Guest post by Jim Steele
Scientific evidence reveals there has been no climate effect regards California’s wildfires! None! The data below proves it beyond all doubt. There is no denying that warmer temperatures can cause drier fuels and promote larger fires. But that fact is being misapplied to all wildfires. About 70% of California’s 2020 burnt areas have been in grasslands and dead grass is so dry by the end of California’s annual summer drought that dead grasses are totally insensitive to any added warmth from climate change. Dead grasses only require a few hours of warm dry conditions to become highly flammable. It’s fire weather not climate change that is critical. Furthermore, the century trends in local temperatures where California’s biggest fires have occurred reveal no connection to climate change. In most cases the local maximum temperatures have been cooler now than during the 1930s. Those cooler temperatures should reduce the fire danger. Newsom is either ignoring or distorting the scientific evidence, is totally stupid, or is a dishonest demagogue.
Maximum temperatures are typically used by fire indexes to issue red flag warnings because it is the heat of midday that has the greatest drying effect. Minimum temperatures are often low enough to drop below the dewpoint at which time fuel moisture increases. So averaging minimum and maximum temperatures is inappropriate. In addition, referencing a higher global average temperature is meaningless. Only local maximum temperatures determine the dryness of surface fuels during every fire. As in Park and Abatzoglou 2019, the months of March through October are averaged to determine maximum temperatures during California’s dry season.
Here are some relevant facts (from the Western Regional Climate Center). Trust the scientific evidence
1) The August 2013 Rim Fire centered around Yosemite National Park, was California’s 5th largest fire.
2) The November 2018 Camp Fire was California’s deadliest fire destroying the town of Paradise. It was also its 16th largest fire.
3) The 2018 Mendocino Complex Fire was California’s largest fire (since 1932 excluding 2020) .
4) In the October 2017 wine country fires, the Tubbs Fire was the 4th deadliest. It only burned 37,000 acres but high winds drove embers into the dwellings of the heavily populated outskirts of Santa Rosa.
Governor Newsom ignores the data to disgustingly hijacking the tragedy of California’s fires to push is climate change agenda. But he is not alone. There are climate scientists pushing catastrophes by ignoring the local maximum temperature trends. Bad analyses promote bad policies and obscure what needs to be done regards fuel management and creating defensible spaces in fire prone California. Newsom must focus on fuel management and fire suppression. As fire ecologist Thomas Swetnam echoed the experts’ growing consensus against fire suppression wrote, “The paradox of fire management in conifer forests is that, if in the short term we are effective at reducing fire occurrence below a certain level, then sooner or later catastrophically destructive wildfires will occur. Even the most efficient and technologically advanced firefighting efforts can only forestall this inevitable result.”
Further information about California’s wildfires are
Minimizing California Wildfires
Wildfires: Separating Demagoguery from the Science
How Bad Science & Horrific Journalism Misrepresent Wildfires and Climate
Jim Steele is Director emeritus of San Francisco State’s Sierra Nevada Field Campus and authored Landscapes and Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism
“Scientific evidence reveals there has been no climate effect regards California’s wildfires! None!”
In theory rising CO2 forcing could reduce Californian wildfires by inhibiting El Nino intensity by a not very meaningful amount. Low solar increases the El Nino induced rains which boost the undergrowth fuel load. An increase in El Nino conditions during a centennial solar minimum is normal. And then the fire risk increases in the year following an El Nino episode, and in the weeks-months with a positive NAO/AO anomaly, which is down to a short term high solar signal. Like with this August and September having the fastest solar coronal hole streams for around a year, as I had predicted over a year ago.
One small question: What was Governor Gavin Newsom’s claim ?
From the piece I can guess what it probably was, but for the purposes of scientific method, having the underlying claim would be helpful.
“Gavin Newsom’s Exceedingly Ignorant Climate Claim”
What, another one?
I also posted the link to my blog on California fires and Gov Newsom’s cliams to the Weather West (Daniel Swain’s website). He quickly removed the post and blocked me. My blog post, ( also posted here) showed a century of maximum temperature changes at the location where California’s major fires happened. Those trends show max temperatures have not exceeded the 1930s. Swain posts that it is extreme temperature promoting the big fires.
It is sad how alarmists like Swain prevent honest debate supported by facts, to enforce their catastrophic climate change position
You would of thought with all their renewables in California it would of stopped the fires by now, or did I miss something?
‘CAL FIRE funded 17 Forest Health grants, targeting over 130,000 acres of California’s forestlands
for restoration through a suite of activities. Activities include thinning dense and degraded forests;
reducing hazardous fuel loads to change extreme fire behavior across the landscape; managing for
drought, insects and disease; and applying prescribed fire for ecological restoration.’
CAL FIRE press release Feb 2020, following the report of February 2019.
And their website has a section urging everyone to create a (fire) defensible space round their homes.
Seems to me a lot of activity aimed at fire management in forests and a lot of things identified which could be done?
From the article: “In most cases the local maximum temperatures have been cooler now than during the 1930s.”
There is the *real* science of CO2-caused Climate Change. It was just as warm in the 1930’s as it is today. Not only in California, but the entire United States. The United States is actually in a temperature downtrend since the 1930’s.
There was much less CO2 in the atmosphere in the 1930’s, yet it was just as warm as today, with more CO2 in the atmosphere. It appears that CO2 has little effect on the temperatures.
It was just as warm in the United States in the 1930’s as it is today, and if you go by unmodified regional Tmax charts from around the world, the same holds true for the entire world.
What climate change, Joe Biden? The actual science shows there has been no change in temperature even though there has been a change in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. So you can’t blame California’s wildfires on heat generated by CO2 because there has been no extra heat generated by CO2, if it’s not any warmer now than in the 1930’s. And it’s not.
Joe’s not really talking about “The Science”. What he is really talking about is “The Leftwing Science”, which is not really science at all, but is an instrument for gaining money and political power.
Bring in Jerry Brown as a consultant. He knows how to spin climate even from Antarctica.