Forest fires! Climate change chaos! We’re DOOMED!!!
Canada-Wildfires-New-York
Or maybe… not so much according to this rather interesting essay on the Financial Post.
We all know about the large fire in Canada which sent clouds of choking smoke across New York (see above) and New England a couple of weeks back, right? It was widely touted as a harbinger (always wanted to use that word) of doom, a foretaste of things to come and it’s All Our Fault!, and shows how serious forest fire in Canada are increasing in number and intensity. Right?
Well, not so freakin’ fast.
For instance, Prime Minister Trudeau tweeted: “We’re seeing more and more of these fires because of climate change.”
That statement is false. Canadian forest fire data are available from the Wildland Fire Information System. Wildfires have been getting less frequent in Canada over the past 30 years. The annual number of fires grew from 1959 to 1990, peaking in 1989 at just over 12,000 that year, and has been trending down since. From 2017 to 2021 (the most recent interval available), there were about 5,500 fires per year, half the average from 1987 to 1991.
The annual area burned also peaked 30 years ago. It grew from 1959 to 1990, peaking in 1989 at 7.6 million hectares before declining to the current average of 2.4 million hectares per year over 2017-21. And 2020 marked the lowest point on record with only 760,000 hectares burned.
The record shows that the fraction of fires each year that become major (more than 200 hectares in size) peaked back in 1964 at 12.3 per cent. From 1959 to 1964, it averaged 8.7 per cent then dropped to 3.4 per cent in the early 1980s. As of 2017-21 interval, it had climbed again to 6.0 per cent, but that’s still well below the average 60 years ago.
At the global level, satellite data from the European Space Agency also show that wildfire activity has been trending downward in recent decades and is currently approaching its lowest level since the record began in the early 1980s.
In an extensive discussion on the Royal Society blog back in 2020, U.K. forestry experts Stefan Doerr and Cristina Santin acknowledged that climate change may be making conditions for fire more favourable in some areas, but also noted it’s leading to reductions in other areas. As for the tendency for some fires to become larger and more dangerous, this can be traced to our approaches to forest management. “[Very] aggressive fire suppression policies over much of the 20th century have removed fire from ecosystems where it has been a fundamental part of the landscape rejuvenation cycle” they explained. This has led to a buildup of fuel in the form of woody debris (‘deadfall’ – ed.) leading to the risk of more explosive and unstoppable fires.
Anyone ever stationed in Germany remembers the painstaking clearing of deadfall they do. In the US, as an unintended consequence of the Smokey the Bear ‘Only YOU can prevent forest fires’ zero-fire-tolerance policy, our forests have accumulated a huge amount of deadfall. But as the stats show – no, it isn’t solely climate change. It ain’t your muscle car, it isn’t that nasty coal plant, it isn’t that you used a plastic jug, that the forests are going to burn off the globe some time in July.
Category: "Teh Stoopid", Global Warming, Government Incompetence
Remember the Yellowstone NP forest fire of 1988?
And the conditions and regulations that led up to it?
I was a nubly nuke student in Idaho Falls that summer. Several mornings I woke up to my truck covered in ash.
Sounds like smoke and mirrors to me.
NYC = Blade Runner 2023
Just without the cool cars.
Truth is immaterial to the propagandist working so hard to maintain the attention of the useful idiots. If you can keep the masses occupied by the lie you can direct their actions accordingly.
I’ll just stick this right here…
Wildfire is more likely to be a cause of climate change, not a result of it.
If Truedope can’t manage the forests of Canaduh maybe he should go back to ‘managing’ balls at the bathhouse?
My garden enjoys the 0.04% of C02 in the atmosphere and they have authorized me to tell zim/zerp to fuck off and to keep fucking off until (s)he’s reached the end of their’s pathetic life on this planet.
Apparently, my veggies are right-wing extremists, so I’m waiting for the IRS Armed Rainbow Division® to raid them in a ‘mostly peaceful’ manner.
…..
These WEF monsters should meet rope and gravitational acceleration.
(nice image, btws. Was in the thick of that and somehow lived, I think… Perhaps Pfizer should come up with a Climate Change
vaccinationmRNA gene-mutating injection to save us?)He smokes a Cubano to celebrate Father’s Day.
But just think how much cleaner the environment will be once a vast swath of those nasty people that are crowding the big New England cities are asphyxiated.
See? There’s an upside even to fire disasters.
One of the WEF gurus said the secret part out loud. They want the planet’s population reduced by 7 million people.
Ranger, I think yer off by a couple of orders of magnitude. They want us reduced by 7 BILLION. I say we take them out first and tell ‘em the rest will follow. They’ll never know…🤣
You are correct. Autocorrect apparently couldn’t believe I typed “billion.” Which is what I meant, as 7 million isn’t even a good start by WEF and Bill Gates standards.
No worries. As I tell my Soldiers , “I feel you, dawg.” It’s hard living in this world today. And by the way, FUCK BILL GATES.
“I feel you, dawg.”
“Not if you were paying attention in SHARP class…. sir.”
(Grin)
NYC looked more like it did back in 1970 for a few days there.
Kids who think the air is polluted these days didn’t live back when the air really WAS polluted.
Riverside California in the 60’s. Got all the LA smog. San Bernardino mountains were only visible during Santa Ana season or fire season.
Even back in the late ’80’s there was bad air over the LA basin. Flying over it in a private airplane at around 7500 feet the slant visibility was terrible. It was especially poor in the summer months.
And the land was sinking! Extracting all that oil left vast empty spaces that collapsed, causing the coastal areas to subside and the sea to move inland.
And the water. And the land. When I listen to environmentalists these days, which is very very seldom and very very briefly, I wonder how I survived the toxic wasteland and waterways that covered the Earth (Gaia?) pre-EPA.
I spend too much time listening to/watching YouTube videos; among the myriad content are channels like Steve Magnante and other car-related ones. The Malaise Era was brought about because we really didn’t understand the effects of high emissions earlier on and overreacted. Well, there was that little oil embargo too, but who needs to remember that? We all love the classic muscle and fine large cars of the ’60s, even young’uns like me, but by the end of the ’70s we had “American Muscle” producing maybe 130hp. My 1978 F-250 had the 400 small block making about 152hp. My 1978 K5 Blazer originally had a 305 but by the time I owned it there was a 350 with a 4-barrel carburetor getting about 7 miles to the gallon. My then-future father-in-law owned an early-90s Geo Metro by the time I met my wife. Now that was a quick and safe ride! At least it good good mpg.
Now we have ultra-low emissions vehicles, some of which combine performance and fuel economy on a scale that no one who started legally driving in the ’90s (like me) would have thought possible. Even so, “climate change” will be the end of the world, causing massive wildfires, the melting of the polar ice caps, floods, locusts, and finally the four Dog-Masked Colonels of the Apocalypse.
Fire’s gonna fire. Poor forestry management coupled with inept politicians who wish only to selectively blame something besides themselves and the bureaucrats that hold important titles and throw money at the “correct” groups is going to result in a fire or two.
Funny, I spent my career on military bases in the Southeastern US. Controlled burns and fire breaks were the norm and, maybe I’m missing something, but I can’t recall the last time a wildfire overcame the training areas of Fort Stewart, Benning, or Campbell.
Dude, I grew up in the TRUE steel capital of America (fuck Pittsburgh). Back in the day, we said that if the sky was black, we were making money. Indiana Harbor, baby.
Controlled burns are a necessary tool for good Forest management. Without them, fuel accumulates to the point where what’s called a Crown Fire erupts, burning everything combustible. What is passed off as “Forest Management” in a lot of places these days is little more than neglect.
“Anyone ever stationed in Germany remembers the painstaking clearing of deadfall they do.”
Oh yeah. I thought they had a special variety of pine trees that only grew branches near the top. And I swear they mowed the grass in those forests. Heck, the woods where we did most of our soljer stuff looked better than my lawn does now. And no creepy-crawlies, either.
I grew up in Kansas and remember the smell and sight of smoke out the wazoo every spring. The source? Cattlemen burning off their pastures every Spring Season which caused the grass to grow better as well as getting rid of some weeds and tree saplings.
We had a forest fire that burned about 3000 acres of forest in the northern portion of Lower Michigan just recently. Fortunately, the winds kept the smoke moving east. Unfortunately, we got the smoke from western Canada to keep everything kinda smoky.
Then the local media went scrambling to find a dem politico to opine on the cause(Climate Change, of course). Even though the Michigan fire was apparently started by a lightning strike. But, hey, if you’ll only pay more taxes, we’ll not have any more forest fires. Or, maybe we’ll have more, nobody seems to want to make that declarative statement.
Pour beer on it! We have surplus Bud Light…
It’s just about water, with a bit of foam, so BL should work for firefighting.
And the horses don’t want it back.