By James Taylor
CNN published an article yesterday titled, “This website helps you imagine what extreme climate change will do to your home.” According to CNN, a new website delivers “a surprisingly realistic sense of what it could look like” if your home address is struck by the ravages of climate change. To illustrate its point, CNN provided an Artificial Intelligence-manipulated photo of New York City’s Times Square engulfed in wildfire smoke.
Newsflash – wildfires have not engulfed New York City any time since SUVs were invented, nor will wildfires ever engulf New York City. Even if wildfires ever do engulf some area within hundreds of miles of New York City, the wildfires would almost certainly have been started by arsonists than climate change.
If we are going to talk about global warming and any alleged consequences, we have to look at global data. Although this past year has seen more wildfires than usual in California, with climate activists and their media sock puppets blaming global warming, NASA satellite instruments have been measuring the amount of land burned globally by wildfires since the 1990s. According to NASA, lands burned by wildfires have decreased by 24 percent since the satellite measurements first began.
Wildfires have always occurred on this planet and always will. When wildfires substantially decline as temperatures modestly warm – in conjunction with more precipitation and a greening of the Earth with more vegetation – it is counterfactual and dishonest to point to the fewer wildfires that still occur and claim that global warming is causing those that still occur.
No, CNN, wildfires are not destroying New York City, nor will they ever do so.James TaylorJames Taylor is the President of the Heartland Institute. Taylor is also director of Heartland’s Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy. Taylor is the former managing editor (2001-2014) of Environment & Climate News, a national monthly publication devoted to sound science and free-market environmentalism.
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NOAA web pages not available ?
I have tried to look up some of the NOAA data, could not access it, went to the search page
https://search.usa.gov/search?utf8=✓&affiliate=noaa.gov&query=stratospheric+temperature&commit=
works OK, but none of the links there I’m interested in, and few more that I’m not did not work. Never had any problems in the past.
Even granting that is scientifically false [for wildfires at least] and a fantasy, aren’t we allowed a little fantasy?
Subotai Bahadur
Wildfires, besides requiring a ready source of fuel (grasses, brush, dead wood) and source of ignition – in the last couple centuries, mostly humans), also depends upon congenial environmental conditions.
Given that New York City and environs average about 4 to 4.5 inches of rainfall per month during the normal warm (non-winter) months, it’s pretty tough for general drying out of the wildlands where wildfires happen there in NYC. Not to mention lack of fuel.
Wildfires occur primarily in the western and southern states where they experience dry springs and falls and relatively high winds coming off the Pacific – with a slowdown in wildfires in the midsummer months due to (at least inland of California) annual summer monsoons.
Maybe not wild fires in Times Square, but what about a gaggle of EVs erupting?
Since most of the tall buildings in New York City have steel frames, they would likely melt down long before they caught on fire.
Forests can burn down because the ignition temperature of wood is much lower than that of steel or concrete.
The only thing that ‘Climate Change’ is destroying, is CNN.
Climate change is also causing academics to become serial arsonists who start wildfires. CNN has not reported on that.
A friend living on the east coast US, told me today that she heard on the news that California has gotten only 50% of the rain they usually get. I told her it was BS and fearmongering because COP26. Not sure she believed me….