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WILDFIRE 3

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Heidi St. John declares that the wildfires in Spokane, Washington are a direct result of the fact that voters elected "radical environmentalists to manage our forests."

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For season one of the HEATED podcast, Tracy and I threw a lot of ideas and formats at the wall. Over 20 episodes in five months, we covered everything from fracking waste to fossil fuel ads to fashion greenwashing to attacks on weather science. We were figuring it all out as we went.

But in the end, one episode outperformed all the others: our myth-busting episode about electric vehicles. As of today, it’s gotten more than 90,000 downloads, whereas the rest of our free episodes averaged about 6,400 downloads. Pretty crazy, right?

Fortunately, we really liked doing that episode! So for season two, Tracy and I decided to just do a lot more of that—and way less of everything else. Instead of 20 episodes about anything we can think of, we’ll be doing just 6 episodes, audio-only, each taking on a bad climate idea that’s becoming harder to escape.

First up: the idea that “forest management” can solve the wildfire crisis. We hear this one all the time, particularly from Republican politicians amid devastating fires.

I’ll be honest: I thought this one would be pretty straightforward. I’ve talked to enough scientists over the years to know that, while taking better care of forests can help reduce wildfire risk, it can’t solve the problem by itself. We also have to tackle climate change—and the reason Republican politicians never mention that is because they’re self-muzzled by fossil fuel industry money. I figured I’d explain that and be done.

But then I started talking to a scientist who challenged the first part of that assumption; the idea that forest management is even part of the solution to wildfires. He argued that most of the work politicians call “forest management” is just industrial logging, and that this practice is not just ineffective, but actively making wildfires worse. I’d never really heard that argument before. And the more I tried to figure out whether he and scientists like him were right, the deeper I got into a fierce scientific debate I hadn’t even known existed.

Fortunately, as I was deep in this rabbit hole thinking I’d never get out, I got a call from Miranda Green, the host of the *Los Angeles Times*’ *Boiling Point* podcast, asking if I might like to collaborate on an episode. I told her about the predicament I was in, and a reporting partnership was born.

For the first episode of season two, Miranda and I dive into a debate you almost never hear in the political conversation about wildfires. We don’t come close to settling it, or even covering every part of it. But we do learn that the myth of “forest management” is bigger than I thought: It’s the idea that this vague phrase describes one reliable fix for every forest—and that any amount of work in the woods can make up for a warming climate.

I’m sure this episode will ruffle some feathers. Listen to it above, or on your favorite podcast app by searching “HEATED.”

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THREAT 50% TARIFF ON WILDFIRES, USED ARR BOOZE ETC

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney incited a MAGA meltdown after pointing out that the United States shared responsibility for the climate change currently dumping wildfire smoke all over the upper U.S.

Nearly 900 wildfires were burning without control in the north, as of Friday, in the wake of an abnormally dry and hot summer. This led to air quality alerts throughout the northeast and the Midwest, with Chicago and Detroit having the worst air of any major cities in the world — and more US cities due for pollution further east over the next few days.

But Republicans, who are loathe to admit that climate change is real and regularly jumps borders, prefer to blame whatever nation is currently suffering out-of-control fires, whether they are blue US states or neighboring ally nations.

However, Carney, while speaking of the disaster to Canadian citizens, pointed out in French that “We need a contribution from the Americans in the fight against climate change ... climate change is everyone's responsibility, including the US.”

This sent MAGA into even more of a fury.

“Canada is a doomed state. Can’t wait until their total economic collapse, and have to ask the US to buy them,” ranted one critic on X.

“Nice deflection while hiding behind the con that is ‘climate change,’ railed another MAGA heckler — while ignoring the vanishing US glaciers in Glacier National Park. “Dude is inept as hell and has no clue about forest management.”

“This climate change is a hoax,” blasted another critic on X, in contradiction to the majority of science. “Even Bill Gates had to admit that we are not dying from climate change. Now that they need extra energy that renewables can't produce for their data centers … [C]limate change doesn't start over 100 separate fires.”

President Donald Trump himself blasted the PM later on Friday, while denying the fact that the US has regularly been plagued by raging fires as well as temperatures rise and regions get less, more sporadic rainfall.

“We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!” Trump posted on Truth Social. “I will call the Prime Minister during the day to find out what they are going to do about it. The cost is incalculable! Canada has refused to engage in basic Forest Management and Debris Removal, knowing that such refusal will lead to exactly this result.”

Last year, Trump lobbed many of the same accusations at California as that state burned under historic flames, accusing state leaders of not raking forests of debris and not maxing out the Colorado River to wet its dry areas — despite competition with other thirsty western states for the same water source.

A few months previous, in 2024, Trump had threatened to withhold federal aid for fighting California wildfires at a California rally.

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congrats primary 819 amazon, siberia

no merri

SEE DROUGHT RECORD HEAT

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see matthew efx doom tip pt

SEE WATTERS CRM ARSON BS LA 10 25 also 2 26

new normal CA?

bak 1219

Right-wing media miss the mark on explaining wildfire recovery in Los Angeles

The Trump administration has denied Los Angeles $34 billion in disaster relief

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Ilana Berger

:{Published 02/11/26

Right-wing media are echoing a recent executive order from President Donald Trump pinning the blame for Los Angeles’ delayed recovery from last year’s wildfires on the state and local government, specifically construction permitting holdups. But the order, which the White House says will speed up permitting processes, fails to address key factors, like unpaid insurance claims and insufficient funding. The coverage omits how Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s mismanagement is hindering disaster response and recovery.

Experts are skeptical about whether federal agencies even have the authority to implement the executive order, and survivors say a lack of access to money to fund construction is more of a barrier to rebuilding than permitting. Meanwhile, DHS has reportedly created a “$17 billion bottleneck” that is impeding federal disaster response, and the administration denied Los Angeles $34 billion in disaster relief.

Trump issued an executive order that cuts through permitting requirements, but he might not have the authority, and experts say it doesn’t address Los Angeles’ root problems

:{:{## Right-wing media’s coverage of the fires in L.A. was misleading from the start.}:

Right-wing media insisted that climate change had nothing to do with the wildfires, despite the clear connection, and instead blamed forest mismanagement and water policies. In reality, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s water policies have no relationship to the LA fires or low water pressure in fire hydrants, debunking another popular narrative on the right, while the conditions driving the fires and their clear connections to climate change were dismissed. PBS News, [8/9/21;Media Matters, 1/10/25, 1/10/25, 1/15/25]

Right-wing media praised Trump for the new executive order and attacked California Democrats, assigning blame just like they did when the fires occurred

Hannity, 1/28/26]

Trump and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s mismanagement is slowing recovery from natural disasters and preventing communities from becoming more resilient in the future

MMA //

Right-wing media personalities seize on arson charge to falsely deny the role of climate change in Palisades Fire

:{10/10/25

  1. ### Fox News is mostly silent on Trump's ill-advised and dangerous release of water in California after weeks of attacking the state’s water policies

:{02/07/25

  1. ### Trump’s executive order on California water policy canonized right-wing media misinformation about the LA fires

01/24/2

MMA 1125

....In January of this year, The Free Press interviewed Koonin to downplay the role of climate change in intensifying the LA wildfires. Similar to right-wing media outlets like Fox, The Free Press misleadingly suggested that then-President Joe Biden and many climate scientists claimed climate change was the cause of the fires rather than a contributing factor to the intensity of the blazes.

In 2023, The Free Press published one of its signature contrarian pieces – titled “I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published” by Patrick T Brown. In the piece, the author, who works for Breakthrough Institute, which was founded by anti-renewable advocate Michael Shellenberger, claims to have purposely limited his research paper showing warming temperatures increased the likelihood of wildfire growth in California in order to prove that articles in scientific journals were “distorting the scientific process by focusing too narrowly on climate change.” As reported by The Washington Post, “The opinion piece quickly provoked backlash from scientists and the editor of Nature herself.”

The stunt by Brown reflects the decades-old right-wing media narrative that climate scientists are “cooking the books” or playing “fast and loose” with data in order to manufacture a climate crisis.

The Free Press elevates contrarian and conservative voices to disparage climate activism and action

MMA

Right-wing media personalities seize on arson charge to falsely deny the role of climate change in Palisades Fire

SpecialPrograms Climate & Energy

Written by Allison Fisher

Research contributions from Ilana Berger

Published10/10/25

Right-wing media personalities are using the arrest of a man charged with igniting the Palisades fire in Los Angeles — a blaze that killed a dozen people and destroyed nearly 7,000 structures in January — to deny climate change.

For example, Fox News host Jesse Watters claimed that the finding that arson started the Palisades Fire “put the final nail in the climate change coffin.”

*As the Palisades fire and the nearby Eaton fire were raging in LA, many right-wing media figures attacked those who were connecting the intensity of the blaze to climate change. The arson charge is now serving as a baffling “gotcha” moment for right-wing media figures who are misrepresenting the scientific finding that climate change contributes to, not causes, wildfires.

By attacking a claim no one is making these figures advance their campaign to undermine climate science and decouple the impacts of increasingly destructive extreme weather events from our warming planet.

Climate change didn’t start the LA fires; it created conditions that intensified them

Right-wing media claimed arrest of alleged arsonist disproved link between climate change and the LA fires

FLOYD BROWN WJC

//

Right-wing media push Trump's false claim that California water policies are hurting efforts to suppress LA fires

01/10/25 1:47 PM EST

Right-wing media insist climate change has nothing to do with LA wildfires despite a clear connection

01/15/25 8:04 PM EST

Right-wing media figures baselessly claim LA wildfires are burning out of control because the fire chief is an LGBTQ woman who supports DEI

01/09/25

afp

Los Angeles fires spark 'smart city' conspiracy theories

:{Published on January 21, 2025

{By Daniel Patrick GALGANO, AFP USA}:

As a string of wildfires hit Los Angeles County, social media users spread claims that authorities purposefully set the blazes to encourage the development of so-called "smart cities." While America's second-largest city does have long-term plans to implement digital technologies to improve services, experts say the claims have no merit and that razing neighborhoods would not accomplish these goals.

"And then I find this document and it all begins to connect the dots. You have a fire, things burn down, you rebuild it and you make it a smart city," says a January 9, 2025 X post with thousands of interactions.

"And you have the government, the insurance agents and the electric companies all into it together."

Image

Screenshot from X taken January 16, 2025

The same claim has circulated elsewhere on X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, Bluesky, Rumble and Gettr.

The posts are the latest describing conspiracy theories linking natural disasters to smart city plans that frequently crop up in the United States and Canada.

Several wildfires near Los Angeles have claimed more than two dozen lives and billions of dollars in property damage. The largest of the two, which have enveloped neighborhoods in the Palisades and the nearby city of Pasadena, were spurred on by destructive high winds as firefighters attempted to limit their spread.

The posts claim officials and investors set the fires to make room for a "smart city," an urban planning concept that uses a wide range of technology to monitor traffic patterns, electricity and utility consumption and criminal activity to improve public services and cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Other users conflate smart cities with "15-minute cities," a different philosophy that involves rezoning cities to place most day-to-day amenities, such as shops, parks, medical services and schools, within walking distance of residential areas.

SmartLA 2028

In December 2020, city officials announced an infrastructure investment plan called SmartLA 2028, which proposes using technology to monitor electricity usage, integrating city services onto a mobile app and installing sensors that can alert emergency services to potential crimes and housefires (archived here).

Los Angeles is due to host the Summer Olympics and Paralympics in 2028, spurring hopes that the city will be able to ease its notoriously dense traffic, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve emergency services.

The plan does not call for razing entire neighborhoods or rebuilding portions of the city from scratch. Instead it focuses on efforts including installing devices to monitor traffic patterns and gathering data on air quality, crime, road conditions and other things to help improve local services.

"Technology enables the City of Los Angeles to efficiently and ethically improve the quality of life for our residents, businesses, and visitors," Ted Ross, chief information officer for the City of Los Angeles, says in avideoexplaining the strategy (archived here). vid]

IFrame Content

The SmartLA 2028 plan also only applies to the City of Los Angeles and does not outline a scheme for the rest of the county, which includes other fire-affected cities such as Pasadena.

AFP reached out to Ross for further information, but a response was not forthcoming.

Disaster recovery is expensive

Susan Winter, the associate dean of research at the University of Maryland (archived here), said causing destruction is not a "rational way to approach urban planning."

The cost to the government to rebuild areas devastated by fires could quickly surpass the economic benefits of adding smart technology to those regions, she noted.

Winter added that city planners have worked to address some public concerns about smart technology infringing on residents' privacy by anonymizing gathered data and restricting where information is stored to reduce the risk of a breach.

"There's nothing in that city of Los Angeles plan that looks at all shady or nefarious to me," she said on January 13.

Several home and fire insurance companies have scaled down or entirely withdrawn their operations in California amid concerns over the frequency of climate change-fueled disasters in the region, reportedly leaving thousands of Los Angeles residents without private home insurance ahead of the fires. The State of California created an insurance carrier of last resort for homeowners unable to secure private insurance that offers more limited coverage options.

The carrier reportedly could face losses of as much as $24 billion due to the Los Angeles fires, while total property damage could surpass $250 billion.

Image

Homes smolder near the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, California on January 9, 2025 (AFP / JOSH EDELSON)

Hussam Mahmoud, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Colorado State University (archived here), said US cities have been investing in systems designed to spot wildfires early to prevent them from spreading too widely.

"I highly doubt that anyone would say, 'let's wipe the area by doing this,'" he said on January 14.

Investigators are still attempting to uncover what caused the fires. Lawsuits have placed some blame for the Eaton fire on Southern California Edison for failing to de-energize its equipment. However, there is no evidence government agencies deliberately sparked the infernos.

AFP has debunked other claims about the Los Angeles fires.

MMA

CNN’s Daniel Dale fact-checks Trump’s claims that CA water policy exacerbated LA fires

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Allison Fisher

Published 01/24/25

On January 20, as part of his day one executive orders, President Donald Trump directed several U.S. agencies to restart a policy from his first term that reroutes water from Northern California to Southern California. The order ties Trump’s policy to the devastating fires in California that are so far responsible for 28 deaths and more than $250 billion in damages, effectively canonizing the false right-wing media claim that current California water policy impeded efforts to contain the LA fires.

Right-wing media wildfire misinformation underpins Trump’s executive order on California water policy

At the outset of the LA fires, the most costly in California history, Trump blamed “federal and state protections for California’s endangered delta smelt fish. He falsely claimed that those regulations led to inadequate water availability for firefighting efforts.”

As The New York Times explained at the time:

Peter Gleick, co-founder of the Pacific Institute, a California research organization that focuses on water, said Mr. Trump was spouting “complete nonsense.”

“There’s no link between California’s water policies and efforts to protect endangered species and water availability for firefighters,” Mr. Gleick said. “They’re completely unrelated."

He noted that Southern California reservoir levels, including ones that feed Los Angeles, are above normal for this time of year. “There’s no water shortage,” he said. “The real issue is that urban water systems are not built or designed to fight massive, urban wildfires.”

Despite this and other fact-checks confirming Trump’s claims are inaccurate, right-wing media elevated this misinformation while firefighters raced to suppress the fires. As firefighters continue their battle to contain the blazes, Trump and right-wing media have continued to spread this falsehood, undeterred by the facts.

During Trump’s first sit-down interview since his swearing in, the president and Fox host Sean Hannity continued to push falsehoods about the LA fires, saying they were caused by poor forest management and lack of water due to California’s water policies. During the interview, Hannity asked Trump whether aid to the state would “be contingent on them practicing the science of forestry.” In response Trump said, “I don't think we should give California anything until they let water flow down.”

Video

Citation

From the January 22, 2025, edition of Fox News' Hannity

Most recently, Trump repeated the false claims while visiting North Carolina (and hours before visiting California):

But much more importantly, in California, just to revert to it for a second, millions of gallons of water are waiting to be poured down through, already, the halfpipes that are already built. … And about 20 years ago they turned off the water. And it is the water that comes from the Pacific Northwest, some of it comes out of Canada. And it flows there and it probably has flowed there for a million years and they turned it off and they route it out to the Pacific. And in the meantime, you don't have water in the hydrants, you don’t have water in the sprinkler systems. … Everyone is trying to figure out, “Why aren't they turning it back” — they say it’s the delta smelt, it’s a fish. But I find that hard to believe.

Moments after Trump’s comments, which aired live on Fox News and CNN, CNN’s Daniel Dale fact-checked the claim that water policy played a role in the LA fires:

The fact is that whatever happened in Los Angeles has nothing to do with a little fish in Northern California, like President Trump keeps saying. He keeps saying or suggesting that there was insufficient water in Los Angeles. You know, those dry hydrants we heard about in Pacific Palisades because the state didn't send enough water down from Northern California to L.A., instead was doing environmental protection like protecting the delta smelt. I've talked to a bunch of experts in California water policy. Complicated stuff. But on this subject, it's not complicated. Those two things have nothing to do with each other. If you look at California water data, it's available online. You'll see that there is no shortage of water in the Los Angeles area.

Trump’s January 22 interview with Hannity and his visit to California on January 24 came just days after the president signed an executive order that directs U.S. agencies to restart work “to route more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to other parts of the state for use by the people there who desperately need a reliable water supply.” The order reads: “The recent deadly and historically destructive wildfires in Southern California underscore why the State of California needs a reliable water supply and sound vegetation management practices in order to provide water desperately needed there, and why this plan must immediately be reimplemented.”

AN 1 25

Trump, who made baseless attacks against FEMA during his 2024 campaign, suggested on Wednesday night that he wants to defund the Homeland Security emergency management agency and shift the burden for disaster relief to individual states. The move would revoke federal responsibility for managing crises like hurricanes, earthquakes, flooding, and wildfires. While his remarks appear to align with The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, he appears to have gone further in appointing an interim FEMA head who reportedly “does not appear to have experience coordinating responses to large scale disasters.”

Although he has repeatedly denied knowing anything about Project 2025, despite at least 140 of his former administration’s officials having been involved with the program, President Trump appears to be following the far-right plan to eliminate or largely downsize the 45-year-old agency. Its current incarnation was created by President Jimmy Carter, but the federal government of the United States has been assisting states with disaster relief for well over 200 years.

“Now, I will say that Los Angeles has changed everything, because a lot of money’s gonna be necessary for Los Angeles, and a lot of people on the other side want that to happen,” Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity in a pre-taped interview that aired Wednesday night (video below). In recent weeks, California’s wildfires, fueled in part by climate change according to Scientific American, have decimated large swaths of the Los Angeles area, killing dozens of people.

READ MORE: ‘Road to Chaos’: Trump Orders ‘Thousands’ of Troops and ‘Illegal’ Arrests at Border

“Well, they don’t care about North Carolina. The Democrats don’t care about North Carolina. What they’ve done with FEMA is so bad. FEMA is a whole other discussion. Because all it does is complicate everything,” Trump baselessly charged. “FEMA has not done their job for the last four years. You know, I had FEMA working really well, we had hurricanes in Florida, we had Alabama, tornadoes, we had. — but unless you have certain types of leadership, it’s really, it gets in the way.”

“And FEMA is gonna be a whole big discussion very shortly because I’d rather see the states take care of their own problems,” Trump declared, alluding to wanting to dismantle the agency. “If they have a tornado, someplace, and if they have — let that state, Oklahoma is very competent. I love Oklahoma. 77 out a 77 districts and uh that’s never been done,” he claimed, referring to his Electoral College win.

On Thursday, The Independent reported, “Trump wants to shut down the Federal Emergency Management Agency and let states handle their own disaster needs.”

Project 2025 describes the Department of Homeland Security as a “bloated” bureaucracy that would “provide real opportunities for a conservative Administration to cut billions in spending and limit government’s role in Americans’ lives.”

It calls for “privatizing” FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program, and “reforming FEMA emergency spending to shift the majority of preparedness and response costs to states and localities instead of the federal government,” as well as “eliminating most of DHS’s grant programs, and removing all unions in the department for national security purposes.”

Trump’s remark, “I’d rather see the states take care of their own problems,” is similar to a portion of Project 2025’s proposal.

But Trump appears to have taken yet another step that could harm FEMA.

READ MORE: Trump May Invite J6 Pardoned Convicts to the White House: CNN

Trump has appointed a former Navy SEAL, Cameron Hamilton, who “does not appear to have experience coordinating responses to large-scale disasters, like the wildfires in California,” to be the interim head of FEMA, according to The New York Times.

“Mr. Hamilton is an unusual choice to lead the agency, even in a temporary capacity. Since Hurricane Katrina, when the federal response was severely criticized, FEMA has been led by disaster management professionals who have run state or local emergency management agencies, or were regional administrators at FEMA,” the Times reported. “Mr. Hamilton does not appear to have experience coordinating responses to large scale disasters like the wildfires that are raging in Los Angeles or the hurricanes, floods and earthquakes that FEMA typically manages.”

Right-wing media have long pinned wildfires on Democratic leadership and “bad forest management” to avoid acknowledging climate change and other complex factors

01/10/25

Written by Ilana Berger

Published 01/10/25

As Los Angeles residents grapple with losing their homes and firefighters struggle to contain the fires that broke out on January 7, right-wing media figures are set on pinning the blame on the state’s Democratic leaders and environmentalists, misleadingly claiming they’ve mismanaged the state’s forests, failing to implement preventive measures meant to mitigate wildfires.

But at a time when wildfire season now appears to be year-round, right-wing media are ignoring the larger implications of the fires and the aggressive steps that cities in the West will realistically need to take to live with these blazes while protecting residents. While techniques such as thinning out small trees, shrubs, and other dry fuel, as well as prescribed burning, can help reduce the risk of large fires, unpredictable cycles of extreme flooding, heat, and drought are creating roadblocks. Improving emergency and resource management and climate-proofing homes and infrastructure must be part of the solution as well.

Several fires erupted across Los Angeles County following days of strong Santa Ana winds

Several factors, including cycles of climate change-driven drought, are making wildfires worse

Forest management techniques like thinning are not foolproof, and some experts disagree on their efficacy.A 2021 Oregon State University study found that forest thinning in tandem with prescribed burning can “moderate fire behavior,” but some ecologists and studies suggest that mechanical forest thinning, or getting rid of smaller trees and shrubs to reduce fire fuel, is not always effective.}: For example, during an appearance onCNN Newsroom Live, Chad Hanson, a forest and fire ecologist and the president of the John Muir Project, noted that wildfires have also affected areas near forests that have been logged and thinned out already, saying it’s necessary to focus on “helping communities become fire-safe.” He also told the Los Angeles Times, “The fact is that forest management is not stopping weather- and climate-driven fires.” Los Angeles Times, [8/21/21; CNN, CNN Newsroom Live, 1/8/25; Oregon State University, [9/26/21]](https://news.oregonstate.edu/news/osu-study-thinning-moderates-forest-fire-behavior-even-without-prescribed-burns-%e2%80%93-while)

Right-wing media blamed the wildfires on environmentalists and failure to clear brush, flattening the issue

{ Disgraced former Republican lawmaker and OAN host Matt Gaetz blamed the fire on “liberals” for supposedly working “against sensible management of California's forests that would reduce the severity of routine regular wildfires.”Gaetz insisted that fires have gotten worse because “liberals have essentially thrown a match into a room with gasoline and then wondered why everything is on fire.”}: One America News, The Matt Gaetz Show, [1/8/25]

MALL SAVED BY PVT FIRE DEPT?!

Fox News has made similar claims about wildfires in the past, following Trump's lead

{ Fox again parroted these claims, with Fox contributor Jason Chaffetz}: calling Trump “absolutely right” and blaming the wildfires primarily on a lack of clearing brush, saying, “Democrats have been the biggest impediment in doing so.”Fox News, Outnumbered Overtime, [9/14/20]

omg // maui fire BS? MMA

Jesse Watters says “there’s a good chance the homeless started” the California fires

01/09/25 6:21 PM EST

  1. ### On CNN, Rep. Jasmine Crockett pushes back on baseless right-wing media claims that DEI has hindered the LAFD wildfire response

01/09/25 1:46 PM EST

  1. ### Charlie Kirk says Donald Trump should threaten to withhold federal assistance to California

01/09/25 1:10 PM EST

  1. ### Charlie Kirk says California Democrats are “living in the tragedy of your own making”

01/09/25 1:06 PM EST

  1. ### Charlie Kirk: “I sure hope that Pam Bondi and President Trump open a robust criminal investigation into Gavin Newsom and Mayor Bass”

01/09/25 12:36 PM EST

  1. ### Right-wing media figures baselessly claim LA wildfires are burning out of control because the fire chief is an LGBTQ woman who supports DEI

01/09/25

greg kelly nzmx dei bs

mma

January 9, 2025, edition of Fox Business' Mornings with Maria

MARIA BARTIROMO (ANCHOR): Have we ruled out all outside agitators?

MARK TEPPER (GUEST): No. In fact, I think there were videos of some arsonists creating new fires. So no, I don't think that's been ruled out at all and given the terror attacks that we saw on January 1, I mean, it's certainly not outside the realm of possibility that that's happening. But you know, what's happening right now — at least for me — a lack of mitigation standpoint prior to this has to do with the fact that California is effectively a one-party system. And when you're operating under a one-party system, there's no accountability from the other party to help you make sure that you're doing what you should be doing.

BARTIROMO: That's a great point.

TEPPER: Gross incompetence. Having priorities backwards. All that stuff contributed to what's happening, not saying it caused it, but it certainly contributed.

BARTIROMO: But I'd like to know what kind of investigation is underway in terms of outside agitators. I mean, all of these people who have come into America and wanting to disrupt our lives. I would like to see an investigation to ensure that we know that there were no outside agitators starting these fires.

mma

Right-wing media figures baselessly claim LA wildfires are burning out of control because the fire chief is an LGBTQ woman who supports DEI

As the fires burned, commentators claimed that DEI “is quite literally getting people killed”

Written by Payton Armstrong

Published 01/09/25 mma

Right-wing media figures are exploiting the devastating Los Angeles County wildfires to further their crusade against diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, suggesting the fires are burning out of control because LAFD's chief is an LGBTQ woman who supports DEI initiatives, declaring “DEI = DIE,” and claiming that “it literally leads to death.”

Uncontained wildfires in Los Angeles County have forced thousands to evacuate

Wildfires in Los Angeles have killed at least five and forced tens of thousands to evacuate their homes, and the fires remain largely uncontained. The Los Angeles Times reported that “more than 1,000 homes, businesses and other buildings have burned and at least two people are dead in wildfires burning across L.A. County, making this one of the most destructive firestorms to hit the region in memory.” Los Angeles Times, [1/8/25, 1/7/25]

ABC7/KABC, [6/5/24; Los Angeles Times, 1/8/25, 1/8/25]

Right-wing figures blamed the tragedy on LAFD's fire chief being an LGBTQ woman

Right-wing social media influencer Rogan O’Handley, known online as “DC_Draino,” posted pictures of Crowley and the New Orleans police chief — both women — and wrote, “DEI is quite literally getting people killed.”He added, “Bring back merit.” Twitter/X, [1/8/25]

Right-wing media figures blamed the Los Angeles fires on DEI

Far-right host Alex Jones posted that “DEI Equals societal collapse.” Jones was responding to a post about Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass visiting Ghana when the fires broke out. Local reporting noted that Bass was “in Accra this week as part of a delegation to celebrate the inauguration of Ghana President John Mahama,” but she “was on her way back to Los Angeles Wednesday morning as the city remained under siege from several major wildfires.” Twitter/X, [1/8/25; KTLA 5, 1/8/25]

Effectiveness is. And when you sacrifice effectiveness for diversity, especially within a fire department, police force or military unit, people will die. I’m tired of innocent people’s lives being placed on the altar of equity. Enough.” Twitter/X, [1/8/25]

an 1 25

Historian: Trump’s 'us v. them' response to LA wildfires shows inability to handle 'moments of crisis'

an 1 25

President-elect Donald Trump took his complaints about the wildfire disaster in California to a new level on Thursday, with a Truth Social post baselessly suggesting that Gov. Gavin Newsom was withholding water firefighters could be using to protect homes and businesses.

"Governor Gavin Newscum should immediately go to Northern California and open up the water main, and let the water flow into his dry, starving, burning State, instead of having it go out into the Pacific Ocean," Trump said. "It ought to be done right now, NO MORE EXCUSES FROM THIS INCOMPETENT GOVERNOR. IT’S ALREADY FAR TOO LATE!"

Trump has repeatedly claimed that California officials are somehow blocking firefighters from accessing water — which appears to be a confused misinterpretation of long-running political battles in the state over how to allocate water between agricultural, commercial, residential and environmental use.

He made similar accusations in 2018 about water being denied to firefighters during an aggressive fire season in Northern California, prompting the state fire agency to issue a statement clarifying this is not true.

Firefighters have struggled to maintain water pressure as they have tried to save neighborhoods like Pacific Palisades Experts say it's because aging water infrastructure in Los Angeles is being overstressed by the sudden spike in demand, depleting tanks faster than they can be refilled.

In previous fire disasters, Trump has also accused California officials of failing to properly manage forests, at one point suggesting they should have raked leaves to prevent wildfires, like Finland does — a remark that led to widespread mockery from Finns on social media.

He made similar claims about the latest fire disaster, which forced a reporter on Fox News to point out that forest management was irrelevant given that the fire in Malibu began in a residential area.

recall tx drought some yrs back was prayer

oregon was antifa

mma 3 24

Conspiracy theorists and right-wing influencers are attributing unprecedented wildfires in Texas to a government attack using so-called directed energy weapons (DEWs), while others say the fires were an act of “retaliation” from the federal government motivated by an ongoing stand-off over migration at the state’s southern border. Dozens of videos and posts falsely insist that the claim is backed up by remarks President Joe Biden made during his February 29 visit to Brownsville, Texas.

While discussing how “up-to-date standards and building codes” could help reduce property damage from wildfires, Biden said, “If you fly over these areas that are burnt to the ground, and you see in the midst of 20 homes that are just totally destroyed, one home is sitting because it has the right roof on it.”

Claims that Biden was somehow suggesting that certain roofs are immune to the impacts of DEWs while other structures were intentionally targeted in the fires are proliferating on X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok, along with related conspiracy theories suggesting the fires were payback for the state defying federal border policy.

In 2024, climate change is already fueling extreme weather all around the country — including the Texas fires}:

A conspiracy theory about blue objects being immune to so-called government weapons has been brewing since the Lahaina fires}:

X and TikTok users claim Biden’s roof comment is evidence of foul play}:

Social media users are speculating that Biden was referring to homes with blue roofs when he said “one home is sitting because it has the right roof on it,” apparently confirming their suspicions about the fires being set intentionally by government weapons.

Video Player

Other online content creators speculate that the wildfires are “retaliation” for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s dispute with the administration’s border policies}:

Abbott has been highly critical of the Biden administration’s approach to handling migration at the southern border. In January, Abbott deployed Texas state police to block U.S. Border Patrol from entering Shelby Park at Eagle Pass, which has been turned into a holding center. Texas has also continued to erect razor wire between Shelby Park and the Rio Grande River after a Supreme Court ruling found that federal agents had the right to remove the wire.

On social media, some conspiracy theorists and right-wing influencers alleged that the government started the fires deliberately to punish Texas for not complying with the Supreme Court ruling, or suggested that migrants were somehow involved in starting the Smokehouse Creek Fire.

an common dr

as the Midwestern and Eastern U.S. braced for what could be the longest heatwave in decades for some locations, a wildfire near Los Angeles forced more than 1,000 people to evacuate over Father's Day weekend.

The climate crisis caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels is making both heatwaves and wildfires more frequent and extreme, and politicians and environmental advocates pointed out the role that state and national policy can play in fueling extreme weather.

"Each of the last 12 months have been the hottest on record," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote on social media on Sunday. "This week, cities across the country will see record-high temperatures. A vote for Donald Trump is a vote to surrender the fight against the devastation of climate change. We cannot let that happen."

"Politicians making bad policy decisions (like killing congestion pricing) is the number one cause of climate change, which makes heatwaves like this one worse."

Former U.S. President Donald Trump reportedly told oil and gas executives this spring that donating $1 billion to his campaign would be a "deal" for them because he would dismantle the Biden administration's climate regulations.

Sanders' remarks came as the National Weather Service (NWS) Weather Prediction Center forecast that "record-breaking heat" would "expand from the Midwest and Great Lakes to the Northeast this week, potentially lingering through early next week."

NWS said the heatwave would be the "first significant" heatwave of the season and could break daily temperature records and some monthly June temperature records for the portion of the country stretching from the Ohio Valley to the Northeast between Monday and next Saturday.

"The longevity of dangerous heat forecasted for some locations has not been experienced in decades," NWS said.

The heat index could come close to 105°F in many places, and nighttime temperatures of around 75°F mean that those without cooling infrastructure will see "little to no relief."

The high temperatures could impact millions of people from Michigan to Maine. As of Saturday, 22.6 million people were under extreme heat warnings, watches, or advisories, according toThe New York Times.

University of California, Los Angeles, climate scientist Daniel Swain told the Timesthat the heat would "affect a bunch of highly populated areas where there hasn't been quite as many stories about extreme heat recently," adding, "Now, it's New England's turn."

The NWS warned, "With the intense heat and high humidity it is important to take precautions to protect one's health, particularly those without effective cooling and/or adequate hydration."

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul issued a warning on social media on Saturday, pointing out that extreme heat is the leading weather-related cause of death in the U.S.

However, climate advocates criticized Hochul for exacerbating the root cause of more extreme heatwaves with her last-minute cancellation of a New York City congestion pricing plan earlier this month.

"Politicians making bad policy decisions (like killing congestion pricing) is the number one cause of climate change, which makes heatwaves like this one worse," the Sunrise Movement wrote in response to Hochul's post.

Long-time climate advocate and author Bill McKibben said: "This governor just blocked congestion pricing, one of the most important climate policy advances possible. She's redefining trolling."

Climate Central noted that, "while heatwaves are common in summer, this early season excessive, likely record-breaking heat is made as much as two times to five times MORE likely to occur in mid-June due to human-caused climate change (particularly overnight warmth)."

Meanwhile, on the West Coast, the Post Fire ignited at around 1:45 pm on Saturday local time in Los Angeles County, California, about 65 miles from downtown Los Angeles, The Washington Postreported.

As of Sunday afternoon, it had spread 12,265 acres and was 2% contained, according to California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire). Fire officials said the blaze was fanned by heat, low humidity, and wind and had damaged two structures.

"Currently crews are working to construct perimeter fire lines around the flakes of the fire. Aircraft are working to stop forward progress but have limited visibility," Cal Fire wrote on Sunday, adding that "the fire is pushing up into Hungry Valley Park. California State Park Services have evacuated 1,200 people from Hungry Valley Park. Pyramid Lake is closed because of the threat of the Post Fire."

One of those evacuated was 33-year-old Oscar Flores, who was visiting Hungry Valley Park with his 12-year-old son on Saturday.

"It looked like it was the last day of the world," Flores told the Los Angeles Times. "People were loading quickly and merging out, driving fast. The ranger said you have 10 minutes [to get] whatever you can pack."

Jesse Kelly

The Procedural Safety Failure In Maui Wildfires - The First TV

The First TV

Marc Morano of Climatedespot.com breaks down what went wrong in Maui. While the administration was quick to tie the tragedy to climate change, ...

we are morons not to left on own devices since govt cd not give precise directions, why not blame climate SUV; good snippet intomindset of govt; podesta BBB so lacking of humanity, really anti-hu; looking for something that did not make acctable, hawaii green leader no update grid smae as texas, spent on grn not reliable grid;global ruling class ready to pounce, declare emergency; wildfires radicaLLY DECLINinG IN us AND WORLD[lomborg?] ; 130 exec powers; build back better , bypass democ, like covid lockdown; [am legend GW if $] Thu, Aug 17, 2023

Length 5:29

Marc Morano of Climatedespot.com breaks down what went wrong in Maui. While the administration was quick to tie the tragedy to climate change, Jesse believes it might be a question of competence of public emergency officials. The biggest question mark were officials explanation for why they didn’t turn on the sirens. Morano explains how the Inflation Reduction Act is just a way to give Biden more power over state policy.

omg

https://www.alternet.org/laura-ingraham-renewables-maui-wildfire/

aha wildfires getting harder to ignore (smoke air quality, dramatic pix) tho morano just said no increase in US or world?! dn?! 8 23 but recall space laser, no rake, BLM arsonists in Oregon? Oz sky news murdoch?

demonization?

https://www.mediamatters.org/michael-knowles/**daily-wires-**michael-knowles-suggests-**radical-environmentalists-set-maui-wildfires

==

8 23 ?! kia 6 --> 55 plus 100, 1k MIA?

https://www.alternet.org/**maui-**wildfires/

https://www.mediamatters.org/broadcast-networks/only-4-national-tv-news-segments-about-catastrophic-wildfires-hawaii-mentioned

agw settler colonialism DN drained swamp/wetlands eur grass

8 23

EMILY COMPAGNO (CO-HOST): The people of Hawaii are just devastated, and I want to bring this conversation to the couch now. Tammy, you are like me, where I grew up going to Hawaii ever since I was very little. I've had the honor and the privilege of having so many experiences there. I was just talking about the other day in Lahaina, Mama's Fish House, you know the famous restaurant there. I was just sharing with someone how on the menu they always cite the name of the fishermen who brought in that catch, so you know exactly who you can express your gratitude to when you are eating that lovely aloha fish. The community is devastated and so are we watching.

TAMMY BRUCE (FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR): Yes, and for many Americans it's great to be able to grow up either in Hawaii or in Southern California, because then it becomesreachable. This seems like an exotic place, a place maybe that many people could just never dream of even of going to. But, it really has an extraordinary culture, it's obviously an American state, these are American citizens. Plays an incredibly important role for our security, for vacations and rest and relaxation, and what Americans can and do learn from that remarkable culture of the Hawaiian people. So, I miss it a lot. When you live on the East Coast, it seems you can't really get over there. But, what's striking for me and I think Americans, we can all relate to what happens in each state. We come together in a crisis like this.

This is a crisis, even though it's far away. But, the question also becomes, how did this happen? We have to wonder about when you're dealing with — and some people are already moving into a political dynamic talking about climate change, but the reality is we need to know for really an ancient land that this hasn't happened before, why did it happen now? What was the difference? We think about volcanoes, and you know when you go there, I mean it is a magnificent, the power of nature that's there. And you are reminded of that every single day. So, this isn't necessarily something that you could never have imagined happening. But, we need to know why so that it doesn't happen again and, you know, Maui is popular for a very good reason. That particular coastline, it is magnificent, beautiful, many resorts along that area. Obviously, people rely on the tourism, all of that is now going to stop and slow down. So, Americans have to come together, really understand I think the power of the Hawaiian culture and come together for those people.

OMFG // antifa BLM BS oregon a couple years back?

https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/15-nonsensical-comments-made-right-wing-media-during-2023s-summer-climate-fueled

15 nonsensical comments made by right-wing media during 2023’s summer of climate-fueled extreme weather events

Special PROGRAMS

CLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY ALLISON FISHER

PUBLISHED 08/07/23

July 2023 was the earth’s hottest month on record, punctuated by record-shattering extreme heat events, catastrophic floods, and historic wildfires. While major media outlets sounded the alarm on the climate crisis, climate denial and downplay reached a fever pitch among right-wing media outlets and influencers.

Many in the right-wing media have downplayed the record heat — suggesting that it’s normal summer weather, despite clear evidence that the intensity of this summer’s heat waves would not have been possible without climate change — or dismissed its lethal impact by arguing that more people die of cold than heat. Others have said those linking July’s extreme weather to climate change are weaponizing these events to push a radical climate agenda or call for climate lockdowns.

Here are 15 other examples that illustrate the lengths to which right-wing media are going — often deploying nonsensical arguments or outright lies that attempt to ignore the fact that there is scientific consensus that carbon emissions are heating our planet— to maintain climate denial in the face of climate-fueled catastrophes:

1 in

response to extreme weather that grounded planes in the Northeast, Fox host Rachel Campos-Duffy said the left is “trying to control the weather” and “trying to be God.” Fox News, Fox & Friends, [7/3/23]

Responding to calls for climate action, Newsmax host Eric Bolling denied that human activity is responsible for warming: “Real scientists, meaning those not purchased by the kings of propaganda, well, they’ll tell you there is actually no such thing as climate change.” Newsmax, Eric Bolling The Balance, [7/11/23]

Fossil fuel shill Steve Milloy on Newsmax’s Rob Schmitt Tonight: “The Earth is greener than ever before. Have we affected the planet and wildlife? Yeah, sure. But you know, in the end, it's been, I think, positive. The Earth is carrying more life now than ever before thanks to warming, thanks to CO2, thanks to fossil fuel use.” Newsmax, Rob Schmitt Tonight, [7/11/23]

Newsmax host Greg Kelly said that “LGBTQ+IA whatever has been kind of pushed so relentlessly. … I think climate change and the whole phony debate about it has something to do with it,” suggesting the goal is to decrease population in order to reduce climate impacts. Newsmax, Greg Kelly Reports, [7/11/23]

Fox host Jesse Watters suggested that U.S. special presidential envoy for climateJohn Kerry made it “impossible” to believe in climate change because according to Watters he lied about using a private plane. Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, [7/13/23]

Conservative radio and Fox News host Mark Levin on his radioshow said climate change is a religion not based on science: “This is a religion. This is an ideology. This isn’t science. ...Don't you see how hot it is in Nevada? In the middle of the damn summer?It's what we have air conditioning for.”Westwood One, The Mark Levin Show, [7/13/23]

Far-right media host Steven Crowder claims that carbon dioxide is not pollution because plants use it: “Is carbon dioxide the — basically, you know, the neurotoxin atmospheric poison that people make it out to be? Because you just pointed out plants thrive on it.” Rumble, Louder with Crowder, [7/15/23]

Fox host Greg Gutfeld attempted to downplay the record-breaking heat with bizarre logic: “The problem with using weather — like saying, ‘This place broke records’ — how many states,how many countries didn't break records? Nobody ever provides you the context. They’re going, ‘Three countries had record-breaking heat waves.’ It’s like, well, how many countries are there?” Fox News, The Five, [7/17/23]

The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh claimed that the record heat is not a result of human activity but the sun: “The sun … that’s what calls the shots on Earth. It determines the temperature. It determines everything in terms of weather. … And until you can figure out a way to literally control the sun, there is basically nothing we can do to intentionally and significantly raise, lower, or otherwise affect the temperature on Earth.” The Daily Wire, The Matt Walsh Show, [7/18/23]

The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro: “Thank God we have this thing called air conditioning. … You know what’s a great cure for being super-duper hot outside? Being a first world country.” The Daily Wire, The Ben Shapiro Show, [7/20/23]

Fox Business host Larry Kudlow on America Reports: “This is not an overly hot July. ... Hot weather happens in some places; cooler weather happens in other places. We do not have a climate catastrophe.” Fox News, America Reports, [7/21/23]

Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk on climate science and why carbon dioxide is not pollution: “The science is not solid. The science is debated. They look at science as if it is religious, irrefutable dogma.” Kirk added, “The built-in premise of the climate hoax is carbon is bad. OK, well, carbon is life, actually. … Don’t plants thrive on carbon dioxide?” Real America’s Voice, The Charlie Kirk Show, [7/24/23]

On The Ingraham Angle, American Majority founder Ned Ryun called climate change a “hoax”: “It is nothing more than an attempt to manipulate people into a state of fear to have them give more control over to a ruling elitewho would take this hoax and enforce it through a whole host of means.” Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, [7/27/23]

On America’s Newsroom, fossil fuel shill Daniel Turner deliberately conflated weather with climate: “And if you look at the weather forecast for this great city, where I’m born and raised, next Friday is mid-70s. So we are in what's called a heat wave.” Fox News, America’s Newsroom, [7/28/23]

Climate denier Marc Morano on Jesse Watters Primetime blamed global wildfires on arsonists, dismissing the role of climate change: “This is a global problem of people starting this. Now, is it climate change? Well, this would be the equivalent of blowing up a dam or sabotaging a dam and allowing a valley to flood and then saying, oh, look, climate change is causing more floods.” Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, [7/28/23]

…

Next page

Related

Right-wing media deny climate change in face of deadly and record-breaking extreme weather event

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Right-wing media downplay the hottest day in modern history with the help of Twitter’s community notes feature

07/11/23

Only 5% of national TV news segments on the record-shattering heat wave that scorched Texas mentioned climate change

07/03/23

OMG BS

field eror bad code?

gmail

Marc Morano

Weekly update ⋅ August 4, 2023

NEWS

How data is manipulated to sell the climate hysteria narrative | Marc Morano - Rebel News

Rebel News

... pick and choose small samples of data to make extreme weather events seem like bigger issue than they are, says Climate Depot's Marc Morano.

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New York's Falling Tower Of Pizzas - Forbes

Forbes

ClimateDepot.com's publisher, Marc Morano, compared the emissions of a wood-burning stove with the emissions from the private plane routinely used ...

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Strangely, an awful lot of these "climate change" wildfire were started by arsonists, not excess CO2

HotAir

... are other forces at work' | Climate Depot https://t.co/XJtGThKJ69 pic.twitter.com/DxDJ64gxPu. — Marc Morano (@ClimateDepot) July 29, 2023.

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HotAir

ED MORRISSEY SHOW

PODCASTS

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Strangely, an awful lot of these "climate change" wildfire were started by arsonists, not excess CO2

TWITTER 12:35 PM on July 30, 2023

fox chryon is it gw or arson? watters? twet

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Watch: Morano on Fox News w/ Jesse Watters on how arsonists are responsible for ‘climate’ wildfires – Not ‘climate change’ – ‘There are other forces at work’ | Climate Depot https://climatedepot.com/2023/07/29/watch-morano-on-fox-news-w-jesse-watters-on-how-arsonists-are-responsible-for-climate-wildfires-not-climate-change-there-are-other-forces-at-work/

bad code?

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https://www.climatedepot.com/2023/07/29/watch-morano-on-fox-news-w-jesse-watters-on-how-arsonists-are-responsible-for-climate-wildfires-not-climate-change-there-are-other-forces-at-work/

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no lnx pix vid twt

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Watch: Morano on Fox News w/ Jesse Watters on how arsonists are responsible for ‘climate’ wildfires – Not ‘climate change’ – ‘There are other forces at work’

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Fox News Channel - Jesse Watters Primetime - Broadcast July 28, 2023 - Are arsonists responsible for global wildfires? 'The Green Fraud' author Marc Morano says there are 'other forces at work' as wildfires rage across the planet on 'Jesse Watters Primetime.'

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Morano: "Arson, of course, happened in the United States. Jesse, you mentioned the Yosemite fires. What that was a Democratic donor who had actually given to Democratic candidates started the fire. So we have Democratic politicians blaming wildfires on climate change when in reality it was one of their donors who actually started the wildfire. And this goes on in Australia 42 percent of the Australian fires were said to be caused by mankind. They've had 700 unnatural fires started and over 250 arrests a few years ago in Australia.

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This is a global problem of people starting fires. Now is it climate change? Well, this would be the equivalent of blowing up a dam or sabotaging a dam and allowing a valley to flood and then saying 'Oh look, climate change is causing more floods.' There are other forces at work here, Jesse."

Jesse Watters: "All right Marc. Thank you so much. You're always on top of this. We appreciate it."

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By: Marc Morano - Climate Depot July 29, 2023

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Fox News Channel – Jesse Watters Primetime – Broadcast July 28, 2023 – 04:26

Are arsonists responsible for global wildfires? ‘The Green Fraud’ author Marc Morano says there are ‘other forces at work’ as wildfires rage across the planet on ‘Jesse Watters Primetime.’

Rough Transcript:

Jesse Watters: Author of The Green Fraud Marc Morano joins me now. So Marc, can you distinguish between an arsonist fire or winds blowing and an already hot forest?

Marc Morano: No, not really. It looks like they started these fires, the arsonists at the worst possible times, with high winds, with dry conditions, with heat. So it sounds like they may even know what they’re doing. And there are two different islands in Greece, there’s Rhodes island and Corfu island, and in both of them now, the officials are saying these are intentionally started and they actually said they’re basically sick individuals who get pleasure out of causing other people pain.

Arson of course, happened in the United States. Jesse, you mentioned the Yosemite fires. What that was a Democratic donor who had actually given to Democratic candidates started the fire. So we have Democratic politicians blaming wildfires on climate change when in reality it was one of their donors who actually started the wildfire.

And this goes on in Australia 42 percent of the Australian fires were said to be caused by mankind. They’ve had 700 unnatural fires started and over 250 arrests a few years ago in Australia.

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This is a global problem of people starting fires. Now is it climate change? Well, this would be the equivalent of blowing up a dam or sabotaging a dam and allowing a valley to flood and then saying ‘Oh look, climate change is causing more floods.’ There are other forces at work here, Jesse.

Jesse Watters: All right Marc. Thank you so much. You’re always on top of this. We appreciate it. Have a great weekend.

Marc Morano: Thank you, Jesse.

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Background Info:

Most fires in Greece were started ‘by human hand’, government says

The Guardian, 28 July 2023Most of the 667 fires that have erupted across Greece in recent weeks were started “by human hand”, the country’s senior climate crisis official has said. As the Mediterranean country emerges from an unprecedented, 15-day period of heatwave-induced infernos, the scale of the destruction is finally being laid bare.

While weather conditions have been different from any other year – with experts calling the first three weeks of July the hottest on record – most of the fires could have been prevented, the government claimed on Friday. Vassilis Kikilias, the Greek minister of climate crisis and civil protection, told reporters:

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“During this time 667 fires erupted, that is more than 60 fires a day, almost all over the country. Unfortunately, the majority were ignited by human hand, either by criminal negligence or intent. Kikilias said that, in certain places, blazes had broken out at numerous points in close proximity at the same time, suggesting the involvement of arsonists intent on spreading fires further. He added: “The difference with other years were the weather conditions. Climate change, which yielded a historic and unprecedented heatwave, is here. There were very few days where the extreme weather was not combined with strong winds.”

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LARGE PIX OF COVER DRAMA

Full story

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Spoof headline:

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Image

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https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/set-by-human-hands-are-arsonists-burning-rhodes/

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‘Fires are set by human hands. Whether it is due to negligence or fraud will be seen [but] people have been summoned for statements and others will be summoned. As soon as we have complete information – because the investigation is in full swing, we will make announcements…’ said Vassilis Vathrakogiannis, speaking on behalf of the Rhodes Fire Department.

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Rhodes has been burning for seven days, while other tourist locations, such as Corfu, face smaller localised fires. Corfu’s fires are also believed to have been deliberately lit, with the Deputy Mayor for Tourism and Construction speaking to the BBC about suspicions that they were started ‘by a group of people’. ‘[They] get pleasure out of this with the pain of other people,’ he said.

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Fewer Europeans would die if they installed a couple of air-conditioners instead of basking under ceiling fans like it’s 1976.

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“Fires are set by human hands. Whether it is due to negligence or fraud will be seen.”

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The Mediterranean is on fire as countries have been caught unprepared for the inevitable impact of climate change due to their disastrous capitalist policies. Austerity measures have hampered responses to the deadly wildfires that have paralyzed the region

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Prime Minister Giorgio Meloni has branded EU targets “climate fundamentalism”.

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Thousands of people evacuated as devastating wildfire threats Rhodes, Greece.

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Massive explosion in a NATO ammunition warehouse in Central Greece amid wildfires.

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When climate change doesn’t increase global fires… Activists take it upon themselves. There is NO climate emergency but there is an emergency surrounding mental health and climate anxiety that is leading people to start fires to save the planet.

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Corfu’s fires are also believed to have been deliberately lit, with the Deputy Mayor for Tourism and Construction speaking to the BBC about suspicions that they were started ‘by a group of people’. ‘[They] get pleasure out of this with the pain of other people,’ he said.

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Greece has been here before. Many people were arrested and charged over the 2021 fires in Greece, which were considered to be some of the worst on record. Some of the blazes were described as a ‘deliberate organised criminal activity’. In the devastating fires of 2007, arson was listed as a major cause of the blaze and some of the blazes were even suspected to be a form of terror attack. Charges of arson and murder were eventually brought. NOTE PASSIVE NO DETAIL

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As over 32,000 precautionary evacuations are carried out for the fires on Rhodes and surrounding areas, the Prime Minister of Greece, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, told his nation that they had ‘more difficult days ahead’.

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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2023/07/24/greece-wildfire-island-thousands-evacuation-updates/70454961007/

Yiannis Artopios, a fire service spokesperson on Rhodes, told Greek television network Skai TV that authorities are currently questioning suspected arsonists.

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“Fires are not sparked on their own,” he told Skai TV. “They are triggered by the human hand, be it intentionally or not. We currently have several people being questioned in connection with their probable involvement.”

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In Corfu, the region’s deputy mayor for tourism and construction told the BBC the fires there were started by “a group of people.” Chariton Koutscouris said officials had a “suspicion” fires would be started this weekend.

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Officials are said to have been warned on Friday by the fire department chief that someone who started two fires last week would start another.

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“He was right,” Koutscouris said, adding that the apparent arsonists “get pleasure out of this with the pain of the other people.”

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Global wildfires are not historically unusual and have been part of the natural forest cycle for thousands of years and contribute to their regeneration.

But the media blaming ‘climate change’ anyway — even when humans start the fires!

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Arson and poor green policies of forest management cause many forest fires and increase CO2 emissions! see: U.S. Geological Survey: 2018 California Wildfires Emitted as Much CO2 as an Entire Year’s Worth of Calif. Electricity

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Recently, as Democratic politicians were blaming wildfires on climate change, it was revealed that it was Democratic donors that caused the wildfires.

Australia had the same issues with arson!

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Aussie police announce a crackdown on arsonists after investigations showed 716 fires this season did not occur naturally – 267 already charged with arson offences – The Daily Telegraph: Serial arsonists will face the full force of the law after NSW Police announced a crackdown on fire bugs in the wake of investigations which showed 716 fires this season did not occur naturally. Of that number it is unclear how many were the work of arsonists and what was the result of negligent behaviour. Dedicated investigators will now trawl through evidence to separate the two.

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Aussie ABC says Arson = 1%. NSW police say 42% of fires are man-made. 9% are ‘natural’. Rest unknown. (So far)

Australia’s Epic Fires Caused By Bad Forestry And Arson, Not ‘Climate Change’

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Then the odd thing about this is if you look at all the data on wildfires, there are dramatic drops from 100 years ago in the United States.

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There is no trend in wildfires, no trend at all the extreme weather, but it doesn’t matter. This is the narrative, and if they need an arsonist to help The Science along apparently they’re not beneath doing that at this point. And again, this is the same thing — blaming the wildfires on climate

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The Reality is Global & U.S. fires are declining.

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From my 2018 book: ‘Less fire today than centuries ago’ – Scientists, studies counter claim that wildfires due to ‘climate change’ – Book Excerpt – “There is increasing evidence that there is overall less fire in the landscape today than there has been centuries ago, although the magnitude of this reduction still needs to be examined in more detail.”…

“The ‘wildfire problem’ is essentially more a social than a natural one.” Researchers from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid found that “climate change” is not to blame for increased forest fires in the Mediterranean basin.”…

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“In the United States, wildfires are also due in part to a failure to thin forests or remove dead and diseased trees.

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You are being conned: Data, studies & UN IPCC all reveal Canadian fires not due to ‘climate change’ – ‘There has been a significant & continuing decline in the number of fires’

Dr. Roger Pielke Jr: What the media won’t tell you about … Wildfires – ‘Wildfires used to be much more extensive in past centuries’

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Pielke Jr.: “The IPCC has not detected or attributed fire occurrence or area burned to human-caused climate change

Globally, emissions from wildfires has decreased globally over recent decades, as well as in many regions

Canada wildfire trends show no increase in recent decades

Wildfires used to be much more extensive in past centuries

Wildfires are a part of the natural eco-system.”

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Bjorn Lomborg: Climate alarmists falsely claim the world is literally on fire – Satellites reveal global area burned annually has trended downward in past 2 decades

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Lomborg on Global wildfires: For more than two decades, satellites have recorded fires across the planet’s surface. The data are unequivocal: Since the early 2000s, when 3% of the world’s land caught fire, the area burned annually has trended downward. In 2022, the last year for which there are complete data, the world hit a record low of 2.2% burned area…The latest report by the United Nations’ climate panel doesn’t attribute the area burned globally by wildfires to climate change. Instead, it vaguely suggests the weather conditions that promote wildfires are becoming more common in some places. Still, the report finds that the change in these weather conditions won’t be detectable above the natural noise even by the end of the century. …

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America wildfires: While the complete data aren’t in for 2023, global tracking up to July 29 by the Global Wildfire Information System shows that more land has burned in the Americas than usual. But much of the rest of the world has seen lower burning — Africa and especially Europe. Globally, the GWIS shows that burned area is slightly below the average between 2012 and 2022, a period that already saw some of the lowest rates of burned area.

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Australian Wildfires: Likewise, while Australia’s wildfires in 2019-20 earned media headlines such as “Apocalypse Now” and “Australia Burns,” the satellite data show this was a selective narrative. The burning was extraordinary in two states but extraordinarily small in the rest of the country. Since the early 2000s, when 8% of Australia caught fire, the area of the country torched each year has declined. The 2019-20 fires scorched 4% of Australian land, and this year the burned area will likely be even less.

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When reading headlines about fires, remember the other climate scare tactics that proved duds. Polar bears were once the poster cubs for climate action, yet are now estimated to be more populous than at any time in the past half-century. We were told climate change would produce more hurricanes, yet satellite data shows that the number of hurricanes globally since 1980 has trended slightly downward.

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Filed under: astrology, avg, heatwave, mediacd, mediacdf, wildfires

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https://www.rawstory.com/2661271716/

wildfires CA prediction not good

https://www.rawstory.com/predicting-and-planning-for-forest-fires-requires-modeling-of-many-complex-interrelated-factors/

AMPLIFY FDBK DOOM SPIRAL

https://www.alternet.org/inferno-climate-change-fiery-apocalypse/

Jane Braxton Little: A Global Four-Alarm Blaze

Just over a year ago, my old friend Jane Braxton Little experienced climate change up close and personal. Greenville, California, the Gold Rush-era town she’d lived in since the 1970s (when I used to visit her there) was burned down in the raging Dixie Fire. She wrote about it vividly at TomDispatch. For a time, she became, as she put it, a “climate refugee,” just as so many of the survivors of Hurricane Ian did in Florida this fall.

Honestly, it isn’t really up for debate anymore (unless you’re in the Trumpublican Party), is it? This overheating planet of ours is growing ever more perilous right before our eyes, whether you’re talking about increasingly severe megadroughts, floods, fires, storms, or melting glaciers and ice sheets. And it’s only going to get worse as, despite everything we now know, humanity continues to put record amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. As it happens, the latest war on this planet, the still expanding one in Ukraine, is only making matters worse, while pouring record profits into the coffers of the giant fossil-fuel companies whose CEOs are living as if there were no tomorrow.

Of course, there will indeed be a tomorrow and another after that, even if they prove ever more perilous. When it comes to fire, as Little explains today, in its own fashion, this planet is already ablaze. As a United Nations report put it, we’re experiencing “a global wildfire crisis… turning landscapes into tinderboxes.” Already reporting on climate change when the Dixie Fire hit her community, Little saw all this in a horrifying way. Now, take a step back with her and she’ll fill you in on the inferno this planet threatens to become. Tom

Inferno:Climate Disaster Is Turning the Planet into a Tinderbox

Mike Savala’s boots scuffed the edge of a singed patch of forest littered with skinny fingers of burnt ponderosa pine needles. Nearby, an oak seedling sizzled as a yellow-shirted firefighter hit it with a stream of water. Spurts of smoke rose from blackened ground the size of a hockey rink. A 100-foot Ponderosa pine towered overhead.

“Third response today,” said Savala, shaking his head.

This hillside in my own backyard in California’s northern Sierra Nevada mountains hadn’t seen lightning for months and yet it had still burst into flames. All summer long, it had baked in heat that extended into an unseasonably hot autumn. Now, in late October, it was charred by a fire of mysterious origin. A spark from a wandering hiker? An errant ember from a burn pile? Spontaneous combustion?

Savala, a fire-crew boss for the Greenville Rancheria of Maidu Indians, scanned the sky. Cloudless. There had only been three inches of precipitation since July 1st — 15% of normal. And no wonder, since California is in the throes of its fourth dry year. More than 95% of the state is now classified as under severe or extreme drought.

Although small and easily contained, this tiny fire in rural northeastern California was another wake-up call, up close and personal, about an ominous trend. A warming planet and changing land use are fueling a dramatic surge in forest fires worldwide. Terrifying projections forecast a 57% increase in extreme fires globally by century’s end. The indisputable cause: climate change.

“The heating of the planet is turning landscapes into tinderboxes,” a team of 50 researchers from six continents reported in “Spreading Like Wildfire: The Rising Threat of Extraordinary Landscape Fires,” published this year by the United Nations Environment Program. That document describes what can only be viewed as a future flaming version of planetary collapse that could push humanity perilously close to a precipice of no return.

Like dozens of previous reports from the U.N. and other international organizations, it describes a situation that, while dire, isn’t yet hopeless. Despite those ever stronger, hotter, drier winds that will fan the flames, governments could slow climate change by improving their forest management techniques, planning and preparing far better, and communicating more effectively. To reduce the likelihood of future mega-fires means working with forests where fire is an element as essential to ecosystems as sunshine or rain. It also means working with forest communities, where local knowledge accumulated over generations is too often shunned. And of course, it means honestly confronting our reluctance to ween ourselves from the fossil fuels that power our factories, cars, and those absurdly unnecessary leaf blowers that are backing us toward the cliff.

A Fiery Feedback Loop

If my small backyard fire was a personal wake-up call, the 2021 Dixie fire was a four-alarm blaze. On its rampage from the Feather River Canyon through Lassen Volcanic National Park and beyond, it destroyed my adopted town of Greenville, 160 miles northeast of San Francisco. In fact, it torched close to a million acres. Nearly half of them burned so intensely that the once-majestic, now blackened pine and fir forests there may never again support the biologically diverse ecosystems that drew me here so long ago.

The single-largest fire in California’s history, Dixie was part of a record-breaking fire year globally. Around the world, fires burned nearly 23 million acres, an area almost the size of Portugal. Dixie contributed to the worldwide loss to fire of more than a third of the tree cover that disappeared in those 12 months, according to a report from the World Resources Institute. And this is only a preview of what’s to come. Scientists believe that there may be a 30% increase in extreme fires globally by 2050.

Such an acceleration of forest fires will, it seems, spare few parts of the world. Fires, burning longer and hotter, are already flaring in unexpected places, shattering assumptions about what’s safe, let alone normal. Even the Arctic, that remote expanse of sea ice, treeless permafrost, and minus 40-degree Celsius temperatures, home to polar bears, lemmings, and snowy owls, is now beginning to burn. After July 2019, the hottest month on record so far, fires erupted across the Arctic Circle in Alaska, Greenland, and Siberia. As temperatures soared to as much as six degrees Celsius above normal, flames spurted across an expanse of tundra larger than England.

Arctic fires are particularly worrisome because of the vast amounts of carbon locked beneath that frozen soil. Much of it, after all, is peatlands, largely formed at the end of the last ice age, 12,000 years ago. Although it covers just 3% of the Earth’s surface, peat sequesters 42% of the carbon stored in all other types of vegetation, including the world’s forests. Global warming is now drying out that peat, making it ever more susceptible to fire. As it burns, of course, it releases that carbon.

Nor is such a bio-feedback loop limited to the Arctic. As the world becomes hotter and drier, the carbon we emit from our reliance on fossil fuels is drying out forests everywhere, making them ever more prone to burn, while extending burning seasons globally. Firefighters in California used to don fire-resistant Nomex shirts in May or June, knowing they could shed them by mid-October. Now, there’s barely a pause before things heat up again and those shirts go right back on.

As wildfires are transformed into year-round challenges, the carbon they release only further contributes to emissions from other sources, making it that much more difficult to halt rising temperatures. Think of it as a mutually exacerbating feedback loop: wildfires are worsened by climate change, which, in turn, is intensified by the ever-fiercer wildfires.

Management for Better — or Worse

Forests around the world evolved with fire, hosting species that came to depend on its cleansing power for renewal and the flushes of nutrients it releases. Indigenous people understood this and learned to live with fire. Over the last century, however, many forests have been fundamentally altered by a misunderstanding of its essential role in forest resilience. While climate change is indeed the primary driver of the global increase in wildfires, forest management has played its own substantive and mostly negative role in that increase by overemphasizing the importance of fire suppression.

Scientists and policymakers are urging fire-fighting agencies to rethink their use of financial and human resources. Instead of focusing primarily on how many crews can be mustered for fire suppression, the emphasis should shift to planning and prevention. Most countries devote less than 0.2% of their wildfire expenditures to such planning, according to U.N. researchers. In the United States, just 40 cents of every dollar spent on managing wildfires goes toward reducing fire risk or helping forest communities like mine recover in ways that could make them more resilient.

“There isn’t the right attention to fire from governments,” says Glynis Humphrey, a fire expert at the University of Cape Town and one of those U.N. researchers.

Whether it’s the collapse of forest ecosystems before our eyes or the trauma of entire towns like Greenville burning up in raging infernos, forest managers are slowly starting to respond to the global crisis — with sadly mixed results.

A wave of deadly fires in Portugal in 2017 that killed 117 people and ravaged 1.3 million acres evoked fierce popular condemnation of the government’s response, prompting that country to adopt an aggressive 20-year plan to transform its fire management. It aims to use fire as a tool, while increasing understanding of its positive role in such a heavily forested country. Prime Minister Antonio Costa has restricted funding aimed at combatting fires to less than 10% of the total spent, while rural communities are to become more involved in protecting their homes and businesses. However, his new plan was barely launched last summer when temperatures of up to 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit) and 40-mile-per-hour winds contributed to yet another series of out-of-control wildfires, forcing evacuations of whole communities and a nationwide state of emergency.

Throughout the western United States, a century of public policy committed to suppressing all wildfires has left our forests unnaturally crammed with small-diameter trees and brush. Scientists documented as much as a seven-fold increase in tree density in the Sierra mountains between 1911 and 2011. While large old-growth trees have evolved to live with fires, those small trees and shrubs form an unnatural bed of fuel for future infernos. As a result, blazes in the West increased by seven large fires a year from the mid-1980s through 2011, according to a study by scientists at the University of Utah and the University of California, Berkeley.

What needs to be done is clear, says Scott Stephens, a professor of fire science at Berkeley. “Active stewardship is the only way we’ll ever get out of this.”

In California, state and federal officials have committed to reducing the threat of catastrophic wildfires by returning fire to the forest ecosystems that evolved with it. They’ve set a goal of igniting planned fires to burn away such brush and seedlings on one million acres annually. In September 2021, Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation allocating $1.5 billion to wildfire mitigation projects, the largest such investment in state history. Last January, the federal government also announced a $600 million program to support California’s wildfire recovery efforts. As well-intentioned as such programs may be, however, they have so far fallen well short of their objective. Fire managers hope that, in 2022, they will have set prescribed burns on 200,000 acres, only 20% of the goal. Add in logging to thin overcrowded stands of trees and they may reach 300,000 acres.

Amid the frightening statistics on rising temperatures and scorched acres, an 8,800-acre area in California demonstrates the potential for active management to reduce the dangers of destructive wildfires. In 2019, Forest Service crews set intentional fires on the western slopes of the central Sierra Nevada near Caples Lake. Last summer, when the 222,000-acre Caldor fire roared through there en route to South Lake Tahoe, it left a finger of green where prescribed fires had reduced the forest’s fuels. While that was only a small island of resilience, consider it an enormous example of possibility.

The Promise of Technology

Some of the government agencies most criticized for their management of wildfires are now turning to technology to help detect them before they turn into infernos. In this, they are not alone globally. Take Australia, where fires in the catastrophic 2019-2020 summer season, the worst in that country’s recorded history, killed 34 people directly and another 445 through smoke inhalation. Often sparked by lightning at a time of warmer-than-average temperatures and lower-than-average precipitation, they destroyed about 6,000 buildings and killed an estimated 1.5 billion animals. In response, last year, Australia launched a satellite system connected to ground-based cameras and aerial drones meant to spot any fire within one minute of ignition.

Sonoma County, California, has similarly been testing fire-detecting artificial intelligence technology for two years now. In 2017, that area just north of San Francisco was devastated by the deadly 37,000-acre Tubbs fire. Three other fires followed in 2019 and 2020. In 2021, county officials linked artificial intelligence software to an already existing system of tower-mounted cameras. Called ALERTWildfire, it snaps photographs every 10 seconds, exposing smoke and flames. The AI sifts through the camera images in a fashion designed to increase the speed of detecting such blazes and so getting firefighters to them faster.

After the first full season, the results, however, were anything but overwhelming: AI detections beat humans in spotting fires only once out of every 10 times. Now, managers are directing their AI-adapted cameras to look for fires where humans are unlikely to spot them — as Sam Wallis, a community alert and warning manager, put it: the fires “way out in the middle of nowhere, the ones that really scare us.” He’s also optimistic about AI’s potential for detecting nighttime fires, which can smolder in the forest duff for significant periods before bursting into uncontrollable flames. Overall, Wallis said, “the AI is not a silver bullet, but it is a bullet.”

Last year, Pacific Gas and Electric also began adding AI software similar to the kind Australia is testing to its network of cameras. It’s a better-late-than-never effort to reduce the number of deadly wildfires sparked all too notoriously by its own faulty equipment. The company has, after all, been implicated in at least five major California wildfires including the Dixie one.

Then there are the “dragon eggs.” The Forest Service is dropping those ping-pong-sized balls from remote-controlled aircraft to start controlled burns designed to return fire to its natural role of keeping forest fuels more balanced. The chemicals in the spheres ignite when they hit the ground. During the Dixie fire, drones dropped such incendiary balls on a mountainside ahead of the advancing flames to start what’s known as a backfire and did indeed create a fire-unfriendly zone in its wake.

Such management efforts may prove effective both in returning forest stands to a state of fire resilience and in curbing runaway blazes. They don’t, however, relieve officials of what many consider their unconscionable failure to enact the most basic laws to curb the greenhouse gases that are driving such climate-change-induced disasters. Apocalyptic scenes — cities blanketed in smoke, vast landscapes left lifeless — have prompted proposals before the U.N. to include “ecocide” as the 5th international crime, alongside genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes of aggression.

Sadly, humanity may already have passed the point of simply managing ourselves out of the fiery apocalypse scientists predict we’re heading for. Global mean surface temperatures are already up 1.09 degrees Celsius and rising. The precipice looms.

Yes, technology can help and, if the feet of agencies are held to the proverbial flames they’re committed to managing more effectively, the oncoming inferno may yet be slowed, if not halted altogether. But if we don’t take responsibility for what’s happening, all our talk, all that bureaucratic lingo about creating a low-carbon economy and hitting net zero in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 may be little more than what environmental activist Greta Thunberg has called the “blah blah blah.”

Still, hope is empowering and activity galvanizing. While it’s taken far too many destroyed towns to get there, California, at least, is beginning to grasp what’s needed to live with fire. Both cultural and monetary support is now strong — and growing — for prescribed burns and fuel-treatment projects. And so, locally, we take chainsaws to the smaller trees overcrowding our woods, using what we remove to heat our homes. We prune the branches from the large fire-resilient trees, chopping them to fit our stoves. We rake the small debris and forest litter into burn piles, wishing we had a way to utilize those forest products, too, instead of adding to the very emissions we’re trying to reduce. And we keep on igniting small, safe burns to return resilience to these lands that once enjoyed the benefits of fire. On such a planet in such a time, the question remains: Will any of it be enough to live with the fire next time?

Days after our backyard blaze flared up, it snowed: eight inches of reassurance that this fire, at least, would not smolder and restart. But by the end of November, the Sierra had no additional rain and state officials were at the edge of declaring a fourth year of drought. Somewhere in our future, the inferno still lurks.

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/response-wildfire-smoke-choking-new-york-city-fox-news-trots-out-tired-climate-denial

June 7, as smoke from hundreds of wildfires raging across Canada turned New York City into a dystopian climate change movie, MSNBC host Chris Hayes tweeted: “I always thought there would be some kind of climate reckoning when it got bad enough but Covid has taught me that, no, people will just step on the gas and happily mow people down so they never have to admit taking a wrong turn."

Too little TV news coverage connected the code red air quality in New York and other impacted U.S. cities to climate change, but Fox News and other right-wing media figures retreated even further from a reckoning, stepping on the climate denial pedal by dismissing the link between global warming and wildfires, attacking those that did, and insisting on alternative explanations for why Canada is having its worst-ever wildfire season.

In fact, at 2 hours and 41 minutes of coverage, Fox News covered the wildfire story more than either CNN (2 hours and 19 minutes) or MSNBC (41 minutes) on June 7 and mentioned climate change (to deny it) more times in its coverage than its counterparts.

Fox News dismisses the link between wildfires and climate change, mocks those that do make the connection

Scientists say wildfires are becoming more severe as “forests around the world increasingly dry out amid the warming climate”, a fact even observed by Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal. Experts further note that Canada’s wildfire season is a “harbinger of our climate future” with the United Nations warning that by 2090, “global wildfires are expected to increase in intensity by up to 57% thanks to climate change.” But no amount of evidence, either experiential or academic, changes the tone of the reporting at Fox News when it comes to extreme weather and climate-fueled events.

Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade mocks AOC, climate change czar John Kerry, and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre for connecting the dangerous air quality to climate change: “Every time it’s real hot, climate change. Every time it’s real cold, climate change. When it rains a lot it’s because of climate change. And you guessed it, Canada, with burning forests, 400 separate fires, it’s because of climate change. AOC said it. Of course climate change czar John Kerry said it, and [Karine Jean-Pierre] KJP has one note, listen.” Fox News, Fox & Friends, [6/8/23]

Fox News host Laura Ingraham suggests that coverage of the event is overblown and mocks those reporting the air quality from a climate angle: “Is this really a novel occurrence for our country or is it getting the coverage of the type it’s getting because it's happening along the East Coast where all the elites live?” Ingraham continued: “The apocalyptic coverage in the New York Times today was just absolutely knee-slappingly hilarious. … CNN's Bill Weir, no stranger to hyperbole himself, used the event to call for action to electrify every car in the United States for humanity’s sake." Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, [6/7/23]

Fox News host Sean Hannity accuses Democrats, including AOC, of politicizing the crisis to push their climate agenda: “Tonight, smoke from the Canadian wildfires, they blanketed the entire East Coast of the U.S. creating a scary martian-like scene in New York City especially. And as usual, Democrats, they wasted no time. They went right to politicizing the crisis, AOC using the wildfire and heat wave in Puerto Rico to once again push her radical Green New Deal or the climate alarmist religious cult agenda.” Fox News, Hannity, [6/7/23]

On Jesse Watters Primetime, climate denier and frequent Fox guest Mark Morano dismissed climate change and accused those making the connection of weaponizing the weather while smoking a cigar:“This is exactly what you would expect to happen. This is Canadian natural disaster mismanagement and now they are trying to blame global warming which makes it, what? Our fault. It's our SUVs. It's our gas stoves which, by the way, didn't New York ban them? Shouldn't we have -- shouldn't wildfires be a thing of the past? I thought they were banning them.” Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, [6/7/23]

On The Five, Jeanine Pirro accuses AOC and Democrats of “pumping up climate hysteria”: “While Americans choke on the smoke, the far left smells an opportunity. AOC thinks this is a great time to push her Green New Deal. She says that we must, ”Adapt our food systems, energy grids, infrastructure and healthcare to prepare for what's to come". Other Democrats are pumping up climate hysteria and bringing back, you guessed it, mask insanity.” Fox News, The Five, [6/7/23]

On Outnumbered,the panel mocks AOC for connecting the crisis to climate change while Fox contributor Kennedy suggests that because wildfires existed before “we started talking about the climate crisis” then the science is not settled: “There are a lot of reasons for wildfires. Wildfires have been happening for a long time. Before we started talking about the climate crisis. So, I want to make sure that the science is settled before we completely turf our economy and flush any innovation we have down the toilet because of a tweet from AOC.” Fox News, Outnumbered, [6/7/23]

Fox turns to its go-to explanation for catastrophic wildfires: It’s poor forest management. And it’s environmentalists’ fault.

Forest management has played some role in the unprecedented wildfire season in Canada — while the role of climate change is also evident and clear. But from watching Fox’s coverage of the fires, you would probably come away with the idea that it’s been Canada’s forest management policies alone driving the worsening fires.

Fox’s jump to shift blame to poor forest management as a tactic to downplay climate change goes back to at least 2018 when Trump first blamed California’s forestry policies while touring the aftermath of the deadly Camp Fire that destroyed the town of Paradise. Fox revived the tactic in full force during California’s apocalyptic 2020 wildfires.

Helping drive the swift move to blame forest management and environmentalists this time around is News Corps darling, Fox News contributor, and New York Post columnist Miranda Devine who wrote a June 7 column, “Smoky New York isn’t climate change — it’s bad forest management,” which has been cited by Fox News personalities and amplified by right-wing media figures online.

Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy on Outnumbered: “The real blame is on the climate cult. … They are an anti-human group and they want to shut our forests and close them off to humans and to industry who know how to manage it. And that's what's happening right now.” Fox News, Outnumbered, [6/8/23]

On the Faulkner Focus, Fox News contributor Jason Chaffetz insists that poor forest management is liberals' fault: I hate to tell it you folks but there have been big forest fires for eons probably since the beginning of time. It's ironic to me because the same people who claim they want the Green New Deal, they fight us every single time on the mitigation efforts to manage the forests, clear out the underbrush, clear out the dead trees and clear out the fuel that makes these things so ignite in such big fashion. They will not do that as Democrats and these left-leaning liberals. Fox News, Faulkner Focus, [6/8/23]

Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy dismissed climate change and redirected the blame to “bad forest management”: “Climate change does not start a fire. It can create dry conditions, and they have really bad dry conditions up in Canada right now. In Canada they are blaming bad forest management because of a very dry winter and they did not get a lot of snow. … Apparently behind the scenes they have not been doing the controlled burns that they should have been doing. And back in 2024 environmentalists wrote a paper and said not enough is being done to fund this kind of forest management and there is going to be hell to pay.” Fox News, Fox & Friends, [6/8/23]

Sean Hannity also suggested that forest management is the main culprit:“Here's what nobody talks about. There is a science. You can get an advanced college degree in forestry. There's something called the controlled burns that climate alarmist cult membersare all dead set against. And you see, if you have a controlled burn that prevents the bigger fires like the one they're experiencing in little Justin's neighborhood in Canada that's now making it smoke all the way down here.” Fox News, Hannity, [6/7/23]

Host Jesse Watters claims that there are fewer wildfires now than 100 years ago to dismiss the role of climate change and prop up the forest management argument: “You might be surprised to find out over the last 100 years, there have been less wildfires, not more. The Wall Street Journal says in the early 1900s about 4% of land worldwide burned every year by 2021 that was down to 2.5%. So instead of obsessing over climate change they should take a look at forest management.” Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, [6/7/23]

On The Five co-host Dana Perino blames wildfires on forest management and liberal policies: “Canada is experiencing really bad wildfires on their public lands. We have a similar problem, and it has to do with forest management. The Biden administration has policies that are in direct conflict with one another. … Wildfires can occur naturally of course, but if you are actively managing your forest, then you can prevent some of these things. The left has never wanted to do that.” Fox News, The Five, [6/7/23]

Pirro suggests that since only half of Americans believe in climate change that Democrats shouldn’t be linking it to wildfires: Agreeing that poor forest management is the main cause of severe wildfires, Pirro questions why climate change is even part of the discussion: “We’re at a point when I think 49% of Americans believe climate change is caused mostly by human actions, the lowest reported apparently in many years.So why are Democrats, why do they keep pushing climate change over something that could’ve been prevented?" Fox News, The Five, [6/7/23

Related

National TV news chokes out the climate angle in coverage of Canadian wildfires

06/08/23 2:57 PM EDT

With Canadian wildfires, Fox News follows its COVID playbook

06/08/23

Fox News host Jesse Watters says it’s “normal” for the Northeastern United States to be engulfed in smoke from Canadian wildfires

06/08/23

no lnx twit vid

With Canadian wildfires, Fox News follows its COVID playbook

Fox guest on hazardous smoke: “There's no health risk. … Particulate matter is very fine soot. It's just carbon particles — they're innocuous.”

Special PROGRAMS

CLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY MATT GERTZ

PUBLISHED 06/08/23

Fox News hosts and guests and other right-wing media figures are minimizing the public health risk of the cloud of particulate matter from Canadian forest fires that descended on much of the United States this week and mocking people for taking steps to protect themselves.

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The coverage is reminiscent of Fox’s disastrous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly its early days, when the network downplayed the potential danger posed by the virus.

Smoke from wildfires in Ontario and Quebec inundated the Midwest and East Coast on Wednesday. Major metropolises were under hazardous air quality warnings, and a reddish-orange haze choked New York City, which at one point had the lowest air quality of any major city in the world. On Thursday, the smoke-filled air is expected to spread further into the Midwest and South even as conditions improve in the Northeast.

Scientists say such wildfires are becoming larger and more frequent as “forests around the world increasingly dry out amid the warming climate,” a fact calmly observed by Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal but furiously derided by his Fox employees.

Many major news outlets published reports noting that experts recommend people in affected areas wear high-quality masks to prevent health problems caused by the smoke. Those can include “trouble breathing, burning eyes, dizziness, headache or nausea,” particularly among high-risk populations including children, seniors, and people with respiratory problems including asthma. As Fox medical correspondent Dr. Janette Nesheiwat put it during a Wednesday appearance on Fox News Tonight, “If you do have to go outside, an N-95 can help protect you from that large particulate matter.”

Nesheiwat has a lot of work to do within Fox’s own building if she hopes that message will sink in for its audience. Hosts elsewhere on the network treated the idea of wearing masks in response to the wildfire smoke as a punch line.

On Wednesday afternoon, Jeanine Pirro presented the notion as a left-wing conspiracy, saying, “Democrats are pumping upclimate hysteriaand bringing back, you guessed it, mask insanity.” That night, Sean Hannity mocked “young, healthy people” for putting on masks, Jesse Watters lashed out at government officials for recommending their use, and Laura Ingraham claimed they “seem a little giddy to be back in the masks” and arepromoting “panic porn.”

In fact, Fox’s influential hosts repeatedly downplayed the idea that the wildfire smoke poses any health risk at all.

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“I keep reading and hearing reports and people being interviewed — 'I had a hard time breathing' — and I'm like, I'm walking in the same place you're walking in and I don't feel a thing, and I'm trying to understand, and my -- I work out regularly, so I think I'm relatively in tune with my body,” Hannity said. “I think if it was difficult -- if I was having difficulty breathing, I would notice. But these are young people saying this. Are they all snowflakes?”

“Yes,” OutKick host Charly Arnolt replied. “I think people just like to make a big deal out of nothing.”

“Everybody is saying stay inside, but I didn't listen,” Watters said at the top of his show over the chyron “Jesse Braves ‘Hazardous’ Air Quality.”

“Why? Because I love you,” he continued. “I came into the city for you tonight. I braved the smoke so you could watch your favorite show. The air quality is hazardous. ‘Worse than 9/11.’ But, I said, I don't care. The show must go on.”

Ingraham decided that the perspective her viewers needed to hear about the potential health impacts of smoke on the respiratory system was that of Steve Milloy, a notorious climate denier and former cigarette and coal lobbyist who told them they had nothing to fear.

“Steve, no one's denying it is unpleasant. My eyes are pretty itchy and watery, yesterday and a little bit today, and it might go on for a couple more days,” Ingraham said after introducing her guest. “But is this wholly out of the ordinary?”

“No. This happens anytime there's a wildfire in the West. I mean, it's unusual in the East. Look, the air is ugly, it's unpleasant to breathe, and for a lot of people, they getanxietyover it. But the reality is there's no health risk,” Milloy replied. “We have this kind of air in India and China all the time — no public health emergency.” (Both countries reportedly see more than 1 million premature deaths a year from air pollution.)

“This doesn't kill anybody, this doesn't make anybody cough, this is not a health event,” he further explained.

:{

}:

“Particulate matter is very fine soot. It's just carbon particles — they’re innocuous,” Milloy later added. “There's nothing in them. They have no effect.”

Video

CitationFrom the June 7, 2023, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle

Meanwhile, at Fox’s cable news competitor Newsmax, host Greg Kelly highlighted the upside of the hazardous levels of smoke blanketing New York City. “I'll tell you, it actually smells like wood smoke. It's not an unpleasant odor, to be honest,” he said. “It is pretty, it actually is pretty. It's a beautiful, interesting aura the city has right now.”

The modern right-wing media ecosystem is defined less by its ideology than its grievances. Popular figures within that milieu,for reasons financial and partisan, despise Democrats, liberals, experts, and the mainstream press, which they consider one and the same, and reflexively oppose whatever those hated entities support.

That reflexive opposition became lethal when COVID-19 spread across the United States. Fox News hosts initially told their viewers, incorrectly, that the virus was no more deadly than the flu and urged them to treat it as a Democratic hoax to damage President Donald Trump. Later, they endorsed untested and ineffective COVID-19 “cures” while downplaying the effectiveness of masks, social distancing, and vaccines.

This irresponsible coverage assuredly led to the deaths of Fox viewers. But virtually no one at the network was held accountable for their actions during a public health crisis, so now they are following the same playbook.

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Related

Sean Hannity mocks New Yorkers for wearing masks to protect themselves from wildfire smoke

06/07/23

Fox News host Jeanine Pirro calls it “insanity” to wear a mask to protect yourself from wildfire smoke

06/07/23

Fox News' Jesse Watters attacks government officials for suggesting masking to protect against wildfire smoke

06/07/23

6 23

canada east and west coast?

https://www.alternet.org/no-end-in-sight-wildfires/

an 4 22

The historic drought plaguing California and other Western states is showing no signs of letting up. Record high temperatures and erratic precipitation patterns have put millions of Americans at risk of running out of fresh water, and the longer that elected leaders stall on curbing the nation's dependence on fossil fuels, the risks to lives and livelihoods increase dramatically with each passing year.

The data is alarming, Dr. Andrew Schwartz, the lead scientist at the Central Sierra Snow Lab's station center at the University of California Berkeley, wrote in Monday's New York Times.

'This past week, I joined teams of other scientists gathering the most important measurements of the Sierra Nevada snowpack from over 265 sites throughout the state. Typically, this measurement marks the transition from snow accumulation season to the melt season and contains the most snow of any measurement throughout the year," Schwartz said in his editorial. "The 2022 results, however, confirmed what those of us monitoring the state’s drought had feared: California’s snowpack is now at 39 percent of its average, or 23 percent lower than at the same point last year. This signals a deepening of the drought — already the worst in the western United States in 1,200 years — and another potentially catastrophic fire season for much of the West."

Normally, Schwartz said, droughts are defined by prolonged periods without rain or snow. But the current situation is different, he noted, because of the impact of human-caused climate change.

"As more frequent and large wildfires and extended dry periods batter the land, our most important tools for managing water are becoming less and less accurate. At the same time, our reliance on these models to try to make the most of the little water we have is becoming more and more problematic," he pointed out.

Those ballooning discrepancies mean that residents of affected regions lack the necessary means to adequately prepare.

"Droughts may last for several years or even over a decade with varying degrees of severity. During these types of extended droughts, soil can become so dry that it soaks up all new water, which reduces runoff to streams and reservoirs. Soil can also become so dry that the surface becomes hard and repels water, which can cause rainwater to pour off the land quickly and cause flooding. This means we no longer can rely on relatively short periods of rain or snow to completely relieve drought conditions the way we did with past droughts," wrote Schwartz.

"Many storms with near record-breaking amounts of rain or snow would be required in a single year to make a significant dent in drought conditions," he continued. "October was the second snowiest and December was the snowiest month on record at the snow lab since 1970 thanks to two atmospheric rivers that hit California. But the exceptionally dry November and January to March periods have left us with another year of below-average snowpack, rain and runoff conditions."

As the planet becomes ever warmer, "this type of feast-or-famine winter with big storms and long, severe dry periods is expected to increase," Schwartz added, noting that "as a result, we’ll need multiple above-average rain and snow years to make up the difference rather than consecutive large events in a single year."

But chronically dry conditions are only half of the equation. Wildfires – which have escalated in frequency, intensity, and size – also have profound effects on the relationship between water and soil.

Those infernos, Schwartz explained, "cause distinct changes in the way that snow melts and that water, including rain, runs off the landscape. The loss of forest canopy from fires can result in greater wind speeds and temperatures, which increase evaporation and decrease the amount of snow water reaching reservoirs."

Fire 'also alters soil properties and can create flash flooding during intense periods of rain. These landscape changes, feast-or-famine precipitation patterns and increased demand on the water supply are making water management in the West a precarious and difficult task," he stressed.

Consequently, the "simplistic" models employed by government agencies "such as the National Weather Service’s Office of Hydrologic Development, the Army Corps of Engineers and the California Department of Water Resources" are perilously outdated and insufficient for tackling today's growing regional weather crises, Schwartz said. "Land surfaces, snowmelt patterns and the climate have all changed since many of these models were developed, which means they’re missing crucial pieces of today’s water puzzle. What’s prevented updates to the models for decades is shrinking funding for science and engineering."

This means that bracing for water shortages will be extremely challenging, calling into question the future habitability of large areas of the United States.

"We are looking down the barrel of a loaded gun with our water resources in the West," warned Schwartz. "Rather than investing in body armor, we’ve been hoping that the trigger won’t be pulled. The current water monitoring and modeling strategies aren’t sufficient to support the increasing number of people that need water. I’m worried about the next week, month, year, and about new problems that we’ll inevitably face as climate change continues and water becomes more unpredictable."

Schwartz then called upon lawmakers to "invest in updating our water models rather than maintaining the status quo and hoping for the best. Large-scale investment in the agencies that maintain and develop these models is paramount to preparing for the future of water in the West."

Like water, time is a precious resource that is quickly diminishing.

"Better water models ultimately mean more accurate management of water, and that will lead to greater water security and availability for the millions of people who now depend on the changing water supply. It is an investment in our future and, further, an investment in our continued ability to inhabit the water-scarce regions in the West," Schwartz concluded. "It’s the only way to ensure that we’re prepared when the trigger is pulled."

Read Schwartz's full editorial here (subscription required).

2 22

new big scary drought study on PBS, alternet; dry earth does not absorb wet years well so takes long to recover?

we will have more warm years than wet ones, trend is drier (but wet will be wetter?) mudslides?

[noaa says 1 ft sea level rise by 2050]

biden 1b$ disaster season

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/western-fires/

many graf

The Western U.S. appears headed for another dangerous fire season, and a new study shows that even high mountain areas once considered too wet to burn are at increasing risk as the climate warms.

Nearly two-thirds of the U.S. West is in severe to exceptional drought right now, including large parts of the Rocky Mountains, Cascades and Sierra Nevada. The situation is so severe that the Colorado River basin is on the verge of its first official water shortage declaration, and forecasts suggest another hot, dry summer is on the way.

Warm and dry conditions like these are a recipe for wildfire disaster.

In a new study published May 24, 2021, our team of fire and climate scientists and engineers found that forest fires are now reaching higher, normally wetter elevations. And they are burning there at rates unprecedented in recent fire history.

While some people focus on historical fire suppression and other forest management practices as reasons for the West's worsening fire problem, these high-elevation forests have had little human intervention. The results provide a clear indication that climate change is enabling these normally wet forests to burn.

As wildfires creep higher up mountains, another tenth of the West's forest area is now at risk, according to our study. That creates new hazards for mountain communities, with impacts on downstream water supplies and the plants and wildlife that call these forests home.

Map showing how high-elevation forest fires advanced uphill.

Forest fires advanced to higher elevations as the climate dried from 1984 to 2017. Every 200 meters equals 656 feet.

Mojtaba Sadegh, CC BY-ND

Rising fire risk in the high mountains

In the new study, we analyzed records of all fires larger than 1,000 acres (405 hectares) in the mountainous regions of the contiguous Western U.S. between 1984 and 2017.

The amount of land that burned increased across all elevations during that period, but the largest increase occurred above 8,200 feet (2,500 meters). To put that elevation into perspective, Denver – the mile-high city – sits at 5,280 feet, and Aspen, Colorado, is at 8,000 feet. These high-elevation areas are largely remote mountains and forests with some small communities and ski areas.

The area burning above 8,200 feet more than tripled in 2001-2017 compared with 1984-2000.

One of Colorado's largest wildfires, 2020's East Troublesome Fire, crossed the Continental Divide and was burning at elevations around 9,000 feet in October, when snow normally would have been falling.

AP Photo/David Zalubowski

Our results show that climate warming has diminished the high-elevation flammability barrier – the point where forests historically were too wet to burn regularly because the snow normally lingered well into summer and started falling again early in the fall. Fires advanced about 826 feet (252 meters) uphill in the Western mountains over those three decades.

The Cameron Peak Fire in Colorado in 2020 was the state's largest fire in its history, burning over 208,000 acres (84,200 hectares) and is a prime example of a high-elevation forest fire. The fire burned in forests extending to 12,000 feet (3,650 meters) and reached the upper tree line of the Rocky Mountains.

We found that rising temperatures in the past 34 years have helped to extend the fire territory in the West to an additional 31,470 square miles (81,500 square kilometers) of high-elevation forests. That means a staggering 11% of all Western U.S. forests – an area similar in size to South Carolina – are susceptible to fire now that weren't three decades ago.

Can't blame fire suppression here

In lower-elevation forests, several factors contribute to fire activity, including the presence of more people in wildland areas and a history of fire suppression.

In the early 1900s, Congress commissioned the U.S. Forest Service to manage forest fires, which resulted in a focus on suppressing fires – a policy that continued through the 1970s. This caused flammable underbrush that would normally be cleared out by occasional natural blazes to accumulate. The increase in biomass in many lower elevation forests across the West has been associated with increases in high-severity fires and megafires. At the same time, climate warming has dried out forests in the Western U.S., making them more prone to large fires.

On average, fires have spread 826 feet (252 meters) higher into the mountains in recent decades, exposing an additional 31,400 square miles (81,500 square kilometers) of forests to fire.

Mojtaba Sadegh, CC BY-ND

By focusing on high-elevation fires, in areas with little history of fire suppression, we can more clearly see the influence of climate change.

Most high-elevation forests haven't been subjected to much fire suppression, logging or other human activities, and because trees at these high elevations are in wetter forests, they historically have long return intervals between fires, typically a century or more. Yet they experienced the highest rate of increase in fire activity in the past 34 years. We found that the increase is strongly correlated with the observed warming.

High mountain fires create new problems

High-elevation fires have implications for natural and human systems.

High mountains are natural water towers that normally provide a sustained source of water to millions of people in dry summer months in the Western U.S. The scars that wildfires leave behind – known as burn scars – affect how much snow can accumulate at high elevations. This can influence the timing, quality and quantity of water that reaches reservoirs and rivers downstream.

High-elevation fires also remove standing trees that act as anchor points that normally stabilize the snowpack, raising the risk of avalanches.

The loss of tree canopy also exposes mountain streams to the Sun, increasing water temperatures in the cold headwater streams. Increasing stream temperatures can harm fish and the larger wildlife and predators that rely on them.

Climate change is increasing fire risk in many regions across the globe, and studies show that this trend will continue as the planet warms. The increase in fires in the high mountains is another warning to the U.S. West and elsewhere of the risks ahead as the climate changes.

Mojtaba Sadegh, Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering, Boise State University; John Abatzoglou, Associate Professor of Engineering, University of California, Merced, and Mohammad Reza Alizadeh, Ph.D. Student in Engineering, McGill University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/05042021/projected-surge-of-lightning-spells-more-wildfire-trouble-for-the-arctic/

with the Arctic warming at up to three times the pace of the global average, more lightning storms will invade the High North, igniting wildfires that release carbon dioxide and speeding the transition of flat mossy tundra to brush and forest landscapes that absorb more solar heat energy.

Yang Chen, an Earth scientist with theUniversity of California, Irvine and lead author of a study released today in the journal Nature Climate Change that projected the increases in lightning strikes, said the findings were somewhat unexpected, and intensify wildfire concerns in the High North because lightning is the main ignition source in the Arctic.

“The size of the lightning response surprised us because expected changes at mid-latitudes are much smaller,” he said. More lightning-caused fires would speed a vicious circle of climate-warming changes already under way in vast areas of tundra and permafrost across Siberia and Alaska, he added.

A surge in the frequency of large Arctic fires in the last five years spurred the research, which is based on 20 years of NASA satellite data showing the relationship between lightning and the climate, he said.

Linking that data with climate projections through 2100, the scientists estimated the number of lightning strikes will grow by about 40 percent for every 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit of warming. By late in the century, the IPCC projects the Arctic could warm by 4.5 degrees to 8 degrees Fahrenheit, depending on emissions.

The study also shows that the region that experiences lightning will shift, with future flash rates in the far northern tundra areas equal to the current rate in boreal forests, 300 miles to the south.

The increase may cause “a fire-vegetation feedback whereby more burning in Arctic tundra expedites the northward migration of boreal trees,” that will absorb more heat from the sun, accelerating the Arctic cycle of warming,” the authors wrote in the study.

More Lightning, More Fires, More Carbon in the Sky

The other part of the story is the vegetation is getting drier, and consequently, more flammable. That increases the odds that any individual lightning strike will ignite a fire. “If you have more lightning and drier fuels you will have more ignitions,” said co-author Sander Veraverbeke, a climate researcher with Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. “What I found quite intriguing is the relative increase becomes higher the farther north you go, lightning increasing 85 percent in boreal forests but 150 percent or more in tundra.”

In recent years, some of the largest, longest-burning wildfires ignited by lightning in Arctic tundra and forests burned deep into soils of carbon-rich peat, which have been documented to release large quantities of carbon dioxide when they combust. As much as 90 percent of the carbon emissions from an Arctic wildfire come from the smoldering soils, he said, with only a little bit coming from the burning trees.

“Burning peat can release 2.5 to 3.5 kilograms (5.5 to 7.7 pounds) of carbon per square meter of ground,” he said. “That’s a lot, two or three times as much as from a fire in the savanna or the Mediterranean.” Arctic fires can scar the land so deeply that emissions from the disturbed permafrost and peat continue for decades or even centuries.

“It takes a really long time to recover, if it even does recover,” he said, “and if not, it becomes a long-term net flux of carbon to the atmosphere, contributing to more global warming.”

In some parts of the tundra, shrubs and trees start to grow after a fire. While those plants do store carbon, the new growth can also warm the climate because the patchwork of shrubs and trees, which is darker than an unbroken blanket of white snow, absorbs more of the sun’s heat.

Related: Global Warming to Spur More Fires in Alaska, in Turn Causing More Warming

Michelle C. Mack, an Arctic ecologist at Northern Arizona University who was not involved in the study, said the new research highlights important consequences of some more profound changes a rapidly warming climate is bringing to the Arctic, like treeline migration and permafrost thaw.

“I think that the lightning is a moderate worry, while the consequences for permafrost thaw are profound and should stimulate lots of worrying,” she said. Broadly, across northern Alaska and Canada, the dryness of vegetation is crucial to predicting fire severity and carbon emissions, she added. “If tundra is wet, cold, and soggy, it doesn’t matter how many lightning strikes hit it,” she said. “It is unlikely to burn.”

Study co-author Jim Randerson, an Earth scientist at the University of California, Irvine, said tundra fires burn layers of moss and organic debris that insulate the frozen ground below them. So even deep soils that don’t burn can thaw and release carbon dioxide and methane, “which will drive even more warming,” he said.

The new findings bolster other recent research on Arctic lightning, said Rick Thoman, an Alaska climate specialist with the University of Alaska Fairbanks who was not involved in the study. The potential for fire-sparking lightning strikes will increase most in tundra zones where fire is still mostly a stranger, he said. Another study published last month in Geophysical Research Letters showed a tripling of Arctic lightning strikes globally between 2010 and 2020, increasing “linearly with the temperature anomaly.”

Related: Alaska Chokes on Wildfires as Heat Waves Dry Out the Arctic

Challenges and Opportunities for Firefighters

The series of large fires in Alaska and Siberia the last five years were all preceded by weeks and months of record heat that turned normally soggy bogs into tinder for the lightning storms. While the new study highlights the double whammy that global warming is for Arctic wildfire ignitions—supercharging the atmosphere with moisture and warmth needed for lightning storms while at the same time drying out the surface of the tundra in some areas—it also hints at some opportunities to better confront the fires. ...

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/understanding-the-norths-climate-change-trifecta/

Arctic Circle became unbelievably hot on June 20. In the Russian community of Verkhoyansk, temperatures topped 38C, marking what may be the highest air temperature ever recorded within the Arctic.

The temperatures at Verkhoyansk are part of a larger trend across western Russia this summer, with small communities throughout the region reporting temperatures that are smashing local records that have stood for decades. During the latter half of June, surface temperatures throughout western Siberia were as much as 10C above historical norms, marking one of the hottest Junes on record despite relatively cool temperatures at the start of the month.

For scientists the world-over these record-breaking temperatures are alarm bells, demonstrating the kind of extreme weather events we can expect to see more often if climate change continues unchecked. However, it is the long-term fallout from modern heat waves that has many northern scientists deeply concerned, as they will affect our planet for decades to come.

The fires that follow

During heat waves surface temperatures soar, often triggering a chain of fire-promoting weather conditions including extreme thunderstorms. These thunderstorms have hundreds of lightning strikes that can ignite the dry soils and vegetation that serve as fuel for fire.

In northern regions like the boreal biome, these fire-promoting conditions can cause large-scale wildfires that burn millions of hectares of forest in a single summer.

Historically, humanity has considered wildfire a true disaster and spent considerable resources to suppress them. We now understand that despite the initial loss of established trees and soils, wildfires are a natural and integral part of the boreal biome.

Modern wildfires, however, are occurring with increasing frequency and intensity, covering a larger area due weather events like severe heat waves. In extreme fire years, these modern wildfires can burn deep into the organic soils that characterize boreal forests. These carbon-rich soils have been built up over thousands of years and hold approximately 30 per cent of the world's terrestrial carbon stocks.

When fires burn deep into soils or return too quickly to a forest, they lose their “ancient carbon" stocks. Instead of being held in the ground these ancient carbon reserves are combusted and released back into the atmosphere, increasing the carbon levels. The higher carbon dioxide levels generated by wildfires intensify climate change impacts like heat waves, which can lead to further wildfires, forming a powerful “positive feedback" loop with climate change.

While these trends alone are alarming, northern researchers warn that the fallout from heat waves won't stop when the fires burn out. In northern regions where the soils historically stay frozen year-round, a whole new set of changes are beginning to take form.

When permafrost perishes

Permafrost forms on the landscape when soil materials remain below freezing for two or more consecutive years. In some areas permafrost forms in direct response to a cold climate.

As one moves further south, however, permafrost becomes increasingly dependent on the presence of thick organic soils, surface vegetation and a shady overstorey to survive the warm summer months. In those cases, the ecosystem acts like a giant protective blanket, limiting the sun's heat that is able to reach the frozen permafrost materials below.

Carbon-rich peat burns readily, making it good fuel for lightning-caused fires.

(U.S. National Parks Service, Western Arctic National Parklands)]

When permafrost ecosystems burn, the wildfire consumes these protective layers, often triggering permafrost thaw. This can occur gradually, with the thawed layer expanding slowly over decades, or abruptly, with the thawed layer expanding dramatically over years. The land may cave in or sink, plant communities may change completely and local water flows may be rerouted.

In both cases, the loss of permafrost makes the massive Arctic carbon reserves more vulnerable to loss. With gradual thaw microbes are able to break down and release the previously frozen carbon back to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. In contrast, abrupt thaw commonly occurs in ice-rich permafrost resulting in warmer but also wetter soils. Under these conditions decomposition still occurs but carbon is commonly returned to the atmosphere as methane, a greenhouse gas approximately 30 times more powerful at trapping heat than carbon dioxide.

All this lost carbon may make the positive feedback with climate change even stronger. While scientists are working to understand if the vegetation that grows after permafrost thaw is able to offset all the carbon released during decomposition, most current models indicate that permafrost thaw will ultimately be a source of atmospheric carbon.

Read more: More frequent fires could dramatically alter boreal forests and emit more carbon]

Researchers are coming to understand just how tightly linked these disturbances caused by climate change really are. What appears as an individual event — heat wave, forest fire or permafrost thaw — has cascading ramifications through time and space in the Arctic, potentially serving as the seed crystal for the next disturbance in the coming months, years or even decades that follow.

Heat waves, wildfires and permafrost thaw represent an environmental trifecta that are inherently linked and drive change in the occurrence and intensity of one another.

Catherine Dieleman, Research associate, Department of Integrative Biology, University of Guelph

This article is republished from The Conversation

https://www.democracynow.org/2020/9/24/headlines/climate_crisis_drives_record_fires_in_brazil_western_united_states

brazil’s National Center for the Prevention of Forest Fires reports over 7 million acres of the world’s largest wetland have burned in unprecedented fires exacerbated by the climate crisis. The Pantanal fires have consumed 50% more land this year than have burned along the West Coast of the United States.

In California, the Creek Fire has become the largest single-source fire in state history, burning nearly 300,000 acres in Fresno and Madera counties. Five of California’s six largest fires in recorded history are still raging, including the record-shattering August Complex fire, which is now at 860,000 acres with 40% containment.

TOPICS:

Wildfires

Climate Crisis

Brazil

California

an 920

first presidential debate set to ignore humanity’s most pressing issue — even as the planet is burning

Jake Johnson / Common Dreams September 23, 2020

Even as devastating wildfires across the U.S. West Coast and rapidly shrinking Arctic sea ice offer alarming evidence of the reality and immediacy of the climate crisis, the planetary emergency was apparently deemed not…

==

aha fires in Australia a while back and in West now 9/20 quite tangible proof agw is real and will affect Am/white ppl in neat term, so must be negated w/ BS.

CNN's Brianna Keilar dispelled Fox News misinformation on COVID-19 and wearing masks: "Misinformation is a virus unto itself and Fox News is the vector."

The Daily Show looked at how QAnon conspiracy theorists were spreading lies about California wildfires.

The BBC reported about how rising sea levels forced a village to relocate. NBC's Today talked to a climate scientist about how the crisis is fueling record wildfires in the western United States and an incredible hurricane season in the Atlantic. Greta Thunberg called outAmerican news media for ignoring the crisis.

This Week In Dumb

Tucker Carlson claimed coronavirus is known as COVID “to obscure any relationship” between the virus and China.

President Donald Trump gave a speech where he said a radical movement is trying to destroy America, and suggested schools and leftist educators are indoctrinating students. Fox anchor Bill Hemmer called it "sober and straightforward"

Rush Limbaugh ignorantly attacked Joe Biden for talking about his son Beau’s military service and death from cancer.

Right-wing media tried to force out Nashville’s mayor based on a wild misreading of coronavirus emails. The misleading story originated with a Sinclair media station before spreading across right-wing media to include Fox News. The original story has been retracted.

Warning of a left-wing coup, Trumpist media have been prepping their audience for election unrest.

Trump wants to “terminate” the payroll tax that funds Social Security. The Washington Post "Fact Checker" gave him a pass, arguing that because he probably can’t do it, then it doesn’t count as a plan.

Fox News hyped another specious and debunked attack on ActBlue, a left-wing payment processor site.

Mark Levin asserted Democrats are “pushing the mail-in vote” to “burn down this country like they've burned down their cities."

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany deflected after being asked about Trump confidant Roger Stone’s call for Trump to seize Nevada ballots. Stone meanwhile doubled down on his call for martial law after Election Day.

A Fox News anchor apologized for interrupting Newt Gingrich's anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.

Fox anchor Martha MacCallum defended Trump holding indoor rallies during COVID-19 pandemic. MacCallum said “Those people went in of their own accord. They were not made to go in there.”

Fox News attempted to spin Trump’s disastrous ABC town hall as an “ambush.”

Joe Rogan spread a debunked attack blaming left-wing activists for wildfires. After there was a large outrage, he apologized the next day.

NBC News contributorHugh Hewitt: “The lockdown ... is other than slavery the most numerous imposition on people's individual liberty.”

heartland

SEPTEMBER 12, 2020

Real Climate Science from David Legates Seems to Scare the Media, Will it Scare NOAA?

By Jim Lakely

SEPTEMBER 11, 2020

Cut Carbon Dioxide, Cause Misery

By H. Sterling Burnett

SEPTEMBER 11, 2020

Separating Fact From Fiction About Wildfires

By H. Sterling Burnett

SEPTEMBER 2, 2020

CLINTEL challenges IChemE climate scaremongering

By David Wojick

==

not sure this is the takedown that left hopes? he might be said to referring to cooler weather? tho that not matter of sci knowing

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trump-faceplants-with-a-scientifically-illiterate-claim-about-climate-change/

no lnx twt

trump faceplants with a scientifically illiterate claim about climate change

Written by Cody Fenwick September 14, 2020

[California Natural Resources Secretary @WadeCrowfoot: "We've had temperatures explode this summer..."

President Trump: "It'll start getting cooler, you just watch."

Crowfoot: "I wish science agreed with you."

Trump: "I don't think science knows, actually."]

President Donald Trump refused to accept the scientific consensus on the existence of climate change at a meeting about the California wildfires, preferring to blame the crisis on poor forest management.

California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot spoke about the issue, addressing the president directly and calling out the need for federal leadership.

“As the governor said, we’ve had temperatures explode this summer. You may have learned that we broke a world record in the Death Valley, 130 degrees,” he said.

At this point, Trump smirked and look away from Crowfoot.

:{

}:

“But even in greater LA, 120-plus degrees. And we’re seeing the warming trend make our summers warmer, but also our winters warmer as well,” Crow foot continued. “So I think one area of mutual agreement and priority is vegetation management. But I think we want to work with you to really recognize the changing climate and what it means to our forests. And actually work together with that science, that science is going to be key. Because if we ignore that science and put our heads in the sand and think it’s all about vegetation management, we’re not going to succeed together protecting California.”

“OK,” Trump said. “It’ll start getting cooler. You just watch.”

“I wish science agreed with you,” said Crowfoot.

:{

}:

“I don’t think science knows, actually,” Trump said, laughing.

It’s was an embarrassing display of ignorance. The science of climate change is extremely well-established, and while uncertainty remains, the trend we’ve been headed in is clear. As the chart from NASA below shows, the increase in temperatures is a decades-long trend scientists have observed since the ’60s.

“The decade that just ended is clearly the warmest decade on record,” NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies Director Gavin Schmidt said in January in a statement naming 2019 as the second-warmest year ever recorded. “Every decade since the 1960s clearly has been warmer than the one before.”

Trump’s comments were particularly galling because he claimed to know the temperatures will actually get cooler. This is bolder than even many climate denialists, who often say that future temperatures are wildly uncertain. No, Trump’s claim is not only that climate scientists have no idea what they’re talking about, but that he somehow has enough information that contradicts the profession’s broad consensus. It requires a stunning level of arrogance to make this claim.

But it is consistent with what Trump has probably been hearing on Fox News. Host Tucker Carlson has repeatedly cast doubt on climate change, including in connection with the California wildfires. In a recent broadcast, he said: “So are we climate change deniers if we point out that the state of California has failed to implement meaningful deforestation measures that might’ve dramatically slowed the spread of these wildfires? Does that make us deniers? Because in 2018, a state oversight agency in California found that years of poor or non-existent forest management policies in the Sierra Nevada Forests, had contributed to the fires.”

Carlson didn’t mention, however, that the very report he was referring to explicitly listed poor management policies alongside climate change as the key causes of the crisis.

==

https://www.mediamatters.org/broadcast-networks/corporate-broadcast-tv-news-fails-make-crucial-connection-between-record

Corporate broadcast TV news fails to make crucial connection between record-breaking California wildfires and climate crisis

09/10/20 2:07 PM EDT

==

he and tuck both mock CA agw

Limbaugh falsely claims “it’s absolute bunk” that climate change has worsened the California wildfires

09/11/20 5:53 PM EDT

==

https://theconversation.com/coping-with-western-wildfires-5-essential-reads-145965

==

last year dump water and rake forest?

American west is burning — and Trump doesn’t care

Jessica Corbett / Common Dreams September 11, 2020

Climate action advocates and journalists are calling out President Donald Trump’s silence for nearly three weeks, as historic wildfires have torn across the western United States, devastating communities that were already struggling…

only 4% of wildfire segments on ABC, CBS, and NBC mentioned climate change

August was a turbulent month for wildfire activity in the Western U.S. California alone suffered through two of its largest wildfires in recent history, and there are more than 80 other large, active fires burning in 15 states. Record-breaking temperatures and climate change are playing a role in the size and scale of the fires, and the coronavirus pandemic is complicating efforts to contain the blazes and safely evacuate those in their path.

Media Matters found that ABC, CBS, and NBC aired a combined 114 segments about wildfires on their morning and evening news shows from August 1 to August 31. Only five of the 114 wildfire segments -- just 4% of them -- mentioned climate change.

==

icn 820

California and Colorado Fires May Be Part of a Climate-Driven Transformation of Wildfires Around the Globe

BY: MICHAEL KODAS

Wildfires from Australia to Siberia are not just larger, hotter and faster, but burning in areas and seasons where they were previously rare

icn

with Wild and Dangerous Weather All Around, Republicans Stay Silent on Climate Change

BY: MARIANNE LAVELLE

GOP leaders ignored the topic. They also ignored the concerns of some Republicans—especially younger voters—who want to address global warming.

Fires May be in California, but the Smoke, and its Health Effects, Travel Across the Country

BY: MICHAEL KODAS AND EVELYN NIEVES

Fine particulate matter and ozone from wildfire smoke are associated with heart and lung diseases, compromised immune systems and even vulnerability to Covid-19.

Read More

Paying for Extreme Weather: Wildfire, Hurricanes, Floods and Droughts Quadrupled in Cost Since 1980

BY: BOB BERWYN

A new report looks at the price of climate-linked natural disasters and how global warming is making them worse.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/hedge-fund-3-billion-richer-thanks-to-wager-on-wildfire-insurance-claims-what-stage-of-capitalism-is-this

social and environmental toll of the unfolding fire catastrophe in California—where over 100,000 people have been displaced, seven have died, and approximately 1.2 million acres have burned since August 15—is incalculable, but hedge fund Baupost Group has found a way to turn the state’s devastating wildfire epidemic over recent years into profits for investors.

After wagering on insurance claims against PG&E, Baupost received more than $3 billion in July, Bloomberg reported Friday.

According to Bloomberg:

The payout yielded Baupost’s biggest profit generator last month and represented a sizable markup from what the firm had anticipated, it told investors Thursday. The fund bought $6.8 billion of subrogation claims against PG&E, court documents show.

Baupost acquired some of the claims at about 35 cents on the dollar, Bloomberg previously reported, so its profit on the trade could have approached $1 billion. But the gains were partly offset by losses on the firm’s equity holdings in the utility company, one of the people said, asking not to be identified because the information is private.

The relationship between PG&E, insurers, and investors such as Baupost began last year. PG&E’s electrical network—rendered vulnerable by a lackluster commitment to risk reduction—has been implicated in multiple fires across California in the past five years. Facing $30 billion in liabilities stemming from a series of fires in 2017 and 2018 that killed over 100 people and destroyed tens of thousands of buildings, the utility company declared bankruptcy in 2019 and announced an $11 billion settlement with a group of insurance carriers and investors, including Baupost.

insurers sell subrogation claims to investors at a discount because they enjoy the certainty of being paid right away, but in the process they also lose the right to sue to recuperate damages endured by policyholders.

While fire victims across California—and elsewhere in the country—continue to suffer the impacts of increasingly destructive wildfires, the ability of hedge funds to profit from such calamities provoked critics of the financial system and its perverse incentives. In his assessment of a situation in which Wall Street firms have perfected their lucrative approach to disaster management, journalist David Sirota tweeted:

==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/firenado-national-weather-service-issues-americas-first-ever-warning-for-a-fire-tornado/

year 2020 continued to make history as a terrible time as America received its first-ever warning of firenadoes.

“The Reno office of the National Weather Service warned Northern California of a fiery tornado Saturday afternoon that had sprung up near a large, fast-moving wildfire in the Sierra. That’s right: A firenado,” the Sacramento Bee reported Saturday. “It is the first known issuance of a tornado warning for the climate phenomenon since it burst into California’s consciousness during the deadly Carr Fire in 2018.”

Indeed, Washington Post meteorologist Matthew Cappucci confirmed it was a first.

“For the first time in history, a tornado warning has been issued for a likely fire tornado,” Cappucci reported. “These are not ‘firewhirls.’ This is a rotating smoke plume being ingested into a pyrocumulonimbus cloud that could produce a bonafide fire-induced tornado. Tornadic wind speeds.”

==

https://grist.org/climate/arctic-fires-released-more-carbon-in-two-months-than-scandinavia-will-all-year/

8/20

Almost exactly a year ago, we reported that June and July wildfires in the Arctic had released as much carbon as Belgium does in an entire year — an unprecedented summertime burn that would amplify the region’s climate change–fueled fever. But everything, apparently, is worse in 2020, including the climate toll of this year’s Arctic fires, which makes 2019 seem like a warm-up.

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Data released Monday by the European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) shows that in June and July, Arctic fires released 204 megatons of carbon dioxide, far exceeding last year’s 140 megatons and eclipsing the annual emissions of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland combined. With unusually high temperatures continuing to bake the Arctic, the flames show no immediate signs of dying down. Combined with the fact that some of this year’s fires appear to be burning into carbon-rich peat soils, the ultimate climate impact of this year’s fire season could be much greater than what scientists are currently estimating.

While last year’s Arctic fires spanned both Alaska and Siberia, this year, Siberia is the definitive star of the show. Following months of warm weather, fires began flaring up in northern Siberia around the start of May. The blazes escalated significantly in mid-June as a brutal heat wave descended on Russia’s northeastern Sakha Republic, causing the town of Verkhoyansk to sweat through the Arctic’s first-ever 100-degree F day. By the end of the month, Arctic fires had pumped 59 megatons of carbon dioxide into the air, eclipsing the 53 megatons emitted in June 2019 and setting a new high-water mark for Arctic fire emissions in records going back to 2003.

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see disaster capitalism eg ashbritt

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https://theconversation.com/wildfires-can-poison-drinking-water-heres-how-communities-can-be-better-prepared-141430

plastic benzene

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820

ew

Apple Fire Forces 7,800 to Seek Shelter in Coronavirus-Ravaged California

WILDFIRES

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7/20 ariz?

California, Washington and British Columbia Unite to Protect Forests From Wildfires

FORESTS

ew

https://yyy.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/29/megadrought-us-south-west-fires-water-research

US south-west in grip of historic 'megadrought', research finds

Intensified by climate change, the current 20-year arid period is one of the worst on record, with wide-ranging effects

Samuel Gilbert

@samuelgilbert1

Fri 29 May 2020 05.30 EDTLast modified on Fri 29 May 2020 08.31 EDT

The Enterprise Bridge passes over a section of Lake Oroville that is nearly dry on 19 August 2014 in Oroville, California. The region is in the grip of a 20-year megadrought, research suggests.

When Ken Pimlott began fighting US wildfires at the age of 17, they seemed to him to be a brutal but manageable natural phenomenon.

Dust bowl conditions of 1930s US now more than twice as likely to reoccur

Read more

“We had periodic [fire] sieges in the 80s, but there were breaks in between,” said Pimlott, the former head of the California department of forestry and fire protection. But no longer. “That doesn’t really happen any more. Now you can’t even blink” between fires, he said. “We’re seeing the kinds of fires we have never seen before.”

A recent study published in the journal Science helps explains why, revealing that the south-western US is in the grip of a 20-year megadrought – a period of severe aridity that is stoking fires, depleting reservoirs and putting a strain on water supplies to the states of the region.

“You see impacts everywhere, in snowpacks, reservoir levels, agriculture, groundwater and tree mortality,” said co-author Benjamin Cook, of Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory. “Droughts are these amazingly disruptive events. Water sits at the foundation of everything.”

Researchers compared soil moisture records from 2000-2019 to other drought events from the past 1,200 years. They found that the current period is worse than all but one of five megadroughts identified in the record.

Unlike past megadroughts – brought on by natural fluctuations in the Earth’s climate – this current drought has been heavily influenced by human-induced climate change, “pushing what would have been a moderate drought in south-western North America into megadrought territory”, according to the study.

“Global warming has made the drought much worse than it otherwise would have been,” said Cook. “We estimate 30-50% is attributed to climate change.”

According to Nasa, 19 of the 20 warmest years on record have occurred since 2001. Climate change, if unchecked, will hit the American south-west particularly hard.

A major concern is the megadrought’s impact on water supplies in the region. It has experienced explosive growth – half of the nation’s fastest-growing states are in the south-west – made possible by elaborate river diversion projects and massive reservoirs.

Over the past two decades, drought-depleted rivers, and population growth has led to steep declines in two of the nation’s largest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, on which which tens of millions of people depend.

Water deliveries from the Colorado River are also being rationed this year, for the first time.

For Pimlott, this drought has manifested itself in 21st-century fires unlike any he had previously witnessed. In 2018, a fire tornado destroyed part of one northern California town, and almost the entire community of Paradise, California, was wiped out by a blaze that claimed 85 victims.

“Were seeing more intense fires, with longer durations,” he said.

==

4/20

1 in 10 Children Affected by Bushfires Is Indigenous. We’ve Been Ignoring Them for Too Long

https://www.ecowatch.com/air-pollution-cardiac-arrests-2644941669.html

Researchers now say there is "no safe level" of air pollution exposure after a large-scale study found a correlation between exposure to fine particle matter, known as PM2.5, and cardiac arrests, according to the The Sydney Morning Herald.

The researchers found that exposure to PM2.5 that even fell below global standards was hazardous, suggesting that tighter regulations and cleaner energy is required, according to the study, which was published in the journal Lancet Planetary Health.

Scientists from the University of Sydney led the study, which analyzed air quality in Japan against 249,372 cases of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests. They concluded that even low-level exposure was associated with an increased risk of cardiac arrest for people over 65, as The Sydney Morning Herald reported.

The researchers noticed that the risk of cardiac arrest grew by up to 4 percent for every increase of 10 units in the PM2.5 levels.

"Our study supports recent evidence that there is no safe level of air pollution — finding an increased risk of cardiac arrest despite air quality generally meeting the standards,"said report author professor Kazuaki Negishi from the University of Sydney School of Medicine, as The Canberra Times reported.

Negishi pointed out that previous research into air pollution and acute cardiac events had been inconsistent, particularly at PM2.5 levels that met the World Health Organization guidelines. However, the large scale of this study meant that past inconsistencies could be addressed.

"Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest is a major medical emergency – with less than one in 10 people worldwide surviving these events – and there has been increasing evidence of an association with the more acute air pollution, or fine particulate matter such as PM2.5," said Negishi in a University of Sydney statement. "We analyzed almost a quarter of a million cases of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests and found a clear link with acute air pollution levels."

The findings are troubling for Australia, which has seen its usually pristine air plummet in quality due to the recent bushfires.In the study, more than 90 per cent of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests occurred at levels below the Australian standard of 25 micrograms per cubic meter. Put another way, the air quality levels ranked as "fair," "good" or "very good" under Australian standards, as the The Sydney Morning Herald reported. The U.S. and Japanese standard is less strict at 35 micrograms per cubic meter.

Australia had a particularly awful year, with air quality in Canberra ranking as the worst in the world on Dec. 31. Sydney had 81 days of hazardous, very poor or poor air quality in 2019, which was more days of bad air than the last decade combined, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.

The researchers expect the worsening air quality will lead to more heart attack fatalities in Australia, especially among older people.

"Given the fact that there is a tendency towards worsening air pollution – from increasing numbers of cars as well as disasters such as bushfires – the impacts on cardiovascular events, in addition to respiratory diseases and lung cancer – must be taken into account in health care responses," said Negishi in a university statement.

Unfortunately, the researchers did not identify a threshold that is safe for exposure to PM2.5. Instead, Negishi said that existing standards should be reevaluated.

"It might not be a good idea to continue to seek [a new] threshold, but try to continuously improve our air quality. If a threshold exists, it should be very, very close to zero," Negishi said, as The Sydney Morning Herald reported.

==

https://www.mediamatters.org/murdoch-family/fox-news-prime-time-avoided-covering-australian-bushfires-until-murdoch-paper

no lnx pix vid

Fox News prime-time avoided covering Australian bushfires until a Murdoch paper minimized the role of climate change

Instead of engaging with the reality of climate change, Fox hosts latched on to a false narrative about arson

Special PROGRAMS

CLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY ALLISON FISHER & MADELINE PELTZ

PUBLISHED 01/21/20

According to a Media Matters review Fox News prime-time hosts completely ignored the devastating bushfires raging across Australia during the first three months of the crisis It was only after a Rupert Murdoch-owned Australian newspaper started pushing a misleading talking point about arson that Fox’s Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham picked up the story to distract from the role of climate change in accelerating the crisis.

Carlson has hosted one segment about the fires, referring to arson in Australia as “beyond” disgusting without mentioning the climate connection. Sean Hannity has not discussed the fires on air, but he tweeted a link to his own website pushing the false claim that nearly 200 people had been arrested for arson. And Laura Ingraham hosted two separate segments on arson in Australia.

The bushfires have taken the lives of at least 30 people, are threatening to push certain endangered species of animals into extinction, and have destroyed millions of acres of forest and residential areas. The link between climate change and the severity of the bushfires has been described as “scientifically undisputable.” In response, climate deniers have perpetuated a counter-narrative, casting arson as the primary culprit of the catastrophic fires. In reality, experts say “arson alone cannot explain the unprecedented blazes,” with one estimating “that only a handful of the hundreds of massive fires that have broken out in Australia since September were due to arson,” as NBC reported. That handful of fires were likely deliberately lit by a few dozen people -- 24 people are currently facing criminal charges -- and not a result of widespread arson, the red herring that climate deniers have intentionally spread.

Dale Dominey-Howes, a professor of hazard and disaster risk sciences at the University of Sydney, told HuffPost, “The majority of these bushfires have been generated by lightning strikes associated with weather and climate effects.” The fires then spread and burn more intensely due to conditions made possible by climate change.

Despite the evidence, Carlson, Hannity, and Ingraham have intentionally misled their audiences and Twitter followers by ignoring the climate connections and hyping the anecdotes about arson. This effort fits with the broader pattern of climate denial that has been prolific across Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, and it bolsters recent criticism about climate change coverage lobbed by his son James.

Tucker Carlson

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Citation From the January 8, 2020, edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight:

On January 8, Tucker Carlson hosted former Fox personality Anna Kooiman, reporting from the Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia, to discuss the impact of the bushfires on wildlife in the country. The segment irresponsibly did not mention climate change, but Kooiman did highlight arson arrests in New South Wales, which Carlson referred to as “beyond” disgusting.

Sean Hannity

Sean Hannity has not covered the fires in Australia on his show. However, he did tweet an article published to his own website titled “AUSTRALIA BURNING: Officials Charge Nearly 200 with Arson, Looting as Wildfires Rage.”

Laura Ingraham

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CitationFrom the January 6, 2020, edition of The Ingraham Angle:

Laura Ingraham has repeatedly pushed the arson talking point on her show. On January 6, she closed the program by claiming of the fires: “It was arson, perhaps not climate change.” Earlier in the program, frequent Ingraham guest Raymond Arroyo was upset about celebrities at the Golden Globes talking about climate change and the fires, and he noted that police had “arrested 12 people in Australia for those fires; they were blaming it on climate change -- wrong again.”

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CitationFrom the January 8, 2020, edition of The Ingraham Angle:

On January 8, Arroyo again misled viewers when he called commentary on the role of climate change in accelerating fires “incomplete reporting,” saying, “It’s not correct to say climate change caused these wildfires. The New [South] Wales Police Force in Australia report they’ve taken legal action against 180 people who lit fires or discarded a match on land. There’s a complicated story here -- the media only wants to report one half of it.”

Methodology

Media Matters searched the Nexis database for television transcripts with any of the terms “bushfires,” “blaze,” or “fires” within transcripts that contained the term “Australia” from September 1 through January 20 on Fox News. We analyzed Fox News’ prime-time programming (8 p.m. to 11 p.m. Eastern time), which includes The Ingraham Angle, Tucker Carlson Tonight, and Hannity.

We reviewed transcripts for any mention of “arson” or arrests for arson. We counted a segment as discussion of the Australia fires if it included significant discussion of the topic, weather reports that mention the fires, or news briefs that reported on the fires. We excluded topic teasers, defined as a short blip from the host that mentions a segment coming later in the broadcast.

Related

From the sidelines, James Murdoch slams climate denial in Murdoch properties. The problem is even worse than he lets on.

01/14/20 3:10 PM EST

Amid raging bushfire, Rupert Murdoch's Australian media empire turns a blind eye to climate crisis

01/06/20 3:32 PM EST

Murdoch's flagship Australian newspaper pushes climate denial as devastating bushfires rage

01/17/20 11:57 AM EST

==

In the wake of the Australian fires, climate crisis denialism reportedly got a big boost from Facebook.

ref

https://www.buzzfeed.com/hannahryan/facebook-australia-bushfires-climate-change-deniers-facebook

Numerous experts have linked the vast scale of Australia's bushfires to climate change, noting that unprecedented heat and drought created conditions for fires to flourish.

But as Australians choked on smoke and discovered their homes had been destroyed this summer, a different message was spreading on Facebook.

Counter-theories gained traction online that blamed the fires on arsonists, failed hazard reduction policies and even lasers designed to clear a path for a high-speed railway. These theories are untrue or misleading, and have been used to undermine the mainstream consensus on the role of climate change.

And Facebook — the platform conspiracists are using most effectively to muddy the waters or straight-up deny climate change — is doing little to stop the spread.[pix roos]

Australia's federal opposition leader Anthony Albanese, who has previously called out Facebook for failing to take down a doctored image of himself, criticised the platform's failure to police false information.

"What Australians dealing with the bushfire crisis need is information and support," Albanese told BuzzFeed News in a statement. "What they don’t need is rampant misinformation and conspiracy theories being peddled by far-right pages and politicians."

A BuzzFeed News analysis using social media tool CrowdTangle shows that during the worst of the fires, far-right, fringe and conspiratorial Facebook pages were enjoying unusual success by spreading content that misdirected blame away from climate change.

BuzzFeed News assembled a list of almost 100 Facebook pages that were sharing misleading information about climate science in the height of the bushfire crisis. Crowdtangle data shows that engagement for those pages escalated significantly just as the worst hit, on New Year's Eve.

==

spain pledge climate neutral 2050

www.reuters.com › article › us-spain-wildfire › wave-of-wildfires-in-s...

Wave of wildfires in Spain's Galicia cuts roads ... - Reuters

1.

Sep 6, 2019 - Wave of wildfires in Spain's Galicia cuts roads, villages evacuated. 1 Min Read. A forest fire is seen in Galicia, Spain September 5, 2019, in this ...

www.nytimes.com › 2017/10/16 › world › europe › portugal-spain-fires

Deadly Fires Sweep Portugal and Northern Spain - The New ...

Oct 16, 2017 - Forest fires burned across Portugal and northern Spain, fanned by strong ... in Chandebrito, a village in the northern Spanish region of Galicia.

120 ew

Ashutosh Pandey

Teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg is returning to the Swiss ski resort of Davos for the 2020 World Economic Forum with a strong and clear message: put an end to the fossil fuel "madness."

Thunberg's missive is aimed at, among others, U.S. President Donald Trump, who in the past has mocked the Swedish environmental campaigner, saying she has an "anger management problem." Trump, who is among the most prominent climate change skeptics, is returning to Davos after giving it a miss in 2019 due to a government shutdown.

It's the first time Trump and Thunberg would be present at the same event since last year's United Nations climate change summit in New York, where the teenager could be seen staring down the U.S. president as the two briefly crossed paths.

Later, Thunberg — named TIME magazine's Person of the Year 2019 — told the BBC that she "wouldn't have wasted [her] time" talking to Trump about the climate crisis at the UN event.

"Honestly, I don't think I would have said anything because obviously he's not listening to scientists and experts, so why would he listen to me," she said.

[vid]

'State of Emergency'

Thunberg, who famously told Davos participants last year that "our house is on fire," has, however, found support among the organizers of the World Economic Forum, including its81-year-old founder Klaus Schwab, who said the world is facing "a state of emergency."

"We do not want to reach the tipping point of irreversibility on climate change," Schwab told reporters on Tuesday. "We do not want the next generations to inherit a world which becomes ever more hostile and ever less habitable — just think of the wildfires in Australia," he said.

An annual risks survey published by the WEF on Wednesday put climate and other environmental threats ahead of risks posed by geopolitical tensions and cyberattacks. It's the first time that the survey found the top five long-term risks were all environmental, from extreme weather events to businesses and governments failing to mitigate and adapt to climate change....

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08012020/australia-wildfires-forest-tipping-points-climate-change-impact-wildlife-survival

As extreme wildfires burn across large swaths of Australia, scientists say we're witnessing how global warming can push forest ecosystems past a point of no return.

Some of those forests won't recover in today's warmer climate, scientists say. They expect the same in other regions scarred by flames in recent years; in semi-arid areas like parts of the American West, the Mediterranean Basin and Australia, some post-fire forest landscapes will shift to brush or grassland.

More than 17 million acres have burned in Australia over the last three months amid record heat that has dried vegetation and pulled moisture from the land. Hundreds of millions of animals, including a large number of koalas, are believed to have perished in the infernos. The survivors will face drastically changed habitats. Water flows and vegetation will change, and carbon emissions will rise as burning trees release carbon and fewer living trees are left to pull CO2 out of the air and store it.

In many ways, it's the definition of a tipping point, as ecosystems transform from one type into another.

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The surge of large, destructive forest fires from the Arctic to the tropics just in the last few years has shocked even researchers who focus on forests and fires and who have warned of such tipping points for years.

:{

}:

The projections were seen as remote, "something that would happen much farther in the future," said University of Arizona climate scientist David Breashers. "But it's happening now. Nobody saw it coming this soon, even though it was like a freight train.

:{

}:

"It's likely the forests won't be coming back as we know them."[end no lnx]

The link between global warming, forests and wildfires is multifaceted but very clear, said Nerilie Abram, a climate researcher at Australian National University.

"Increasing temperatures dry out fuel and lead to more days of extreme fire weather," she said. "The poleward shift of the Southern Hemisphere westerly winds is drawing winter rainfall away from southern Australia, causing a long-term drying trend that makes the landscape more vulnerable to burning."

The cycle feeds itself, she explained: Drought and loss of forests cause higher temperatures over the land and a lower humidity, which, in turn, worsens wildfire conditions. And there's no reason to think that a gradual temperature rise will cause a similar gradual increase in fire risk, she said, citing a recent study showing that incremental warming increases fire damage exponentially by drying out fuels.

"Each degree of warming has a bigger effect on forest fire than did the previous degree of warming," that study's lead author, Park Williams of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, wrote on Twitter when the study was released.

[pix A koala named Paul recovers from wildfire burns at Australia's Port Macquarie Koala Hospital on Nov. 29, 2019. Volunteers from the Koala Hospital have been working alongside National Parks and Wildlife Service crews searching for koalas following weeks of devastating bushfires. Credit: Nathan Edwards/Getty Images

In a recent Australian television interview, Pennsylvania State University climate scientistMichael Mann said the heartbreaking loss of irreplaceable forests in Australia is a clear sign of a climate tipping point playing out before our eyes.Similar scenarios are apparent in forests around the world, he said.

Some of the forests lost to the ongoing fires in Australia aren't likely to come back anytime soon, said Australian National University climate scientist Christopher Brack.

"These fires burning through the Southern Alps (in Australia) at the moment are re-burning alpine and mountain ash trees that were regenerating from fires less than 20 years ago," Brack said.In the warming climate, the current forests are likely to be replaced by brush and other shorter-lived and more flammable species that will intensify the fire cycle,he said.

[Smoke from wildfires in Australia's Alpine and Kosciuszko National Parks on Jan. 3, 2020, shows up clearly on satellite images. Melbourne's Port Phillip Bay is in the lower left corner. The Credit: NASA Worldview

On the world's current emissions path, with warming of about 3.5 degrees Celsius (6.3°F) by the end of the century, fire frequency is expected to increase on more than 60 percent of global land area, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned in a 2018 report that identified Southern Australia, along with Central and South America, South Africa and the U.S. West as at risk.

Human activity has also contributed to increased fire risk in other ways. Logging can dry up forests and make the remaining trees more susceptible to fire, and the building of more roads and residential areas in the forests means there is more chance of fires igniting from power lines or cars, as well as more property damage and people at risk when fires break out.

Mountain Forests and Even Rainforests Are Drying

Australian Cam Walker, a forest conservation advocate and volunteer firefighter, has been battling to keep the flames away from a resort village near the Mt. Hotham Ski Area.

"This is subalpine country dominated by snow gums, a type of eucalyptus. This area has been burnt three times in about 12 years, and snow gums have a limited ability to cope with repeated fire," he said.

[pix Burned trees covered the landscape across parts of the Blue Mountains northwest of Sydney in December 2019 as Australia experienced its hottest day on record, with the average high temperature nationwide reaching 107°F. Credit: Saeed Khan /AFP/Getty Images

The fires are also threatening some of the most ancient forests on Earth, relics from 180 million years ago, when all the planet's continents were joined in the super-continent of Gondwana. The moist Gondwana rainforests, with damp microclimates under a dense canopy, have little history of fires, but global warming is drying them out.

"We are seeing ever more of these areas burning because conditions are so dry. This has been happening also in relic sub-alpine vegetation in Tasmania, where we are witnessing more regular dry lightning strikes," Walker said.

"The costs to Australia of not acting on climate change will be catastrophic. Already scientists are warning that many ecosystems will collapse under high-emissions scenarios," he said.

[twy graf]

Research in recent years reinforces that view, said David Bowman, director of the Fire Centre Research Hub at the University of Tasmania.

"Global climate change is stressing vegetation much more than we realized. Stressed vegetation recovers more slowly and rapid changes from forest to non-forest are possible," he said. "Increased fire frequency reduces the capacity of forests to bounce back after recurrent fires."

Warming Also Drives Forest Die-Offs and Fire Risk in Other Ways

Even without fire, trees are dying around the world at increasing rates because of global warming.

During extreme heat events and droughts, air bubbles can form in their moisture transport systems, essentially choking them to death. Warming also increases outbreaks of tree-killing insects. And logging, as well as land-clearing fires in the Amazon are threatening to push that critical forest ecosystem past a tipping point with global implications for carbon cycling.

"Why are these trees in all these different regions dying at the same time when they've been around for such a long time? It's heartbreaking," said Breshears. "Ten years ago, I didn't think we'd be in this situation. I'm still kind of shocked myself at how much is occurring."

[pix: Mountain pine beetle and blue fungus infections have created ghost forests of dead lodgepole pines in parts of the U.S. West. As climate change makes summers hotter and drier, U.S. forests are threatened with increasing wildfire activity, deadly pathogens and insect infestations. Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

A series of studies in the past 10 years help explain the global tree die-off,said U.S. Geological Survey research ecologist Craig D. Allen.

There's evidence that most tree species around the world already routinely operate near damaging thresholds of water stress, and that they are unable to cope with the rising frequency and intensity of heat extremes, Allen said.

Another recent study showed how a declining snowpack and rising summer temperatures combine to limit regrowth, which is clear evidence of the negative impact of human-caused climate warming on subalpine forests. Pine seedlings need cool and moist summers to thrive, but those conditions occur less frequently with global warming. As a result, some Rocky Mountain forests will pass a tipping point with "shifts from forest to non-forest vegetation types across a broad range of elevations in Front Range forests," the study concluded.

Some tipping points may be less sudden than we think and already underway, said University of Montana forest entomologist Diana Six, who studies how global warming affects destructive insects that have been killing trees in the U.S. West in the past few decades.

"Older forests are established and may look fine. But what happens when they die? What comes back?" she said. On a warming planet, there's no guarantee that those older carbon-sequestering forests will regenerate—in fact there is plenty of research suggesting that many will not.

Even limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7°F) as targeted by the Paris climate agreement may not be enough to save some forests. "With the changes and extinction we are seeing now, I would say no. But less bad than if we let things go further," she said.

[pixSpot fires flare up in Victoria, Australia, on Jan. 5, 2020. In the coastal town of Mallacoota, thousands of people fled to a beach to escape fires there and were being evacuated by navy ships. Credit: Darrian Traynor/Getty Images

The multiple studies and reports on increases in fire season length, fire size, magnitude and intensity, as well as forest die-back events and pest outbreaks show that forest ecosystems at the very core of our life support on the planet are under severe stress, said Alistair Jump, head of biological and environmental sciences at the University of Stirling (UK).

"The changing climate is massively exacerbating the risk of catastrophic fire, and we are seeing the consequences of that globally," he said. "Even where fire isn't taking forests out, we are seeing drought-driven mortality risk escalate. Add to that changing pest and pathogen distributions and rampant deforestation, and trees are really in trouble just at the time that we need them most. The big risk of all of this being that carbon already locked away gets released in the blink of an eye.

"We take forests for granted—but we can see just how fast we can change the way forests work and how seriously it can impact us in return."

==

krugman correctly ID's tipping pt?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/a-historical-turning-point-paul-krugman-warns-that-disaster-in-australia-is-a-sign-were-barreling-down-the-road-to-hell/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/paul-krugman-apocalypse-is-the-new-normal/

Paul Krugman: ‘Apocalypse’ is the ‘new normal’

==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/winter-isnt-coming-and-you-need-to-prepare-for-the-pyrocene

Millions of acres are burning in the Arctic, thousands of fires blaze in the Amazon, and with seemingly endless flareups in between, from California to Gran Canaria – fire seems everywhere, and everywhere dangerous and destabilizing. With a worsening climate, the fires dappling Earth from the tropics to the tundra appear as the pilot flames of an advancing apocalypse. To some commentators, so dire, so unprecedented are the forecast changes that they argue we have no language or narrative to express them.

Actually, the fire scene is worse than the headlines and breathless commentaries suggest because it is not just about bad burns that crash into towns and trash countrysides. It’s equally about the good fires that have vanished because they are suppressed or no longer lit. More of the world suffers from a famine of good fires than from a surfeit of bad ones; the bad ones are filling a void; they are not so much wild as feral. nderwriting both is that immense inflection in which humans turned from burning living landscapes to burning lithic ones in the form of fossil fuels. That is the Big Burn of today, acting as a performance enhancer on all aspects of fire’s global presence. So vast is the magnitude of these changes that we might rightly speak of a coming Fire Age equivalent in stature to the Ice Ages of the Pleistocene. Call it the Pyrocene.

So there does exist a narrative, one of the oldest known to humanity, and one that has defined our distinctive ecological agency. It’s the story of fire. Earth is a uniquely fire planet – it has been since life clambered onto the continents. Equally, humans are a uniquely fire creature, not only the keystone species for fire but a species monopolist over its manipulation. The fires in the Arctic testify to the planetary antiquity of fire. Nearly all are kindled by lightning and burn biotas nicely adapted to fire; many could be suppressed, but extinguishing them will only put off, not put out, the flames. By contrast, the fires in the Amazon bear witness to a Faustian pact that hominins made with fire so long ago it is coded into our genome. They are set by people in circumstances that people made, well outside ecological barriers and historical buffers. This is a narrative so ancient it is prelapsarian. Our alliance with fire has become a veritable symbiosis. We got small guts and big heads because we learned to cook food. We went to the top of the food chain because we learned to cook landscapes. Now we have become a geological force because we have begun to cook the planet. We have taken fire to places and times it could never have reached on its own, and it has taken us everywhere, even off world. We have leveraged fire; fire has leveraged us. 0, 0, 0); width: 629.986px; flex-direction: row; transition: inherit; justify-content: space-between; align-items: center; height: 50px;">

Yet how the present scene came to be is clear enough in its general contours. How, outfitted with firesticks early humans could take over select biotas. How, with axes and plows and livestock as fire fulcrums, societies could recode the patches and pulses of vast swathes of land for agriculture. How, hungering for ever more firepower, we turned from burning living landscapes to burning lithic ones – once-living biomass converted over eons into oil, gas, lignite, and coal. Our firepower became unbounded.

That is literally true. The old quest for sources has morphed into one for sinks. The search for more stuff to burn has become a problem of where to put all the effluent. Industrial combustion can burn without any of the old ecological checks-and-balances: it can burn day and night, winter and summer, through drought and deluge. We are taking stuff out of the geologic past and unleashing it into the geologic future.

It’s not only about changing climate, or acidifying oceans. It’s about how we live on the land. Land use is the other half of the modern dialectic of fire on Earth, and when a people shift to fossil-fuels, they alter the way they inhabit landscapes. They rely on industrial pyrotechnologies to organize agriculture, transportation, urban patterns, even nature reserves, all of which tend to aggravate the hazards from bad fire and complicate the reintroduction of good fire. The many conflagrations sparked by powerlines nicely capture the pyric collision between living and lithic landscapes. Still, even if fossil-fuel combustion were tamed, we would yet have to work through our deranged relationship to fires on living landscapes.

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Because fire is a reaction, not a substance, the scale of our fire-induced transformations can be difficult to see. But we are fashioning the fire-informed equivalents of ice sheets, mountain glaciers, pluvial lakes, outwash plains, and of course changing sea levels, not to mention sparking wholesale extinctions. Too much bad fire, too little good, too much combustion overall – it’s an ice age for fire. The Pyrocene is moving from metaphor to descriptor.

It’s all there: narrative, analogue, explication. A couple of centuries ago we began hiding our fires in machines and off site, which can make it difficult for modern urbanites to appreciate how profoundly anthropogenic fire practices inform Earth today. We use the rampaging flames to animate other agendas, not to understand what fire is telling us. But fire, the great shape-shifter, is fast morphing beyond our grasp.

What does a full-blown fire age look like? We’re about to find out.

Steve Pyne, emeritus professor at Arizona State University, is the author of the recently updated and revised Fire: A Brief History (University of Washington Press).

==

Millions of burnt trees and rusted cars: Post-disaster cleanup is expensive, time-consuming and wasteful

Sybil Derrible, University of Illinois at Chicago; Juyeong Choi, Florida State University, and Nazli Yesiller, California Polytechnic State University

Government agencies have detailed plans for responding to disasters, but one piece doesn't get enough attention: cleaning up the mess that's left behind.

Christmas tree shopping is harder than ever, thanks to climate change and demographics

James Robert Farmer, Indiana University

If you're craving that freshly-cut tree smell, shop early and don't be too choosy.

Invasive grasses are fueling wildfires across the US

Emily Fusco, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Along with climate change and drought, invasive grasses are promoting wildfires across the US, even in areas that don't normally burn.

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jet stream oscillation dry out CA --> wildfire?

Australia welcomes in 2020 — and shows the world the devastating effects of the climate crisis

Mark Sumner / Daily Kos

Many times on New Year’s Eve, people in the United States are treated to pictures of revelry in Australia as the peculiarities of the International Date Line officially usher in the next year many hours in advance of the ball drop in Times Square.

==

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jet stream:

icn 1219

...It played out in real time on TV and in newspaper headlines about droughts, floods, heat extremes and wildfires—an "unprecedented hemisphere-wide pattern," Mann said. "It played a key role in the large-scale jet pattern we saw in late July, associated with deep stagnant high pressure centers over California and Europe."

That brought blazing temperatures and wildfire conditions to California, flooding over the Eastern U.S. and unprecedented heat to the Scandinavian Arctic region, as well as a six-month heat wave and drought across parts of Central Europe, all events showing a clear global warming fingerprint, according to scientists.

The new study focuses on summer extremes, while other research has looked at how global warming affects the jet stream in winter.

What Happens in the Arctic Doesn't Stay There

Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research who was not involved with the new research, said the study has some "compelling new evidence on the link between amplified Arctic warming and extreme mid-latitude weather during the summer months."

What happens in the Arctic doesn't stay there. Increased melting of reflective sea ice in summer exposes more dark-colored ocean to absorb heat, and that heats the surrounding land. As Arctic warming races ahead of the rest of the global average, the temperature contrasts that drive the jet stream are reduced, and the river of wind more frequently twists into sharp and slow-moving or stationary waves.

"When the jet stream enters this wavy state, extreme weather tends to occur on either side of the amplified ridges and troughs as the storm track becomes locked in place," Swain said. Then, specific regions experience long periods of cool and stormy or, contrarily, hot and dry weather, he added.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/everything-is-burning-australian-inferno-continues-choking-access-to-cities-across-the-country/

getting worse, ppl evac by water!

==

https://www.ecowatch.com/wildfire-recovery-efforts-hurting-biodiversity-2641601458.html

==

https://theintercept.com/2019/11/07/california-wildfires-green-new-deal/

Forged in Fire: California’s Lessons for a Green New Deal

Naomi Klein

==

11/21

https://time.com/5735660/sydney-bushfires/

TIME

As Smoke From Bush Fires Chokes Sydney, Australian

Prime Minister Dodges on Climate Change

Australia's Prime Minister refused to admit a direct link between the bushfires in Sydney and climate change. Here's what scientists say.

hazardous smoke from raging bushfires blanket Sydney’s landmarks on Thursday, the Australian Prime Minister refused to admit a direct link between the fires and the country’s carbon emissions, which are among the highest per capita in the world.

Health officials have issued warnings over “hazardous” air pollution levels as Sydney’s Opera House was shrouded with smoke. The smoke around Sydney and the north-coast is set to settle and remain in the area for the rest of Thursday, fire officials said. Members of the public, especially those with respiratory health issues, are advised to avoid all outdoor physical activities.

Fires have devastated large areas of the country since Oct. 20. New South Wales has seen the most severe and dangerous fires, with six people killed and around 1.7 million hectares burned. Climate Change has played a key role in the bushfires, Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology has said. They said: “Climate change is influencing the frequency and severity of dangerous bushfire conditions in Australia and other regions of the world.”

However, amid the bushfire crisis, Scott Morrison, Australia’s Prime Minister has argued that there is no direct link between Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions and the severity of the fires burning across the country. He told ABC AU during a radio interview on Thursday that there was no “credible scientific evidence” that cutting carbon emissions could reduce the severity of the fires.

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https://www.ecowatch.com/sydney-water-shortage-2641353372.html

==

https://www.ecowatch.com/sydney-water-shortage-2641353372.html

==

1119 many oz aus

https://yyy.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/nov/11/dear-michael-mccormack-the-only-raving-lunatics-are-those-not-worrying-about-climate-change

==

ew 919

While more than 130 wildfires are raging across two states in eastern Australia — Queensland and New South Wales — at an unusually early part of the spring, taxing the water supplies of the drought-stricken country, the country's federal appointee for handling disasters expressed doubts that humans are causing the climate crisis. Then, the next day he made a head scratching about face and said he believes in climate science and always has, according to guk

==

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/23082018/extreme-wildfires-climate-change-global-warming-air-pollution-fire-management-black-carbon-co2

complex interactions

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/parts-of-california-are-too-wildfire-prone-to-insure

no lnx

Parts of California are too wildfire-prone to insure

Written by Nathanael Johnson / Grist.Org August 24, 2019

California is facing yet another real estate-related crisis, but we’re not talking about its sky-high home prices. According to newly released data, it’s simply become too risky to insure houses in big swaths of the wildfire-prone state.

This post originally appeared on Grist.

Last winter when we wrote about home insurance rates possibly going up in the wake of California’s massive, deadly fires, the insurance industry representatives we interviewed were skeptical. They noted that the stories circulating in the media about people in forested areas losing their homeowners’ insurance was based on anecdotes, not data. But now, the data is in and it’s really happening: Insurance companies aren’t renewing policies areas climate scientists say are likely to burn in giant wildfires in coming years.

Insurance companies dropped more than 340,000 homeowners from wildfire areas in just four years. Between 2015 and 2018, the 10 California counties with the most homes in flammable forests saw a 177 percent increase in homeowners turning to an expensive state-backed insurance program because they could not find private insurance.

In some ways, this news is not surprising. According to a recent survey of insurance actuaries (the people who calculate insurance risks and premiums based on available data), the industry ranked climate change as the top risk for 2019, beating out concerns over cyber damages, financial instability, and terrorism. While having insurance companies on board with climate science is a good thing for, say, requiring cities to invest in more sustainable infrastructure, it’s bad news for homeowners who can’t simply pick up their lodgings and move elsewhere.

“We are seeing an increasing trend across California where people at risk of wildfires are being non-renewed by their insurer,” said California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara in a statement. “This data should be a wake-up call for state and local policymakers that without action to reduce the risk from extreme wildfires and preserve the insurance market we could see communities unraveling.”

A similar dynamic is likely unfolding across many other Western states, according to reporting from the New York Times.

To understand the data coming out of California we can use my own family as an example: A few months after Grist published a story about how my parent’s neighborhood is trying to fortify itself against future forest fires, my mom’s insurer informed her and my stepfather that they’d need to get home insurance elsewhere. For two months they called one insurer after another, but no company would take their premiums. So they turned to the state program as the insurer of last resort — which costs about three times more than they’d been spending under their previous, private insurer.

My folks have spent a lot of money clearing trees and brush from around their house. They’ve covered the walls in hard-to-burn cement panels, and the roof with metal. But insurance risk maps don’t adjust for these improvements. Instead, insurance companies seem to have made the call that the changing climate, along with years of fire suppression, have made houses in the midst of California’s dry forests a bad bet, and therefore uninsurable.

“For us, because we’ve done good financial planning and our house is paid off, it’s just an extra expense,” said my mom, Gail Johnson Vaughan. “But we have friends who have no choice but to leave.”

==

==

819 fires in siberia, last mo everglades, now brazil:

==

aha-let: separation allows demonization: X hate America; dems are trying to destroy the cty and then:

Brazil's right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro is giving President Trump a run for his money in the alternative facts department.

Responding to international outrage following the news that there are record numbers of wildfires burning in the Amazon rainforest, Bolsonaro tried to shift the blame away from his pro-business administration and onto an unlikely culprit: non-governmental organizations.

"Everything indicates" that NGOs were planning to set fires to the forest, Bolsonaro said on Facebook Live Wednesday, as Reuters reported. When asked if he had proof, he could not provide any, answering that he had "no written plan."

Later the same day, he repeated the claims at a steel industry congress in Brasilia, The Guardian reported.

"On the question of burning in the Amazon, which in my opinion may have been initiated by NGOs because they lost money, what is the intention? To bring problems to Brazil," he said.

Environmental groups, however, say that the fires are a result of deforestation encouraged by Bolsonaro's policies. He has promised to open the Amazon to mining and agriculture, and that has encouraged farmers to start illegal fires in order to clear land. Local papers report that farmers emboldened by weaker enforcement are even organizing "fire days" in some regions, according to The Guardian.

:{

}:

"This is a sick statement, a pitiful statement," Greenpeace Brazil Public Policy Coordinator Marcio Astrini told Reuters of Bolsonaro's remarks. "Increased deforestation and burning are the result of his anti-environmental policy."

:{

}:

The fires came to global attention this week when Brazil's space agency announced that the number of fires burning in the year since Bolsonaro took office were up more than 80 percent when compared with the year before. On Wednesday, the hashtag #PrayforAmazonas was the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter worldwide.

Experts attribute the fires to deforestation because this year has not been particularly dry.

"In the previous years [wildfires] were very much related to the lack of rain, but it has been quite moist this year," ecologist Adriane Muelbert told National Geographic. "That leads us to think that this is deforestation-driven fire."

Farmers and ranchers start fires to clear forest for soy or grazing land, but the fires then catch and spread. If this continues, ecologist and National Geographic Explorer-at-Large Thomas Lovejoy explained to the nature magazine that it could have devastating consequences for the rainforest, and for the world:

Lovejoy describes a cyclical system in which deforestation fuels forest loss, making the region drier, spurring even more deforestation. Much of the rain in the Amazon is generated by the rainforest itself, but as trees disappear, rainfall declines. Experts worry that this downward spiral could increasingly dry out the forest and push it to a point of no return, where it more resembles savannah than rainforest.

"The Amazon has this tipping point because it makes half of its own rainfall," says Lovejoy. That's why, he says, "the Amazon has to be managed as a system."

Not only would such a change endanger the 40,000 species of plants, 1,300 species of birds, 430 mammals and 400 to 500 indigenous communities that call the Amazon home, it would also make it harder to fight the climate crisis. The world's largest tropical rainforest is an important store of carbon, absorbing millions of tons of emissions per year.

Given the global stakes, it's no wonder that Bolsonaro has come under international scrutiny for his policies, as The Guardian explained. Both Germany and Norway recently suspended donations to the Amazon Fund, and there is pressure for the EU to block a trade agreement with Brazil and other countries in South America.

==

==

Peter Frumhoff, at the Union of Concerned Scientists, has also conducted research in this realm. He's looked at the correlation between climate change and human mortality related to extreme heatwaves. Ironically, the success of the oil companies' social influence campaigns are a real strength to these cases.[00:05:12]

Marco Simons with Earth Rights International is representing a group of cities and counties in Colorado that are suing oil companies to cover the costs of fighting increasingly intense wildfires and other impacts of climate change.Marco Simons:[00:05:23]They did such a good job that the public is more skeptical of climate change now than the oil companies are.[00:05:31]

...ep 8?

...California's ever-extending fire season saw the state burn through its annual budget for 2018—$442.8 million—by September. Fire agencies estimated they needed an additional $234 million to continue combating fires, and that was before yet another devastating complex of fires hit in November. If you want to talk to someone who knows for sure that climate change is happening,talk to a California firefighter. Here's Cal Fire Chief Ken Pimlott on Good Morning L.A. earlier this year.

Ken Pimlott:[00:04:19]It really is going to get worse. The last several years have just shown us every year it continues to progress and things are changing. If you ask career firefighters out on the fire line who've been doing this 30, 35 years, these are not the kinds of fires and weather conditions we were facing you know just a few decades ago. Climate change is real and it's happening everywhere. We're seeing again more intense fires fires are burning more rapidly and they're getting larger. That 100000 acre or more fire used to be the exception to the rule. We might get one of those every few years. Now we're getting multiple one hundred thousand acre fires each year.[00:04:56]

Last year Pimlott told me that one new thing that's made firefighting harder is that it's not getting reliable cooler and wetter at night anymore.Night Time was historically when firefighters would get ahead of a fire. But recent data indicates that nights are warming faster than days. We're seeing record-breaking natural disasters all the time now not just once a decade. And they do seem to be breaking through the noise a bit.

It gets a lot harder to say climate change isn't happening when people can see for themselves that heat waves are hotter and longer or that storms seem bigger and more regular than in decades past. In the last year or so, climate change has regularly made the covers of magazines and the front pages of newspapers as it did back in the 90s. And That's a positive step forward because for decades the industry successfully blocked the first critical step toward taking action on climate: acknowledgement.[00:06:20]

According to most of the literature on human psychology, in order to move past our general tendency to freeze when we're facing huge and scary challenges or big losses is toacknowledgethat the problem is there and that it's tough to deal with.[00:06:38]Instead, the industry put the American public on a pathway to denial. They did so knowingly and with purpose.

...

==

An area of 3.2 million hectares (7.9 million acres) was engulfed by forest fires in remote regions of Russiaon Monday. In comparison, the total surface of the nation of Belgium is 3.07 million hectares.

With fires raging for days, immense clouds of smoke reached large population centers, including Russia's third biggest city, Novosibirsk. Authorities declared emergencies in several regions.

"The smoke is horrible," pensioner Raisa Brovkina told state television after being hospitalized in Novosibirsk.

"I am choking and dizzy," she added.

No Money to Put out Fires

Siberia regularly faces immense wildfires, but the impact this year had been boosted by strong wind and unusually dry weather. The blazes have been allowed to spread as cash-strapped local authorities usually ignore fires in remote regions.

Talking to Siberian Times, an emergency pilot in Krasnoyarski Krai said he had spent days waiting to fly his firefighting plane, but received no order to do so.

"Every day the whole team and I are on duty. There are four aircraft," he said in an article published on Monday.

"Since the beginning of the fires, not a single specialized [plane] has been lifted into the air."

"They say it is expensive to extinguish and if part of the forest burns down — it is not scary," the unnamed pilot said.

Greenpeace Steps in

Separately, the region's officials said that cost of the firefighting effort is sometimes "ten times larger than the possible damage" caused by the fire.

But the pilot slammed the calculation as "absurd."

"Of course, now, probably it will be expensive to extinguish everything that burns," he said.

"But why was there no order to fly out earlier, when the fire had just begun to spread?"

The Russian charter of Greenpeace had launched a petition to force the government to move against wildfires in Siberia, which was signed by some 245,000 by Tuesday evening.

Burning in the Sun

The wildfires "have long stopped being a local problem" and have "transformed into an ecological disaster with consequences for the entire country," Greenpeace said.

Greenpeace expert Grigory Kuksin said thesoot and ashes accelerate the melting of the Arctic ice and permafrost, which in turns releases even more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

"It is comparable to the emissions of major cities," he told the AFP news agency. "The more fires affect the climate, the more conditions are created for new dangerous fires."

The group said almost 12 million hectares have already burned this year, destroying forests that absorb carbon dioxide.

Siberia was almost 10 degrees Celsius (18 Fahrenheit) warmer than the long-term average in June, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

Reposted with permission from our media associate DW.

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==

HEAT DEATH

150 million trees died in California’s drought, and worse is to come

==

http://rachelcarson-wiki.lt.ucsc.edu/wiki/Category:Fire#Wildfires

c8 wiki

https://ic.ucsc.edu/college8core/c8wiki/index.php/The_Big_Picture#Fire_.28climate_change_and_wildfires.29

==

Planned burns can reduce wildfire risks, but expanding use of ‘good fire’ isn’t easy

Courtney Schultz, Colorado State University; Cassandra Moseley, University of Oregon, and Heidi Huber-Stearns, University of Oregon

Decades of wildfire suppression have allowed flammable fuels to pile up in US forests. Scientists and managers say careful use of planned fires can reduce risks of large, out-of-control burns.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11032019/forest-wildfire-climate-change-tipping-point-study-douglas-fir-ponderosa-pines-west

Climate change in the American West may be crossing an ominous threshold, making parts of the region inhospitable for some native pine and fir forests to regrow after wildfires, new research suggests.

As temperatures rise, the hotter, drier air and drier soil conditions are increasingly unsuitable for young Douglas firs and ponderosa pines to take root and thrive in some of the region's low-elevation forests, scientists write in a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Wildfiresin these areas could lead to abrupt ecosystem changes, from forest to non-forest, that would otherwise take decades to centuries, the study says.

"Once a certain threshold was crossed, then the probability of tree establishment decreased rapidly," said Kimberley Davis, a researcher at the University of Montana and lead author of the study. "The climate conditions are just a lot less suitable for regeneration."

The two iconic species are important to both the region's forest ecology and its economy, particularly its timber industry.

Davis and her colleagues looked at growth rings of nearly 3,000 young trees in 33 fire-damaged areas of California, Colorado, the Northern Rockies and the southwestern United States to see when the forests recovered after fires over the past 30 years. Analyzing climate data over the same period, they found certain thresholds involving summer humidity for ponderosa pine, surface temperature for Douglas fir, and soil moisture for both species, beyond which there was a sharp decline in forest regrowth.

The warmer, drier air isn't harming mature trees, but it is preventing future generations from growing, Davis said.

"There could be a lot of areas where there is currently forest but if we have a fire we might not see regeneration," she said.

Thresholds 'Show How Much Is at Stake'

Davis and her colleagues found that most of the sites they looked at had crossed the temperature and humidity threshold at some point in the last 20 years.

They targeted the driest and warmest sites in the region to see if climate change was already beginning to affect forests. The researchers now plan to assess the extent to which regeneration is affected in relatively cooler, wetter sites in the region.

Several factors influence a forest's regrowth after a wildfire, such as the severity of the fire, regional drought and how the trees produce seeds. The researchers noted that as the region sees fewer years with climate conditions suitable for seedlings to grow, the nature of the trees' seed production, with heavy crops of cones only every few years, will further limit new growth.

Last year, wildfires burned more than 8.7 million acres nationwide, 32 percent higher than the 10-year average according to an annual report by the National Interagency Coordination Center released last week. More than 1.8 million of those acres were in California, the highest in recorded state history, according to state fire officials.

The inability of forests to bounce back from such fires is cause for concern, said Joe Fargione, science director for the Nature Conservancy's North America region.

"The thresholds identified here show how much is at stake—losing forests because trees can't grow back—if we don't accelerate the switch to clean energy and invest more in natural climate solutions," Fargione said. "This study will help land managers identify forests at the greatest risk of not regenerating post-fire."

Fargione said such high-risk forests can be targeted for selective thinning to reduce the risk of forest fires and for restoration efforts to improve the success of forest regeneration.

Trees Play a Critical Climate Role

Protecting forests is important for slowing climate change because of their ability to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store the carbon in their trunks, branches and roots.

A study Fargione and others published last fall found better forest, farm and land management practices offer natural climate solutions that could mitigate 21 percent of the United States' annual greenhouse gas emissions.

"It really highlights the fact that we need to begin a national and international conversation about how we can enhance the resiliency of our global forests," Anthony Swift, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Canada Project, said of the current study.

Swift said intensive logging, road building and cutting trees to make room for transmission lines weakens the ability of forests to deal with added stressors like climate change.

"We don't need to stop all activity in global forests, but it does raise the need to reconsider how and where we extract timber and engage in other industrial activities in forests," he said.

A report last month by NRDC looked at how clear cutting boreal forests in Canada by some U.S. toilet paper manufacturersimperils forests and could hasten climate change.The report called for alternatives, like using recycled paper, that don't lead to the fragmentation and clear cutting of intact forests. Leaving forests more intact could also help protect Douglas fir and ponderosa pine forests in the American West, Swift said.

"Whether we are looking at wildfires or industrial activities, concerns that in a changing climate regeneration is going to be more difficult to achieve is an issue that we all need to be looking at more carefully because of the roll our forests have to play for the global climate," he said.

PUBLISHED UNDER:

CLIMATE SCIENCE

FORESTS

CLIMATE CHANGE

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Heartbreaking & Devastating Camp Fire Was World's Costliest Catastrophe of 2018

In terms of natural disasters, 2018 was a really bad year. Communities in the United States and around the world were devastated by record-breaking wildfires, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and other catastrophes.

Lamentably, these weather and geophysical events caused 10,400 human deaths and $160 billion in estimated damages last year, reinsurance company Munich Re said on Tuesday.

Heartbreaking & Devastating Camp Fire Was World's Costliest Catastrophe of 2018

In terms of natural disasters, 2018 was a really bad year. Communities in the United States and around the world were devastated by record-breaking wildfires, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and other catastrophes.

Lamentably, these weather and geophysical events caused 10,400 human deaths and $160 billion in estimated damages last year, reinsurance company Munich Re said on Tuesday.

The deadliest disaster of 2018 was the horrific earthquake-tsunami combo that struck the Indonesian city of Palu in September, where 2,100 lives perished, according to the German firm.

The year's top three most expensive natural disasters all occurred in the U.S. The Camp Fire—the deadliest and most destructive fire in California history—topped Munich Re's list with overall losses of $16.5 billion and insured losses of $12.5 billion. Eighty-six people died and thousands of homes and buildings were incinerated during the November fire in Butte County.

Hurricanes Michael ($16 billion) and Florence ($14 billion) round out the top three. Florence in September and Michael in October were part of an unusually active 2018 Atlantic hurricane season.

In fourth place on this dubious list is Typhoon Jebi, which struck Japan and Taiwan in September, and cost $12.5 billion; and in fifth place is Japan's historic flooding-landslide events in July and cost $9.5 billion, USA TODAY reported from the German analysis.

What's even more daunting, experts say these disasters will become more severe as temperatures keep rising around the planet.

"Our data shows that the losses from wildfires in California have risen dramatically in recent years," Ernst Rauch, head of Climate and Geosciences at Munich Re, said in a press release. "At the same time, we have experienced a significant increase in hot, dry summers, which has been a major factor in the formation of wildfires. Many scientists see a link between these developments and advancing climate change."

While the 2018 sum total of $160 billion is much lower than 2017's extremely high losses of $350 billion caused mostly by hurricane damages, it is above the 30-year average of $140 billion, Munich Re said. About half of 2018's losses were insured.

"2018 saw several major natural catastrophes with high insured losses," Munich Re board member Torsten Jeworrek said in the press release. "These included the unusual phenomenon of severe tropical cyclones occurring both in the U.S. and Japan while autumn wildfires devastated parts of California. Such massive wildfires appear to be occurring more frequently as a result of climate change."

Jeworrek continued, "Action is urgently needed on building codes and land use to help prevent losses. Given the greater frequency of unusual loss events and the possible links between them, insurers need to examine whether the events of 2018 were already on their models' radar or whether they need to realign their risk management and underwriting strategies."

In November, the U.S. government released a daunting report that warned climate change could kill thousands of Americans each year and slash the GDP by more than 10 percent by 2100.

President Donald Trump infamously dismissed his own government's study, saying "I don't believe it."

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Camp Fire ›

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https://www.ecowatch.com/trump-admin-takes-advantage-of-california-fires-2594248442.html

Trump Admin. Takes Advantage of California Fires to Funnel More Water From Endangered Fish to Agriculture, Critics Say

The Commerce Department seemed to take its direction from President Donald Trump's Twitter account on Wednesday when it issued a directive to the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to prioritize fighting wildfires over protecting endangered species when allocating California's water resources, The Huffington Post reported.

The directive comes days after Trump tweeted blaming California's raging wildfires on "bad environmental laws which aren't allowing massive amount of readily available water to be properly utilized."

Firefighters disagreed with Trump's assessment.

"We have plenty of water to fight these wildfires," Deputy Chief of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection Scott McLean told The Huffington Post on Monday. "It is our changing climate that is leading to more severe and destructive fires."

But that didn't stop Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross from using an emergency provision of the Endangered Species Act to direct water towards the fires.

"Today, I direct NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service to make clear to all its Federal agency partners that the protection of life and property takes precedence over any current agreements regarding the use of water in the areas of California affected by wildfires," Ross wrote.

Environmentalists are concerned this move isn't about the fires at all, but rather an attempt to use the disaster to intervene in a longstanding disagreement between agriculture, the fishing industry and environmentalists over whether more water should be used to irrigate crops or should be left in rivers to preserve fish species like delta smelt and Chinook salmon.

Ross's directive comes one month after the California Water Resources Control Board proposed diverting less water towards cities and farms in an attempt to save the two endangered species.

"Secretary Ross's directive is nothing more than a smokescreen designed to weaken these protections that NMFS's scientists determined are necessary to keep these native fish from going extinct. It's almost like the extinction of these creatures is their real goal, so that they no longer have to leave any water in rivers, but can divert it all to corporate agribusiness. The people of California won't stand for Trump destroying our precious resources to line the pockets of his corporate buddies," senior director of the water division for the Natural Resources Defense Council Kate Poole said in a statement reported by ABC News.

Around 80 percent of all water in California currently goes to agriculture, according to The Huffington Post, but, for Trump allies in the state like Republican CongressmanDevin Nunes, that is not enough.

Nunes even went so far as to blame the drought that devastated California from 2011 to 2017 on a misallocation of water resources.

"There was plenty of water," he told The New York Times in 2014, according to The Huffington Post. "This has nothing to do with drought. They can blame global warming all they want, but this is about mathematics and engineering."

Meanwhile, another department head also seemed to take his cue on the wildfires from a different argument in the same Trump tweet, in which the president said the state "must also tree clear to stop fire from spreading!"

On Wednesday, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke wrote an opinion piece for USA Today in which he blamed the fires in part on a buildup of fuels in forests.

He called for more active forest management through logging, controlled burns and "mechanical thinning" and blamed environmentalists for preventing this kind of action.

"Yet, when action comes, and we try to thin forests of dead and dying timber, or we try to sustainably harvest timber from dense and fire-prone areas, we are attacked with frivolous litigation from radical environmentalists who would rather see forests and communities burn than see a logger in the woods," he wrote.

However, his OpEd doesn't appear to signal any imminent policy change, ABC News reported.

Zinke issued a directive last year calling on land managers to be more "aggressive" in clearing dead trees or brush, but Interior Department spokesperson Heather Swift told ABC News that there were no changes in the works this year.

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18 in 8/18. biggest in hist wine cty

mann sierra club mike b

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/8/9/experts_if_we_don_t_stop

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/heres-how-climate-change-impacts-risk-wildfires

Once again, the summer of 2018 in the Northern Hemisphere has brought us an epidemic of major wildfires.

These burn forests, houses and other structures, displace thousands of people and animals, and cause major disruptions in people’s lives. The huge burden of simply firefighting has become a year-round task costing billions of dollars, let alone the cost of the destruction. The smoke veil can extend hundreds or even thousands of miles, affecting air quality and visibility. To many people, it has become very clear that human-induced climate change plays a major role by greatly increasing the risk of wildfire.

Yet it seems the role of climate change is seldom mentioned in many or even most news stories about the multitude of fires and heat waves. In part this is because the issue of attribution is not usually clear. The argument is that there have always been wildfires, and how can we attribute any particular wildfire to climate change.

As a climate scientist, I can say this is the wrong framing of the problem. Global warming does not cause wildfires. The proximate cause is often human carelessness (cigarette butts, camp fires not extinguished properly, etc.), or natural, from “dry lightning” whereby a thunderstorm produces lightning but little rain. Rather, global warming exacerbates the conditions and raises the risk of wildfire.

Even so, there is huge complexity and variability from one fire to the next, and hence the attribution can become complex. Instead, the way to think about this is from the standpoint of basic science – in this case, physics.

Global warming is happening

To understand the interplay between global warming and wildfires, consider what’s happening to our planet.

The composition of the atmosphere is changing from human activities: There has been over a 40 percent increase in carbon dioxide, mainly from fossil fuel burning since the 1800s, and over half of the increase is since 1985. Other heat-trapping gases (methane, nitrous oxide, etc.) are also increasing in concentration in the atmosphere from human activities. The rates are accelerating, not declining (as hoped for with the Paris agreement).

This leads to an energy imbalance for the planet.

Heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere act as a blanket and inhibit the infrared radiation – that is, heat from the Earth – from escaping back into space to offset the continual radiation coming from the sun. As these gases build up, more of this energy, mostly in the form of heat, remains in our atmosphere. The energy raises the temperature of the land, oceans and atmosphere, melts ice, thaws permafrost, and fuels the water cycle through evaporation.

Moreover, we can estimate Earth’s energy imbalance quite well: It amounts to about 1 watt per square meter, or about 500 terawatts globally.

While this factor is small compared with the natural flow of energy through the system, which is 240 watts per square meter, it is large compared with all other direct effects of human activities. For instance, the electrical power generation in the U.S. last year averaged 0.46 terawatts.

The extra heat is always the same sign and it is spread across the globe. Accordingly, where this energy accumulates matters.

Tracking the Earth’s energy imbalance

The heat mostly accumulates ultimately in the ocean – over 90 percent. This added heat means the ocean expands and sea level rises.

Heat also accumulates in melting ice, causing melting Arctic sea ice and glacier losses in Greenland and Antarctica. This adds water to the ocean, and so the sea level rises from this as well, rising at a rate of over 3 milimeters year, or over a foot per century.

On land, the effects of the energy imbalance are complicated by water. If water is present, the heat mainly goes into evaporation and drying, and that feeds moisture into storms, which produce heavier rain. But the effects do not accumulate provided that it rains on and off.

However, in a dry spell or drought, the heat accumulates. Firstly, it dries things out, and then secondly it raises temperatures. Of course, “it never rains in southern California” according to the1970s pop song, at least in the summer half year.

So water acts as the air conditioner of the planet. In the absence of water, the excess heat effects accumulate on land both by drying everything out and wilting plants, and by raising temperatures. In turn, this leads to heat waves and increased risk of wildfire. These factors apply in regions in the western U.S. and in regions with Mediterranean climates. Indeed many of the recent wildfires have occurred not only in the West in the United States, but also in Portugal, Spain, Greece, and other parts of the Mediterranean.

The conditions can also develop in other parts of the world when strong high pressure weather domes (anticyclones) stagnate, [jet stream weaker, so stall of no or hvy rain?]as can happen in part by chance, or with increased odds in some weather patterns such as those established by either La Niña or El Niño events (in different places). It is expected that these dry spots move around from year to year, but that their abundance increases over time, as is clearly happening.

How big is the energy imbalance effect over land? Well, 1 Watt per square meter over a month, if accumulated, is equivalent to 720 Watts per square meter over one hour. 720 Watts is equivalent to full power in a small microwave oven. One square meter is about 10 square feet. Hence, after one month this is equivalent to: one microwave oven at full power every square foot for six minutes. No wonder things catch on fire!

Attribution science

Coming back to the original question of wildfires and global warming, this explains the argument: there is extra heat available from climate change and the above indicates just how large it is.

In reality there is moisture in the soil, and plants have root systems that tap soil moisture and delay the effects before they begin to wilt, so that it typically takes over two months for the effects to be large enough to fully set the stage for wildfires. On a day to day basis, the effect is small enough to be lost in the normal weather variability. But after a dry spell of over a month, the risk is noticeably higher. And of course the global mean surface temperature is also going up.

“We can’t attribute a single event to climate change” has been a mantra of climate scientists for a long time. It has recently changed, however.

As in the wildfires example, there has been a realization that climate scientists may be able to make useful statements by assuming that the weather events themselves are relatively unaffected by climate change. This is a good assumption.

Also, climate scientists cannot say that extreme events are due to global warming, because that is a poorly posed question. However, we can say it is highly likely that they would not have had such extreme impacts without global warming. Indeed, all weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be.

In particular, by focusing on Earth’s Energy Imbalance, new research is expected to advance the understanding of what is happening, and why, and what it implies for the future.

Kevin Trenberth, Distinguished Senior Scientist, National Center for Atmospheric Research

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Calif. — Californians are stunned at President Donald’s Trump’s latest tweets on the state‘s catastrophic wildfires — and his insistence that the state is burning because leaders are letting too much fresh water flow into the Pacific Ocean.

Trump tweeted Monday that California “Governor Jerry Brown must allow the Free Flow of the vast amounts of water coming from the North and foolishly being diverted into the Pacific Ocean. Can be used for fires, farming and everything else. Think of California with plenty of Water - Nice! Fast Federal govt. approvals.”

That tweet — on the heels of a Sunday tweet that referenced California’s “bad environmental laws” as a cause of the state’s current raging wildfires — drew an immediate reaction from veteran California GOP strategist Rob Stutzman, who responded via Twitter: “This is nuts’’ and also “low water IQ.” Stutzman has advised former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and a host of national and state GOP candidates.

@realDonaldTrump

California wildfires are being magnified & made so much worse by the bad environmental laws which aren’t allowing massive amounts of readily available water to be properly utilized. It is being diverted into the Pacific Ocean. Must also tree clear to stop fire from spreading!

2:53 PM - Aug 6, 2018

57.5K

36.6K people are talking about this

Trump’s comments may be referencing an unrelated dispute between Brown's administration and California Republicans over how much of the state's water can be diverted to Southern California farms and cities and how much must be allowed to flow naturally to benefit endangered and threatened fish species.

Wildfires around California have killed nine people, but firefighters have not raised concerns about the available water supplies.

“The notion that somehow more water would be mitigating or better in fighting these fires is just mind-boggling,’’ Stutzman told POLITICO on Monday. “I don’t watch 'Fox & Friends,' but it would seem that someone has put the idea in his head. It doesn’t even show an elementary understanding of water policy.’’

Fox & Friends had aired a segment about the California fires nearly five hours before Trump‘s Monday tweet but didn’t discuss water issues as part of the segment.

Stutzman called the president’s recent tweets on California fires and water policy “frightening,” saying that “water has nothing to do with why these places are tinder boxes. It’s very exasperating. ... It’s a statement from the president that shows no understanding of hydrology.”

He said he would advise Brown, a Democrat, to “not take the bait” and react to such uninformed views.

Indeed, Evan Westrup, the spokesman for Brown, told POLITICO that “this does not merit a response.” But he also added via email: “It’s a sad state of affairs when journalism is reduced to chasing the uninformed, unsupervised tweets of the president.”

Some Democrats seized on the latest tweet. Rhys Williams, spokesman for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom, tweeted: “Has anybody seen the baby’s pacifier? He dropped it again.”

Donald Trump is pictured. | AP Photo

Trump endorses Kobach for Kansas governor]

In a purely political sense, Trump’s tweets reflected his alignment with California Republicans who have long complained that the state unfairly prioritizes environmental uses for water over the state’s sprawling agricultural industry. Putting “fish over farms” is a popular formulation that has been invoked by Trump allies from California’s agricultural heartland, such as Reps. Devin Nunes and Kevin McCarthy.

“Forests should be managed properly and water should be allowed for farmers to grow food to feed people,” Nunes wrote on Twitter in response to Trump’s Sunday tweet, cheering the president "for bringing much needed attention to our flawed environmental policies!"

Trump has courted the Republican-leaning Farm Bureau heavily.California’s water wars are a huge issue for the group. Trump addressed the annual Farm Bureau convention in January, becoming the first president in more than two decades to do so. He also raised the issue during a campaign stop in Fresno in 2016.

But experts who make their living studying California’s water system reacted for the second consecutive day with a communal groan of exasperation. Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute, one of the state’s foremost experts on how the state manages its water, issued a tweet calling Trump’s latest missive “nuts” after labeling the president’s initial tweet “gobbledygook bullsh--.”

In an email to POLITICO, Gleick noted that the water that flows from California’s rivers into the ocean is what remains after cities and farms take their gulp — and that those flows are critical to shoring up ecosystems that, in some parts of the state, are teetering on the brink of collapse.

“Trump's tweets last night and today show a profound misunderstanding about water, fires, California environmental policy, and of course, climate change,” Gleick said, adding that the “idea that somehow state water policies are leading to a shortage of water for fighting the fires is too stupid to rebut.”

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new temp 'hood

fire tornado, siege, move in all directions as if 40-50 mph santa ana

https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article215852940.html

...Brown said Wednesday that the state will spend what it must to attack the fires.

“There is money in this year’s budget,” he said. “In a year or slightly longer, that money will start to diminish. … Things will get much tighter in the next five years as the business cycle turns negative and the fires continue.”

He suggested California has been caught off-guard by the current demands.

“No one expected a fire tornado,” Brown said. “We’re getting a new phenomenon and that new phenomenon is we’re in a new climate weather era and so we have to learn.”

Brown since 2015 has directed more than $800 million in one-time budget funds for fire prevention, including the removal of dead trees and other vegetation that fuel fires.

In May, he outlined in an executive order a $96 million plan to expand vegetation thinning, controlled fires and reforestation on up to 500,000 acres of land. He also spent $160 million in cap-and-trade revenue to support forest improvements and fire protection.

The plan also seeks to make it easier for private landowners to thin vegetation on their properties by streamlining the approvals process for permits needed to do so.

Some say the state’s efforts to date don’t go far enough.

Republican gubernatorial candidate John Cox blasted state lawmakers for not adequately funding fire prevention. He downplayed concerns voiced by his Democratic opponent, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, and Brown about climate change and the increasing threat of disastrous wildfires.

Cox, who toured the fire zone in Shasta County this week with Republican lawmakers, said “I don’t know” if climate change is human-caused.

“Politicians like Mr. Brown and Mr. Newsom are distracting people,” Cox said. “What’s really going on here is they’re blaming this on climate change to cover up for the fact that they haven’t devoted the time and the resources and the planning to actually doing something about forestry management.”

Cox also backs the thinning of forests, saying the state should be investing in “fire breaks, controlled burns and clearing out dead and diseased trees.”

He said the state also needs to invest more heavily in boosting the ranks of firefighters, training and equipment.

“We’re going to find the money, believe me,” Cox said.

Newsom spokesman Nathan Click said “Cox’s Trumpian climate change denials, in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence, only undermine what little credibility remains in his campaign.”

Newsom outlined a detailed approach for how he’d address the looming wildfire threat to California. He said the state must improve vegetation management, boost funding for fire prevention and containment, bolster resources for fire departments across the state, invest in weather monitoring technology and a statewide early warning system and more aggressively lower greenhouse gas emissions to put the state on a path to 100 percent renewable energy.

“The science is clear — increased fire threat due to climate change is becoming a fact of life in our state,” Newsom said in a statement. “We need a comprehensive strategy and more resources to address this growing crisis.”

...

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https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-change-wildfires-2573967514.html

https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-change-forest-ecosystem-2564720055.html

Climate Change Threatens Unique West Coast Forest Region

The Klamath is a unique region in Northern California and Southwest Oregon. In addition to being a haven for biodiversity— hosting plants that only live in its mountainous landscape and 29 different species of conifers—it also stores carbon in its diverse array of tall trees.

But those iconic trees, and their carbon-storing power, are under threat from climate change, a study published Monday in Scientific Reports found.

Using a landscape simulation model, researchers at Harvard University, Portland State University and the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute looked at five different potential climate change scenarios and found that, even under a continuation of current climate conditions, up to one third of theconifer landscape could be replaced by less-carbon-absorbing shrubs and hardwood this century.

This change in vegetation is largely driven by the impact of climate change on wildfires. Conifers are adapted to withstand fires, but climate change reduces the time between fires, called the "fire rotation period," and increases their size and severity.

Researchers found that every climate change scenario also increased drought in the summers, which made it harder for all plant species to re-establish themselves after fires. This effect was worse for conifers, whose ability to regrow decreased from 26 to 39 percent depending on the climate scenario, while shrubs declined by 7 to 20 percent.

"If the fire-free interval is too short or if the growing conditions are too dry, the shrubs can persist indefinitely, and the iconic conifers are squeezed out," study co-author and Harvard senior ecologist Jonathan Thompson said in a Harvard press release published by Phys.org.

While the conifer-dominated area was reduced even under current climate conditions, that area further decreased in the climate change scenarios.

"As the climate continues to warm, big severe wildfires will be more frequent, and the dry conditions that follow will increasingly favor shrubs over conifers. The combination will mean less of the conifer forest that make the Klamath so distinct," Thompson said.

The findings corresponded with other studies that have observed larger fires in Western forests due to climate change. The two warmest climate scenarios predicted forest fires that would break the record for largest fire in the area, currently held by the Biscuit Fire of 2002.

The researchers hypothesized that vegetation shifted from conifers to shrubs even under current climate conditions in part because climate change has already begun and in part because of 20th-century fire suppression that gave conifers an advantage.

...

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https://www.alternet.org/environment/how-californias-fires-are-linked-climate-chaos-soil-health-and-food-choices

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https://www.ecowatch.com/los-angeles-wildfire-2481746122.html

fire jumped columbia river as trump says we feel for vics celebrate dapl, during hurricane harvey pre irma

http://www.ecowatch.com/wildfires-drought-southeast-2094301912.html

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8/15/16

Lake cty poorest, but 1/2 of fire $

habitat for hum burned

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http://www.globalpossibilities.org/a-scorching-earth-threatens-u-s-agriculture/

LONDON—A deadly mix of prolonged drought and wildfire, driven by climate change, could do more than just lay waste to crops and woodland in the western US. It could scorch the earth and trigger ever greater levels of soil erosion.

Joel Sankey a researcher at the US Geological Survey, told the Geological Society of America’s annual meeting in Baltimore, Maryland, that by 2050 an increase in wildfires may double soil erosion in some western states. As a consequence, soil would blow or be washed into water courses.

He and his colleagues used computer models to see what projected increases in wildfire could do throughout the West in the first half of this century.

Researchers have already warned that California’s present sustained drought is an indicator of things to come, and that rising average temperatures and more frequent heat waves must mean greater wildfire hazards.

Rich mix

But the scientists looked beyond the drought and fire to see the consequences for soil erosion.

Topsoil is a rich mix of weathered rock, minerals, trace elements and decaying vegetation that supports a huge community of tiny living things that recycle nutrients. It is the natural substrate that absorbs and holds water and nourishes all green growth. Topsoil also underwrites the wealth of the US, a great agricultural power.

But fire can change the nature of the soil, turning it into hot, charred dust that can blow away in the wind, or—equally dangerously—baking its surface so that falling rain or melting snow runs off directly, rather than percolating into the sediment. Either way, the topsoil can end up in the nearest creek, to choke rivers or muddy the reservoirs.

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http://grist.org/climate-energy/indonesias-huge-fires-might-be-the-worst-climate-change-crisis-on-earth-right-now/

6/15

http://ecowatch.com/2015/06/19/alaska-fires-glaciers-melting

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Wildfires See also Forests

Bark Beetles Are Decimating Our Forests. That Might Actually Be a Good Thing. 3/15.

Yosemite fire 9/14.

Washington Wildfire Season One Of The Most Destructive On Record, Officials Say 9/14.

Explained in 90 Seconds: How Climate Change Fuels Wildfires: Higher temperatures, prolonged drought, and fire suppression policy combine to make fires worse. video.

Thanks to climate change, the world is going to need a lot more firefighters 12/13.

Colorado plan 11/13.

Yosemite Is Burning...Here's How Climate Change Makes Wildfires Worse 8/13. virtual flythrough

Nation on Fire: Climate Change and the Burning of America 8/13.

U.S. Wildfire Interactive Shows Rising Temperatures, Less Snowfall Are Leading To More Fires infographic 7/13.

Wildfire Activity Is Heating Up In The Yukon Flats Of Alaska

Actual fire and forests (will be an effect of global warming). See Scorched Earth.

Tar balls from wildfires worsening global warming 7/13

Climate Change And Wildfires: Bigger, Fiercer Blazes Expected In West 7/13 not unrelated, 19 brave hotshots die. context on how fires have changed (op-ed).

Wildfire season is 2 months longer, two times more destructive now than in the 1970s due to global warming.

U.S. Wildfires: Burn Area Expected To Double By 2050 12/12.

NASA images and info [global tour video].

Native American use of wildfire (audio).

Life in fire country (audio). 2013.