The New York Times (NYT), in a July 30th story titled “How Did the Park Fire Get So Big, So Fast?” claims that “[h]eat has been breaking records all summer, and Dr. Williams said records will probably continue to fall over the next several 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 but rather relies on opinions from so-called climate experts who have no hands-on connection to the fire whatsoever.
Having spent 35 years in Chico, CA, the Park fire is one of three recent wildfires with which I have personal hands-on and boots on the ground experience. The other two were the Camp Fire in 2018, and the Dixie fire in 2021. All these fires affected me personally and the people around me.
Yet somehow NYT and their bevy of so-called experts think they can divine the cause and conditions that drove these fires from their offices from afar. In each case, NYT has blamed climate change as either a driver or contributor to these three fires without so much as a shred of proof. In fact, NYT contradicts their own claims in their article in the table of the top ten fires in California by acreage burned:
Climate change isn’t listed as a cause in any of them. However, that doesn’t stop the “experts” they interviewed for the story to try making a climate connection where none exists:
July 22, two days before the fire began, was Earth’s hottest day on record. June was the 13th consecutive month to break a global heat record. Some areas burned by the Park fire saw their single-hottest 30-day periods on record just before the blaze broke out.
Dr. Williams compared the dry conditions to those preceding California’s second-largest wildfire, the 2021 Dixie fire, which began during a drought and burned almost one million acres. The state has since emerged from drought, which makes the heat’s effect on fuels even more notable, he said.
“It was an exceptional heat wave, and an exceptional drying of the vegetation,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at U.C.L.A. and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Wetter winters led to less-severe fire seasons in 2022 and 2023. But extreme heat this summer, with more hot weather in the forecast, means “we’ve kiln-dried all that extra fuel,” Dr. Swain said.
The Park fire was started by arson, according to Cal Fire. The dry vegetation that allowed it to burn so quickly had a very clear fingerprint of climate change, Dr. Swain said.
By my observations, this sort of causality shoehorning (to coin a phrase) is becoming increasingly common among journalists and climate advocates as they strain to fit any weather event or catastrophe into the climate change narrative.
Swain’s claim of “a very clear fingerprint of climate change” on dry vegetation that fueled the Park fire is little more than his personal opinion. He offers no scientific citation or basis for his claim.
While there was indeed a heat wave prior to the Park fire, that had no bearing on the fire at all. The area where the fire ignited, Butte County California and the most-burned area in Tehama County are not in drought conditions according to the U.S. Drought Monitor for July 23rd – the day before the Park fire was ignited by a criminal arsonist.
So “climate change caused drought” and resultant abnormally dry conditions didn’t figure into the Park fire at all. The fire wouldn’t exist without the criminal act of arson. I would not be surprised at if the next episode of causality shoehorning is a story claiming “Climate Change Causes More Arsonists.”
The arson ignition point, in Chico’s Bidwell Park, is in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Just to the north of that point huge acreages of grassland and scrub brush exist. Combine that ignition with the sustained southerly winds that day of 20-25 mph, and it is no surprise that the fire rapidly spread north. Rick Carhart, the Public Information Officer for CalFire in Butte County and a Chico resident for decades, confirmed in a telephone interview that the area “had not naturally burned in several decades, and had no control burns to reduce fuel loads.” He added that these “high fuel loads, combined with the wind that day made a very aggressive fire.”
Climate change contributed nothing to the actual circumstances or rapid spread of the fire – local weather and a criminal act are at fault. The drying of grasses (which happens every spring) and the heat wave (which happens every summer) are both weather patterns which operate on short-term time scales as opposed to long-term climate change.
My colleague, Heartland Institute research fellow Linnea Lueken, published a scathing factual rebuttal last year of a case with The Sacramento Bee making similar but baseless claims like the NYT when they attempted to connect climate change to wildfires and their natural drivers, such as lightning. She writes:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finds no climate signal, nor increasing trend, behind thunderstorms, or lightning occurrences. Also, NASA satellites have documented a global long-term decline in wildfires. NASA reports satellites have measured a 25-percent decrease in global lands burned since 2003.
Examining wildfires in California in particular, research shows massive wildfires have regularly swept through the state. Indeed, a 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 shrub-land burned annually. As compared to the 4.4 million California acres that burned each year prior to European colonization, only 90,000 acres to 1.6 million California acres burn in a typical year now.
Clearly, there is no climate change driving component to California wildfires at all. If there were, fires in the present would be consuming much more than 4.4 million acres annually – but this isn’t happening. The simple fact is, Arsonists Are Responsible for More Wildfires than Climate Change. The intensity and coverage of wildfire varies greatly from year to year, as evidenced by the 2022 NYT story, Why California’s 2022 Wildfire Season Was Unexpectedly Quiet. A map of fires from year to year in the article demonstrates this well:
Of course, in that article they can’t resist blaming climate change, only providing cherry-picked data back to 1990 to bolster their claim, while completely ignoring the huge fires of the past.
The NYT believes, like some sort of diagnostic remote “telemedicine” call, that they and their experts can divine the climate connections to the fire from offices in New York and from so called “climate experts” sitting in their offices elsewhere who know better about what is going on than people with boots on the ground.
It is a shameful and obvious demonstration that the NYT cares more about furthering the climate agenda, than they do about reporting the facts.
Originally published on ClimateRealism.
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.
Anthony, is cheatgrass and issue in the areas you know. I understand it is invasive, dies early in the summer and drys out quickly (high surface to volume ratio) and is quite flammable.
Denis,
look at the photos here:
2024 BTU Park Incident | Flickr
The yellow/beige colors are dried grasses. There are other fast burning, most invasive plants, one being medusahead ( Taeniatherum caput-medusae). A related story is here: Cheatgrass Threatens Wildlife, Western Lands, and Rural Communities – The National Wildlife Federation Blog (nwf.org)
I’m 30 miles south of Chico in Smartsville and we have a lot of annual Rye grass that has grown to 3-4 ft tall, with the late May rain of 1.5 inches.
Most of the areas in the Chico area is used for cattle grazing, as it is here too, but they won’t touch the cheatgrass, or other invasives..
We move the cattle out once the grasses start to dry, so as to leave some dry feed and protect the soil from erosion.
Shoehorning: Cheatgrass causes my golf handicap to rise. If my shot misses the fairway during the cheatgrass season, I abandon the ball and take a drop rather than risk my socks.
The fire problem is due to bad wildlands management, caused by feckless politicians and Green NGOs blocking, or doing the sue-and-settle footsie game with said feckless politicians.
Mediterranean climates get dry enough to burn every year, and ignoring that fact is folly. Grazing, logging, or controlled burns are contrary to the “leave it alone, Nature Knows Best” notions of the Greens.
Not to mention an ever expanding footprint of human occupancy.
All you need to do is read “The Grey Lady Winked”
A large grassland/scrub brush area with no natural fire for decades and no controlled burns to reduce the resulting high fuel load. Typical bad California fire management. Typical bad MSM false attribution to climate change.
The Aboriginals in Australia and the native tribes in the US knew better long ago.
Many ecosystems NEED fire as part of their ‘lifecycle’. Lodgepole pine forest, burr oak savanna (was there before my Wisconsin dairy farm happened about 1880), tallgrass prairie… Plus the animals in those ecosystems thrive on a patchwork of plants at different levels of cover maturity, for example, white tailed deer, turkey, and bison in SW Wisconsin Uplands oak savannas.
As a specific example, there is an about 3 acre artificial island in the Chicago Botanical Garden surrounded by the Skokie Lagoons (a dammed Skokie River impoundment) created as a (small) tallgrass prairie exhibit. There is a concrete bridge to get to it for visitors to walk the island trail with lots of plant explanation signs. Every second year in summer after it dries out they set it on fire to ‘restore’ the tallgrass prairie exhibit. It greens with fall rains, and is tallgrass prairie again the next spring.
Reason is wild bird droppings (when they feed on the tallgrass prairie seeds) bring in unwanted unnatural seeds from the Garden’s surrounding suburbs. Those undesirables do sprout but do not survive the prairie burn.
Maybe the Aboriginals in Australia actually didn’t “know better”, they burnt off the landscape to chase out wildlife for hunting. There are countless early pictures of landscapes that are nothing more than grass lands, One Tree Hill in Cooktown, Far North Queensland, is a good example … that’s how it got its name, and today it is a hill thick with native trees consequence of the greenies and useful idiots in the city suburbs.
And they also wanted to totally remove the rain forest landscape because when you have no clothes or bedding you cannot sleep with ticks and leeches.
And they were pretty successful.
They contributed to current wildfires.
The giant sequoia trees in California need wildfires to open their cones to release their seeds and they have been around for 200 million years.
Interesting. Sequoia and Burr oak have evolved the same fire survival strategy. VERY thick dead bark protecting the vital living phloem (the thin tissue between bark and annually newly ‘dead’ wood carrying water up to leaves and sugar down to roots while producing new annual ‘living’ wood rings) from heat damage.
Pine bark beetle larvae, fungal Dutch Elm disease, and Emerald Ash Borer larvae all kill target trees by damaging (eventually ‘girdling’) the phloem. Tree dies of thirst.
And they were once common all over North American- many millions of years ago- so fire must have been very common everywhere.
Story tip:
There has been a very severe forest fire in Canada just this past week. Much of the forest around Jasper, Alberta was destroyed, along with about 1/3rd of the town of Jasper. There have been some feeble attempts to blame this on global warming, but the true culprit is very clear: atrocious forest management by Parks Canada.
Jasper is a federal park, which means its upkeep and maintenance falls on the federal government, not the province of Alberta. For years, Parks Canada was warned that the Jasper forest was becoming very unhealthy with the thousands of hectares of dead trees resulting from the ravages of the Northern Pine Beetle. For at least a decade, Parks Canada did nothing to thin the now heavily overgrown underbrush, nor did it do anything to clear the dead and dying trees from the beetle.
As a result, the forest fire in Jasper developed and spread very rapidly. There was barely sufficient time to evaculate people before much of the town was destroyed, as noted above. This was the fault of Parks Canada for its deliberate mismanagement of the forests. Naturally the Minister responsible is in a frantic state of denial that his Ministry had anything to do with the disaster.
When there is a change in government, there will almost certainly be a large public inquiry as to the malfeasance of Parks Canada.
Same cause as the devastating Yellowstone National Park fire in the US some years ago. Failure to clear pine bark beetle ravaged dead trees. Guarantees a devastating crown fire.
I visited Yellowstone a few years after the fire. Countless dead trees lined the main roads. Many looked like they could fall on the road any minute- but policy was to NEVER cut a tree.
With modern logging machinery- it’s possible to thin and clean up a large area quickly. They should have full time crews doing this year round.
Parks Canada terminated all those programs many years ago. There were two main reasons claimed:
This is nothing new to me. My very infrequent professional encounters with Parks Canada seemed to show them in deep denial about the consequences of their lack of action. And right now, the current Minister of the Environment Steven Guilbeault is defending them on the line of “our fire response is the best in the country.”
He ignores the fact that the surrounding forest lands in Alberta and British Columbia have tree removal programmes for dead trees. But Jasper National Park is under the federal government, not provincial, and thus is vulnerable to being mismanaged by bureaucrats in Ottawa. (I’ve personally met some of these people professionally. They are so embedded in the Deep State Environmentalist mindset as to be utterly useless.)
The Black Thursday bushfires, a devastating series of fires that swept the State of Victoria in Australia, on 6 February 1851, burnt 5,000,000 hectares. The 2020 bushfires in California burnt 400,000 hectares.
The planet is covered in highly inflammable vegetation, some with a high oil content, that have evolved with fire being a constant throughout.
It is the wetter conditions that promote increased growth that is the primary driver of what follows.
There is only one part of the fire triangle that man can control and that is the fuel. It can be that man does more damage to the environment by allowing the fuel load to build up to unmanageable levels by putting out the more easily controlled fires when fuel loads are low or restricting grazing that assists in keeping the fuel load on the forest floor lower.
Log it, graze it, or watch it burn. Forest and land management policies are the primary culprits.
“… cheatgrass doesn’t meet the needs of most wildlife species. It doesn’t stay green long enough to provide nutritious forage during the summer and fall, nor does it provide the vegetation structure that many species need for cover or nesting habitat.”
Why Is Cheatgrass Bad? | Working Lands For Wildlife (wlfw.org)
bingo!
The “Park Fire” is the “Paradise Fire” part 2. Criminally incompetent lands management is not climatic but governmental.
“July 22, two days before the fire began, was Earth’s hottest day on record. June was the 13th consecutive month to break a global heat record.”
Really. Then why has it been in the 60s here in the Pacific Northwest, when it’s usually in the 80s? Utter nonsense. There is no global temperature. Anyone pushing such a thing is lying to you.
Today’s journalism makes the old National Enquirer look like scholarly work.
Central Washington State is a hot-dry summer climate and fires are common. Sometimes they burn very hot under the low density-forests. I’ve helped replant sage and native grasses where the Evans Canyon Fire burned in 2020 (there is a Wikipedia Page). Other places with no Ponderosa Pine litter, the Cheat-fires move rapidly with wind, with less intense damage to the plants and soil.
On his site, Cliff Mass has reported on these fires. The small amount of temperature change over the last 100 years makes no difference to the burning of the dead and dry grasses.
I have been maintaining kilometers of fire-breaks on my place for decades to protect adjoining suburbs and so far successfully but the neighbours have no idea and the people responsible for fuel load control will never let me do a control burn and they don’t do any themselves.
Disaster awaits.
I suspect it is the same story in Cal.
I agree with Anthony’s assessment of this fire. I don’t think this was an act of arson in the conventional sense. Yes, the man did light a car on fire and roll it into a brush filled ravine, however I wonder if he wasn’t just destroying the car (his parent’s car) as an act of rage or something. He is certainly a deranged person. But whatever.
I lived in the area 1981 – 1984 while attending CSUC. Lived both in Chapman Town and up in Paradise. My wife and I spent a very hot week in August 1981 camping at the Oroville dam while securing an apartment for the fall semester. In the summer the whole Sierra westside is dry as a bone – rain stops in April and doesn’t start till October. It’s a tender box. In the wind conditions of that day the result doesn’t surprise me at all.
I see there are the usual reflective comments about land management, commercial forestry and so on. Really, before making statements like that do a little research about the geography, climate, and plant cover, And consider the wind conditions that day. The grassland strip of the Central Valley blending into the west slope of oak and Digger (Grey) Pine isn’t a place any government, however wise and forward thinking, could make a bit of difference for a random act of fire starting during a wind event like this.
I agree on the land conditions. I’m east of Beale AFB, and they do controlled burns of 50-100 acres at a time.
The low foothills, where I am have valley grassland and no brush , with Blue oaks and Grey pine, neither of which burn is a grass fire.
Where the cattle have grazed the stubble is 2-3 inches tall, so not much fuel for a fire.
But under the trees, the grasses grow 3-4 ft tall, since the cattle won’t eat under the trees late in the Spring.
The rate of controlled burns is so low, I wonder why they even do it. A few hundred or a few thousand acres per hundreds of thousands of acres seems pointless to me. I think this fire definitely “crowned” the Grey Pines and I see it’s up in the big pines at >4000 feet.
I just took a look at your area and realized I’ve never been in it. It looks like a very quiet sparsely populated bit of the Westside. Even though I was a high mountain guy with mountaineering and climbing I grew to love the quietness of the Westside canyons. There were a few isolated limestone crags I climbed on, and I did some gold grubbing on the forks of the Feather, Butte Creek, and a few higher places. When the sun heads into the west, you really see “California Gold” up there.
Prior to the modern age (non-specific definition), humans did little or nothing in forest management. We have been in this hemisphere for what, 65,000 years? Prior to that fire did what fire did and nature did what nature did.
The point is, if we do not like massive fires, we must do responsible forest management. As a long time conservationist, lack of adequate forest management is a sin.