temperature.
It is nice to see some progress in this rather contentious field.
I wonder if all these horrific fires, along with loss of life and property, will finally wake CA up to the fact we need proactive fire prevention. I used to show 2 videos to my 5th graders (I’m retired now) when we were studying environmental science. The first covered the massive fire in Yellowstone in 1988. There was almost no stopping it because the authorities had never allowed natural burn off of underbrush. The Holy fire in the Elsinore area is burning in an area that has not seen a fire in 40 years! The 2nd video I showed was about a state park in Florida that was mainly lodge pole pines (they burn like a gasoline torches). Florida encouraged natural burns and they also did some controlled burns. They have never had an out of control fire in the park. Florida also encourages private property owners to apply control burns to cut down on devastating fires. Since the environmentalists all insist that humans allow “nature take its course”, maybe they will allow natural fires in huge accumulations of “unnatural” growth to cut down on wild, out of control burns. /sarc/ Unfortunately, it is probably too late. There is just too much underbrush that has built up during the “we will stop any fire anywhere anytime” ethos. CA is faced with many more devastating fires until nature is allowed to return to normal and we finally allow “nature to be nature”.
A major hurdle is the “environmental” groups that sue the government to prevent appropriate fire management. Logging is bad, regardless of the purpose! Cutting down a tree is irreversible harm! (A judge actually said that during a lawsuit. Obviously, the government lost that one.) In my biology (and conservation!) courses, my professors all talked about how controlled burns and thinning of forests was necessary for healthy ecosystems. I asked a few if this was a generally accepted idea among biologists. They all replied in the affirmative.
This further convinced me that many “environmental” groups are willfully and knowingly advocating for actions that are likely to CAUSE ecological and environmental harm, and that the people involved not only do not care about people, they do not care about the environment.
This kind of BS is why I call myself a conservationist rather than an environmentalist.
We live in Redding and had a chance to drive CA-299 out to Whiskeytown and also into the Keswick area. It’s worse than you can possibly imagine. Except for the occasional brick chimney and the metal panels from garage doors and burned cars and trucks you can’t identify anything.
We have friends who built a lovely new home in the area where many but not all homes burned. Across the street from them the land drops down into a ravine and then up a hill where so many homes no longer exist. Their house is absolutely untouched. Green grass, flowers, everything as if no fire took place. Across the street the burn is black, black, black right up to the edge of the curb.
The old city of Shasta is mostly burned but untouched homes are surrounded by total burned destruction. Most of the Shasta Historical Park seems untouched.
The utility companies are busy replacing power poles and lines. The pre-burn heavy vegetation hid the fact that the road was very close to very steep, deep drop offs. They’ve installed new metal guardrails along those stretches.
It is a tragedy you simply can’t imagine if you don’t see it for yourselves. Do what you can to help.
This fire is now a little more than half the size of the fire that devasted southe east Australia in 2009, and probably has a way to run yet. Both fires appear to have human sources either through arson or power utilities.
Both fires also occured against a backdrop of forest mismanagement and development in bushfire prone areas without adequate clearing and access. We appear doomed to repeat this pattern as lessons are not learnt or dissapate over time.
We are doomed to repeat it as Vic Roads and the local council are failing to keep the roadsides properly managed and the greenies are going on about undergrowth management ( thanks to unwarranted concerns about a certain ‘cute’ little possum).
Writing from a position of ignorance: Could the scientist’s name be Maas, not Mass? Just asking . . .
I hit his blog everyday:
http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/
Interesting stuff.
https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2018/08/california-wildfires-is-global-warming.html
For those that want to prevent wildfires by collecting firewood, or even controlled burns:
Think again.
Controlled burns help near where people might get a fire started.
Look up “Firewise” and “Fire adapted communities”
Where the forests are now loaded with fuel, and in mountains, come have a look.
Search “Images” for
Jolly Mountain Fire, or
Norse Peak Fire
The media and Michael Mann has television with compelling images of wild fires on their side.
Statements like “The bottom line of the real fire data produced by the State of California and in the peer-reviewed literature is clear: there has been no upward trend in the number of wildfires in California during the past decades,” isn’t going to convince people. Who are they going to believe? Your “data” or actual images before your eyes showing the devastation of wild fires!
Those who want to rebut the media and the likes of Mann has to come up with something more than “data” (and graphs) – something that can be seen and easily grasped by people. And by the way, don’t use
the term “peer-reviewed” – it has become a four-letter word!
I appreciate the professor’s perspective (and I took a look at his article). But it is my experience living here in CA that the fires are becoming more intense and destructive. A chart on an insurance site – https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-wildfires – lists the 10 largest CA wildfires and seven out of the ten are during or after 2003 (the top five are during or after 2003). The site – wildfire today – sees a trend is the size of wildfires increasing – http://wildfiretoday.com/tag/statistics/ – this is for the continental US (the same data is on the insurance site without the trend line). The fire in Ventura was especially anomalous as it happened after winter began (there is a timeline visual on the wildfire today site which shows how anomalous it was). Also, the fires seem to be moving faster and with more intensity. This is a subjective impression – also heard firefighters quoted on TV saying so. Anyway, if you live in CA you can think about whether it is true for you if you think the weather is becoming, overall, more hot and dry – which, of course, leads to fires. Of course, it would be better to do what the natives did – which was to burn forests during winter – but that doesn’t work in crowded CA with all this expensive property.
Not included in the above article, but mentioned by Cliff Mass on his blog, area burned has increased in California over the 30 years 1987=2016. Data here: http://cdfdata.fire.ca.gov/pub/cdf/images/incidentstatsevents_269.pdf
Thank you for the link. Two observations:
First, 30 years of data is not very much to go by.
Second, it shows that the total number of fires is decreasing by 170/year; while the total acreage burned is increasing by 12000 acres/year.
Clearly for this to happen, the area of each fire must be increasing. I calculate that in total, the area/fire is increasing by 3 acres/fire/year.
But what is even more interesting is the breakdown.
For local government firefighting, the area of each fire has actually *decreased* by 1.9 acres/fire/year;
For California state firefighting, the area of each fire has increased by 1.89 acres/fire/year;
Now for the Feds:
For Federal firefighting, the area of each fire has increased dramatically by 9 acres/fire/year.
The problem seems to lie with Federal firefighting resources, tactics and strategy – or perhaps on increasing demands placed on them as firefighting resources are allocated. That seems a more likely explanation than climate change.
Cliff Mass’ blog strawman starts by conjuring the phrase “the key driver”… when no-one thinks that.
Bastasch backs up with “the primary force”!
“that’s not what the data suggests” Um, no it isn’t, what a surprise. You wern’t surprised were you Michael?
B-grade ‘splainin, right there.
Wildfires are caused by many things, including mismanagment of forests, and undergrowth, and over-development. But it’s a logical fallacy to hold that because things other than climate change are contributing to the problem, climate change is not contributing.
A better view is that because of climate change, we are being made to pay more dearly for our environmental mistakes.
It is a fact that climate change is occurring in California, in the form of the extension of the hot and dry season by several weeks on both ends in recent years. The extent to which this change is contributing to the wildfire problem is hard or impossible to quantify exactly. But we cannot dismiss it as a factor contributing to the problem.
Whether the wildfires currently raging in California are the worst ever is something for the people who publish the Guinness Book of World Records to ponder. It is reasonable to conclude that if the world were greener and wetter instead of hotter and dryer, wildfires would be less of a problem.
This has been quite interesting for me. I have been voicing my opinion on many social media platforms for ages and geting the usual vitriol coming back at me. On Yahoo UK this week was a story about the wildfires so I commented on the fact that this was forecast back in march but people who really knew the weather and also the slow start to the hurricane season. I then threw in the fact about how many times the Arctic has been predicted to melt out. After 4 days I have not had a single thumbs down or reply telling me I know nothing (why is partially true).
2 guys caught lighting multiple spots already..often happens in Aus too;-(
pity cali doesnt have death penalty
Under U.S. federal law, arsonists can be held responsible for the costs of fighting the fires they set, however, few (if any) have millions of dollars to cover them. I am not sure how often anyone is charged, it may be difficult to prove in a court of law, or be considered to not be worth the court costs to recover a pittance.
I do wonder if bankrupting a few arsonists might serve as a deterrent.
In case you are starting to believe the climate warming propaganda being “proven” by the “recent” increase in forest fires, as is publicized nowadays, click for the governmental statistics in this link.
https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/fireInfo_stats_totalFires.html
In summary:
During the recent few years: approximately 5 million acres burned per year on average.
During the few years about 1930: approximately 48 million acres burned per year on average. The year 1930 a record at 53 million acres burned.
[1 acre = 4000 m2]
jake,
It says right at the top of your linked-to data:
“Prior to 1983, sources of these figures are not known, or cannot be confirmed, and were not derived from the current situation reporting process. As a result the figures prior to 1983 should not be compared to later data.”
Yet that’s exactly what you’ve done. Anyway, it would hardly be a surprise if acres burned was greater in the 1930s, given relative lack of infrastructure (roads, for instance, to provide fire breaks and access for fire crews), water supplies, air support, etc. It’s not a like-for-like comparison.
Cliff Mass used verified CALFIRE data from 1987-2016, which is both more reliable and provides a more reasonable comparison. What it shows is that area burned since 1987 has
increased. The trend is ~ 150,000 ac/dec, but that will increase substantially once 2017 data are added; 2018 too, unfortunately.
You selectively fail to mention that the number of fires per year has dropped from 13,000 in 1987 to 7000 in 2016 – i.e. it has halved!
That must tell us that the areas of the fires are increasing. Fewer but bigger fires.
Could it be down to fire-fighting tactics? After disasters like the Storm King fire, are managers are more reluctant to commit human resources at ground-level? Much more use is being made of air-attack.
the number of fires drops.
the area burned goes up
all during a period of improved response.
what can you deduce…smaller number of larger fires…its worth a look.
question is.
does climate change, or increased drought,
CONTRIBUTE TO THE INCREASE IN AREA.
note, not cause the fire, not cause more fires, but contribute along with other factors to increases in burn area?
contribute, not cause.
contribute.
well if we had a natural drought I imagine folks would say, sure, dry conditions contribute to the increase in fire size of both natural fires and arson.
tough question to untangle. if we have dry conditions that are, in part, a result of climate change, regardless of the cause of climate change, we would conclude that larger fires are partially influenced by climate change.
the fun part is.
a. figuring the partial contribution of climate change.
b. figuring the partial contribution of man to climate change.
Mosh,
“Climate change” has had less than no effect on wildfires.
Theo, what is the evidence for that assertion?
Chris,
Should be obvious.
If there be any correlation at all, it’s that wildfires have gotten less destructive and frequent since the world started warming again after the PDO flip of 1977.
https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/fireInfo_stats_totalFires.html
Annual average for 1926-35: 41.45 million acres burned
Annual average for 2006-15: 6.98 million acres burned
I suppose that a fourth molecule of CO2 per 10,000 dry air molecules might however have contributed to more fuel on the forest floor, which, when dried up in the summer, could catch fire and burn more hotly.
An excellent summary of the issue. Thanks Steven.
Unfortunately most people just want to cheer on anything that lines up with what they already believe.
Much more likely to be down to changes in land management.
A real scientist will try to discover and evaluate ALL the possible causes of the observed phenomenon – not just the one that suits his favourite ideology. And once they have proposed a hypothesis, real scientists will ‘bend over backwards’ (per Feynman) to think-up and test counter-instances. With climate scientists, there is only one explanation – climate change – and it is the explanation for everything.
Here’s another possibility that could be explored. Hunting and the health of ruminant populations. Have there been changes to the way the forest understory is being browsed? I would suggest that a forest which supports a large healthy ruminant population would have a very clean clear understory; whereas a forest lacking them would have a lot of undergrowth that could easily catch fire in dry weather.
J,
Misguided environmentalists have made grazing on USFS land hard. Yet that was the original use of the Service’s land, which is why it’s in the Department of Agriculture rather than Interior.
Why is the data presented in the SAME table, as though it is of equal quality to the other data, giving the strong visual appearance that leads one to believe that the figures in the SAME table are reliable. If the data is not reliable, then it should NOT be published in a visual manner that first leads one to believe that it is. Whoever decided to publish that table made a bad, dare I say “erroneous”, decision. Those earlier figures should NOT have been put in there. If they are useless, then why put them in? It makes no sense. Very annoying.
no data scientist is fooled by visuals.
if they didnt present a visual of all the data you would complain they are hiding something.
Projection, defined.
I wonder if we in northern Utah can sue California for damages due to the poor air quality caused by their forest mismanagement and urban sprawl. Salt Lake City has been under a sickly haze for weeks.
Since I read an article on this very website of which they’re usually meticulously sourced, much like the wonderful commenters data in these areas: I would have to say no. Most of your pollution comes from Asia. It’s blown over the Pacific and only supplemented by the hordes of progressives in their urban west coast sprawl. [Sidenote: these are also the Asian countries that have been the primary contributor to the largest floating landfill in the world, located slightly west of Hawaii if memory serves. It’s larger then the state of Texas.] The almost non-existent fire break laws in California and little or no control of brush and dead trees certainly don’t help either. How could they have less tinder piled up all around and in the suburbs if they don’t have the money to clear it? If, after the thousands or millions of dollars in legal fees you actually won a lawsuit against California which is usually bankrupt; you could only obtain a portion in damages.
Logic, facts, and actual studies on population growth, drought, and poor forest management policies leads to massive wildfires. 100 years of Smokey Bear and environmentalist resistance to sound forest and wilderness management has produced this mess.
Too bad that Michael Mann, a dendochronologist, has no knowledge or experience in forestry or forest management, yet is propped up as an “expert” in fire science. It certainly has little to do with climate.
how many DC-9 fire retardant drops did they use 30 years ago? Helicopter water drops? What kind of equipment expense in water tender and bulldozer costs did they have in the 1980’s? The cost of fighting wildfires and the technical and pure physical capacity to fight them has increased exponentially over the last 50 years, as has the expense nationally.
In Redding california the top wind speeds from a fire vortex was over 135 miles per hour.
Think you mean DC-10.
It wasn’t used 30 years ago, but other airliners had already then been converted to fight fires with retardants, as were helicopters with Bambi buckets, invented in 1982. Helicopters before that used heavier rigid structures to drop water.
Click on this link…I don’t think you’ll be sorry ??
https://americandigest.org/wp/lets-review-111-is-the-west-burning/#more-8025
The toddler teething on a shotgun was worth the price of admission.
Seeing that California has wild-fires every year why don’t they keep more rain runoff in some big manmade reservoir, set up the forests with a network of sprinklers and use that water to keep everything nice and moist. Yes it would be expensive but what is the cost of all of these fires?
Arson is becoming a significant factor in forest fires. A man has just been convicted of starting a fire which caused the evacuation of 13,000 people. Also the Athens fires are believed to have been arson by the local fire chief because they all started on the same day. I actually suspect that amateur climate activists are doing it in the belief it will further the cause.
so if we had a natural drought and a dude set a fire that burned massive area, would you argue that the area burned was LARGE because of arson?
or would you say, the fire was caused by arson and made worse by dry conditions?
simple question.
No Steven, Mr Batshich is claiming its “the primary driver”. Nothing else matters.
I think there are many factors that matter if both sides of the political spectrum would stop bashing each other on Twitter long enough to actually look at the historical data. Isn’t that what this article is about?
Why a “dude”.
Taking animals off the land for the past several hundred years is the most likely culprit. Of course that is man-made also. But animals don’t have much of a lobby.
Obviously, Mass is only looking at a small piece of the pie. Clearly, when one looks at the total western half of the US the link between climate change and wildfire is more apparent. Please review the following links:
https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/science-and-impacts/impacts/infographic-wildfires-climate-change.html
https://www.ecowatch.com/graphs-californias-wildfires-2498070388.html