An article by the Associated Press (AP) claims that wildfires are getting worse due to climate change, which is causing farm workers more exposure to wildfire smoke and potential harm to their health. This is false. Wildfires are not getting worse, so farmers and laborers cannot be more exposed to smoke or particulates for that reason.
In the AP article, “Wildfires are growing under climate change, and their smoke threatens farmworkers, study says,” the deception is clear and immediate. The study referred to in the title is a health survey about air quality monitoring in mandatory wildfire evacuation zones, and the abstract paragraph asserts that wildfires are getting worse due to climate change, but offers no evidence of this. The only explanation given for the claim is that wildfire intensity and frequency “are predicted to increase with global warming.” The study also claims that the 2020 California wildfire season was “unprecedented” –which is false, as Climate Realism explained at the time, here. Their baseless claim gave cover for the AP to write the following:
As climate change increases the frequency and intensity of wildfires around the world, a new study shows that farmworkers are paying a heavy price by being exposed to high levels of air pollution. And in Sonoma County, the focus of the work, researchers found that a program aimed at determining when it was safe to work during wildfires did not adequately protect farmworkers.
That is the first and last time climate change is mentioned in the entire article. Despite the climate change hook at the beginning, it actually has very little to do with climate change while the rest of the piece focuses on how farm workers are pressured to work in unsafe conditions and the kinds of occupational safety protocols that should be followed to reduce smoke inhalation when wildfires occur in regions with a lot of agriculture.
The study itself also seems to use climate change only as a hook, when the bulk of the research is actually about air quality monitoring during wildfire outbreaks in Sonoma County in particular, and then makes policy recommendations for employers of farm workers to provide hazard pay and post-exposure healthcare cost coverage.
In a classic case of failure to avail themselves of readily available evidence that counters their pet theory, the researchers conveniently ignore the historically quiet wildfire seasons that have occurred since the 2020 outlier, even though the reversal occurred well before the study’s July 2024 publication date. A Climate Realism post covering the multi-year mild wildfire seasons quoted one scientist who admitted that California has some of the most extreme inter-annual variability with temperature and precipitation, and that it is “normal to go from a record wet year to a record, or nearly record, dry year and that’s just the way it is.”
The number of acres burned by wildfires in the United States declined rapidly after their peak in the 1930s, and only since the 80s began to see a mild upward overall trend again. (See figure below)
But what is interesting is that the prevalence of drought, a major variable that affects wildfire spread, has not increased over that period. What has increased is the amount of available fuel because of forest mismanagement because of well-meaning but ultimately foolish environmental preservation philosophies, and increasing numbers of people living in naturally fire-prone areas.
At the global scale, wildfires and carbon dioxide emissions have a very poor correlation, when looking at the best available NASA satellite data. (See figure below)
Data from NASA and the European Space Agency both show a significant decline in wildfires during the recent period of modest warming, as discussed in Climate at a Glance: Global Wildfires. Also, as discussed in multiple Climate Realism posts, here, for example, even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finds no evidence for an increase in wildfire weather in recent decades or projects such an increase into the future.
If climate change isn’t causing worsening wildfire seasons, then it can’t increase the threat to farm workers from wildfire smoke – it’s that simple.
Farm workers not being evacuated despite mandatory evacuation orders during wildfires, which lead them to inhale dangerous amounts of smoke while working is not a climate issue. The AP and the study authors do a disservice to their cause by trying to force the connection. Perhaps they believe tying it to climate change will court some additional funding for their programs, and they might be right. However, by doing so, they are feeding into a miasma of misinformation surrounding wildfires and climate change and thereby doing a disservice to the pursuit of and public presentation and discussion of truth.
No matter what happens, it will be attributed to climate change until the Green Blob has achieved the Radiant Future.
net zero nirvana
“No matter what happens, it will be attributed to climate change…“
___________________________________________________________________________
Scientific American
World’s Oldest Cave Paintings Are Fading—Climate Change May Be to Blame
I lost 10M VCDs playing online slots.
Climate Change!
VCD = virtual casino dollars. Colorful bits of light.
The study…
Is bolleaux.
But its real purpose is to promote a sense of fear and risk etc. As long as they adhere to the narrative everybody is happy; especially the space agencies.
Wildfires? FEMA (fema.gov) reports about 267,000 arson fires per year in the USA, and an increase of 20 %. Other sites attribute the majority of the increase to Climate Change Activists. Sure, forest and grassland mismanagement makes bigger fires, but how about dealing with the increase in arson? Wrong political identification?
I posted recently about Gary Maynard’s sentencing for setting fires behind the firefighter lines in a Sierras fire. He got 5+ years. The media seemed to stress that he was just a regular loonie and not a climate crackpot – you know the ones who set fires to prove that wildfires are caused by cllllllimate waaaaah. Some of those pieces of human detritus got five years too. I suspect from the cover-up that Maynard was probably one too.
There are nasty people wanting opportunities to do damage.
Arson, certainly, but most of them are from carelessness and neglect. Ex. throwing a lit cigarette out your car window when driving.
Buttmouths are a real problem.
Statistics vary though, perhaps a rash of arson fires because one person sets several (in cities they tend to be serial offenders) and their are copycats.
Funny but serious story.
Victoria BC’s Police Chief and another officer were sitting in a car on the side of a street.
A buttmouth tossed a lit cigarette out the window of his car, it caught grass on fire.
Chief puts the fire out with an extinguisher, then writes the bleep an expensive ticket.
Bleep starts ranting about escalating a complaint, other officer goes to his window where bleep demands to speak to a supervisor.
Funny thing – he was silent after being told the ticketer is the Chief. 😉
Is there anything left to burn?
Don’t tempt me.
Ok. So burn all copies of all IPCC reports.
Your right, the IPCC archives are equivalent to a whole forest full of BS.
“What has increased is the amount of available fuel because of forest mismanagement because …”
Blaming fuel buildup on “mismanagement” of “forests” is too simple.
Just one example: Many small acreage homes now occupy rural areas once used as pasture for cattle and sheep. The animals keep grass, brush, and riparian vegetation under control – sort of. Many owners now only use a third or fewer acres of 10 and 20 acre parcels and neither want to, nor can, manage the rest. This might be called mismanagement (not necessarily of forest), or like a neighbor of mine, a preferred method of management. She loves the ambiance of the naturalness. She is also getting old and new owners will have a highly fuel-loaded property.
Maui was because they did not bother to mow.
There have been several CA coastal dendrochronology studies that looked at tree rings of some
Sequoia’s that showed a lot of fire scars and long periods of drought going
back many century’s. They then were able to tie that into some soil sediment layers
that even goes back even further. There were a lot of interesting web pages from the academic
side of this 10+ yrs ago that have been removed for some reason, must not have shown the
correct story..I found them interesting when they were tied time wise to the Vikings in Greenland and the Ansi cliff dwellers and Mayans leaving their land.
The AP has turned into a leftist regurgitation committee. You can tell by the number of “committee authored” pieces with multiple bylines and the use of pejorative adjectives in headlines that have nothing to do with the actual story.
As with the headlines in this story. Wildfire smoke affects EVERYONE in a given area. I’m not a farmworker and I wasn’t tested for decreased PM 2.5 lung function after the event either. Boo hoo for me? Not so much from the AP.
The evidence has to come from extensive scientific studies. Observing natural phenomenon such as a wild fire and immediatly determining the cause to an external intervention without an exhaustive study in fields such as physics and chemistry of the environment that others can independently corroborate, is not providing scientific evidence. I have an accredited lab for biological testing, and as a chemist can run studies on organisms, waters, soils and air. If anyone has samples from the environment that prove climate change CO2 is real, my lab is available to double check independently. Send samples, or tell me where I can ask the government to supply samples for corroboration. Good luck with that, because I don’t think they exist, because this issue was decided by opinion, not scientific studies: Pseudoscience.
JBVigo, PhD
If smoke from wildfires (induced by “Climate Change” induced by man-made CO2), is such a threat to farm workers, why aren’t they trying to ban camping and campfires? Backyard BBQs?
Even with a solar powered grill roasting vegetables, smoke is produced.
Very nice Linnea, the AP is not an unbiased or reliable source for news.
Yes, SoCal has droughts, I read that centuries ago there was a very long one.
Elsewhere too – the Mayan Empire collapsed because of a very long drought, sacrificing babies on altars did not appease The Gods. Tip: subjectivism does not feed people nor sustain peace (there were civil wars in Maya).
There were ‘climate refugees’ – some people migrated to NE Mexico where there descendants live today.
Side note:
A health problem entering drought years can be rodents getting closer to humans and infecting them with a plague substance, IIRC a ‘hanta virus’. Occasionally it pops up in the SW US, but can be recognized and I presume treated.
(Different from the ‘bubonic plague’, which is a bacteria spread by fleas that live on animals.)
The Hanta Virus may not be treatable. It is spread to humans by excrement dust in the air (very dry areas being dusty). Only one type in US, more on the other side of the planet. Like other bad things and other animals, they may be quite resistant themselves, with only limited impact on their life.