Archives par mot-clé : Wildfires

climate-debate

Wildfires in 2021 emitted a record-breaking amount of carbon dioxide

by University of California – Irvine, Mar 3, 2023 in ScienceDaily

Nearly half a gigaton of carbon (or 1.76 billion tons of CO2) was released from burning boreal forests in North America and Eurasia in 2021, 150 percent higher than annual mean CO2 emissions between 2000 and 2020, the scientists reported in a paper in Science.

“According to our measurements, boreal fires in 2021 shattered previous records,” said senior co-author Steven Davis, UCI professor of Earth system science. “These fires are two decades of rapid warming and extreme drought in Northern Canada and Siberia coming to roost, and unfortunately even this new record may not stand for long.”

The researchers said that the worsening fires are part of a climate-fire feedback in which carbon dioxide emissions warm the planet, creating conditions that lead to more fires and more emissions.

“The escalation of wildfires in the boreal region is anticipated to accelerate the release of the large carbon storage in the permafrost soil layer, as well as contribute to the northward expansion of shrubs,” said co-author Yang Chen, a UCI research scientist in Earth system science. “These factors could potentially lead to further warming and create a more favorable climate for the occurrence of wildfires.”

Davis added, “Boreal fires released nearly twice as much CO2 as global aviation in 2021. If this scale of emissions from unmanaged lands becomes a new normal, stabilizing Earth’s climate will be even more challenging than we thought.”

Analyzing the amount of carbon dioxide released during wildfires is difficult for Earth system scientists for a variety of reasons. Rugged, smoke-enshrouded terrain hampers satellite observations during a combustion event, and space-based measurements are not at a sufficiently fine resolution to reveal details of CO2 emissions. Models used to simulate fuel load, fuel consumption and fire efficiency work well under ordinary circumstances but are not robust enough to represent extreme wildfires, according to the researchers.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

LA Times reveals 2020 CA Wildfire CO2 Wiped Out 18 Years of the State’s Emissions Reductions

by L. Hamlin, Oct 22, 2022 in WUWT

The article notes that “researchers estimated that about 127 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent were released by the fires, compared with about 65 million metric tons of reductions achieved in the previous 18 years.”

The Times article provided the usual climate alarmist hype that “climate change” is responsible for the California’s increased wildfire damage noting:

“Forests have long played a role in that system, with large trees sequestering carbon and helping to alleviate some emissions. But California’s new breed of climate-change-fueled fires are burning hotter and faster than those of the past, sometimes slowing the regrowth process and even converting some areas from coniferous trees into grasslands, shrubs and chaparral, the researchers said.”

However a 2021 prior WUWT article addressed the fact that year 2020 wildfire emissions likely wiped out the state AB 32 emissions reductions and also addressed in detail the huge state government forest management failures that have contributed to the states wildfire growth and increasing risks over the past decade with these critical failures hidden from view in the Times article.  This prior WUWT article notes:

“California’s climate alarmists claim “climate change” is responsible for this wildfire outcome but an extensive 2018 California Legislative Analyst Office (LAO) report presents clear and compelling evidence demonstrating that decades of forest mismanagement by the state have in fact created the growing wildfire crisis.

The LAO report notes that increased fire risks are present throughout California driven by forest conditions that have been allowed by the state to develop for decades.”

Provided below are some of the highlights (or lowlights) of the state governments forest management failures that have led directly to increased wildfire growth and risks that have nothing to do with “climate change” as addressed in the states LAO analysis and presented in the prior WUWT article.

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climate-debate

Nothing Alarming: Europe Data Show No Upward Trend In Droughts And Forest Fires

by P. Gosselin, Aug 24, 2022 in NoTricksZone

German online NOVO-Argumente looks at the forest fire situation in Germany and Europe.

Currently parts of Europe are experiencing severe drought conditions and forest fires are raging in Germany. Climate activists and the mainstream are claiming it’s climate change, and it’s unprecedented.

But NOVO-Argumente looks at the historical data going back decades and finds nothing alarming.

Over the long-term average (1993 to 2019), 1035 forest fires in Germany were recorded with an average of 656 hectares affected. The amount of damage is just 1.38 million euros. Forest fires therefore cost us about as much per year as we spend every 30 minutes on subsidizing solar and wind energy.

“No evidence of an increase in forest fires”

As the following graph shows, there is no evidence of an increase in forest fires over the last 30 years in terms of number and extent. The peaks are not seen in this chart from the Federal Environmental Agency because they are in the past. In 1975, over 8000 hectares burned in Lower Saxony alone. In contrast, in the year 2021, which is not yet recorded in the graph, there were only 548 forest fires in the whole of Germany on a total area of 148 hectares.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Europe wildfires: Are they linked to climate change?–NO!!!

by P. Homewood, Aug 15, 2022 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

The BBC would like you to think so, with statements like these:

So far this year, the amount of land burnt by fires across the European Union is more than three times greater than what you would expect by the middle of July.

Almost 346,000 hectares (1,370 sq miles) of land have been recorded as burnt (as of 16 July), according to the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS).

Much of Western Europe has been hit by a record-breaking heatwave, which substantially increases the risk of fires….

“Heatwaves and droughts are exacerbated by climate change and are absolutely the defining factor in years with massive wildfire outbreaks, like the present one,” Dr Jones says….

“But we definitely see trends in fire weather risk because of climate change.

“The risk is higher in the Mediterranean region than the rest of Europe.”

Studies show increasing fire risk for central and southern regions of Europe over the past couple of decades.

Yet tucked away in the same article is this graph which proves all of these have no basis in fact:

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climate-debate

How Eco-Activists And Lawsuits Are Worsening Wildfires

by J. Wood, July 27, 2022 in Climate ChangeDispatch

With more than three million acres already burned or burning, 2022 is shaping up to be another devastating year for wildfires in the U.S.

America’s forests need to be managed more actively, a task the Biden administration took up earlier this year when it announced a 10-year strategy to reduce excess fire fuels, like downed trees and underbrush, on up to 20 million acres of national forest and 30 million acres of other lands. [bold, links added]

This plan is a step in the right direction, but it’s unlikely to come to fruition if the administration doesn’t first tackle two major obstacles to forest restoration: environmental red tape and litigation.

Projects to clear out fire fuel often face substantial delays. New research from the think tank where I work, the Property and Environment Research Center, found that it takes an average of 3.6 years for efforts to clear downed, unhealthy, and too densely grown trees to move from the required environmental review to on-the-ground work.

For prescribed burns, the delay is even longer, 4.7 years. And these are the averages. Many urgently needed projects take much longer.

While many bureaucratic, technical, and fiscal obstacles affect these delays, red tape and lawsuits are substantial contributors.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

As Climate Screamers Spread Alarm, Germany’s Long-Term Forest Fire Trend Has Declined

by P.   Sommer, June 22, 23022 in NoTricksZone

It’s become an annual ritual. Every summer, when there has been little rain for a long time and unreasonable people set fire to forests, whether through intent or negligence, a solution comes into play: wind turbines.

There are people who obstruct wind turbines, supposedly in order to protect forests. But the opposite is true. Every obstructed wind turbine fires up the climate crisis with heat, drought and forest fires.”

(Image: Screenshot Twitter)

Old military grounds pose huge hazard to fire fighters

Of course, this is exactly what is happening with the current forest fire in Treuenbrietzen in Brandenburg, alarmists like Quaschning say. But, if you look very closely you will see that once again a forest area burned that had previously served as a military training area for several decades. Such areas are not easy to extinguish because firefighters put themselves in serious danger as remnants of ammunition are lying around everywhere. So the fire has an easy time when it can only be extinguished from a distance. Or, to put it another way, in forests without remnants of ammunition, firefighters would have fires under control quickly.

Nothing to do with temperature

What would help the forest is precipitation. Temperature is not the determining factor for forest fires, but the absence of rain. The forest would also be helped if people stopped handling fire in the forest during times of drought.

Yet we will read and hear the call for more wind power in the forests every time there is a forest fire from the likes of Big Wind lobbyists Volker Quaschning – and of course, without them addressing the forest floor contaminated with munitions. This has always been the case in recent years and has also been a topic in this blog. By the way, with the same protagonist as this year and almost word-same tweets.

Long-term downward trend

 

There are people who obstruct wind turbines, supposedly in order to protect forests. But the opposite is true. Every obstructed wind turbine fires up the climate crisis with heat, drought and forest fires.”

Old military grounds pose huge hazard to fire fighters

Of course, this is exactly what is happening with the current forest fire in Treuenbrietzen in Brandenburg, alarmists like Quaschning say. But, if you look very closely you will see that once again a forest area burned that had previously served as a military training area for several decades. Such areas are not easy to extinguish because firefighters put themselves in serious danger as remnants of ammunition are lying around everywhere. So the fire has an easy time when it can only be extinguished from a distance. Or, to put it another way, in forests without remnants of ammunition, firefighters would have fires under control quickly.

Nothing to do with temperature

What would help the forest is precipitation. Temperature is not the determining factor for forest fires, but the absence of rain. The forest would also be helped if people stopped handling fire in the forest during times of drought.

Yet we will read and hear the call for more wind power in the forests every time there is a forest fire from the likes of Big Wind lobbyists Volker Quaschning – and of course, without them addressing the forest floor contaminated with munitions. This has always been the case in recent years and has also been a topic in this blog. By the way, with the same protagonist as this year and almost word-same tweets.

Long-term downward trend

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climate-debate

British colonisation of Australia 250 years ago to blame for recent wildfires

by P. Homewood, Feb 18, 2022 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

Britain’s colonisation of Australia in the late 18th century is partly to blame for the nation’s recent ravaging by bushfires, a new study claims.

Before British ships carrying convicted criminals landed in New South Wales in January 1788, aboriginal people tended the landscape and were in charge of bushfire prevention.

But after the penal colony was established, and indigenous people were forced off their land and away from territories they had tended for centuries, the settlers took a new approach.

Suppression is now the primary focus. Instead of proactively and gradually reducing the risk of fire, authorities try to extinguish a fire as soon as possible after ignition.

Researchers from around the world, including Australia, have published a paper saying this change in tack has left Australia more vulnerable to wildfires now than it was 250 years ago.

“Indigenous people managed Australia’s flammable vegetation with “cultural burning” practices,” the study authors write in an article for The Conversation.

“These involved frequent, low-intensity fires which led to a fine-grained vegetation mosaic comprising grassy areas and scattered trees.

“Landscapes managed in this way were less prone to destructive fires. But under colonial rule, Aboriginal people were dispossessed of their lands and often prevented from carrying out many important practices.”

The change in wildfire prevention due to colonisation has left Australia more vulnerable to wildfires now than it was 250 years ago

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climate-debate

USA Heatwave reality check: Global temps below 30-year avg & ‘75% of the states recorded their hottest temperature prior to 1955’ – Worst U.S. heat waves happened in 1930s

by M. Morano, July 8, 2021 in CO2Coalition

Here we go again! Climate change: US-Canada heatwave ‘virtually impossible’ without warming according to climate model simulations

Model Based Study: Northwest heat wave impossible without climate change: “They logged observations of what happened and fed them into 21 computer models and ran numerous simulations. They then simulated a world without greenhouse gases from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas. The difference between the two scenarios is the climate change portion.”

Climate Depot’s Marc Morano & author of Green Fraud:

“Here we go again. Any heatwave, hurricane, tornado outbreak, etc. are always used by the media and other climate activists as some kind of ‘proof” of a climate emergency.  At least these claims are more plausible than claims that building collapses or illegal immigration are caused by “climate change.”

But currently, the global satellite temperature for June 2021 is below the 30-year average. And despite the U.S. heatwave, there are plenty of record cold outbreaks happening around the globe, (See: Unusually strong cold weather outbreak spreads from Antarctica into central South America, bringing early winter temperature records and first snowfall after decades)

The media gaslights anyone who mocks ‘global warming’ on a record cold or snowy day but has no problem doing the exact same thing whenever it’s hot. As University of Alabama climate scientist John Christy’s research has found: “About 75% of the states recorded their hottest temperature prior to 1955, and over 50 percent of the states experienced their record cold temperatures after 1940.”

In addition, the EPA’s own data has shown that the 1930s U.S. heatwaves were far more severe than current temperatures. (2021 Update: EPA puts inconvenient data on 1930s drought and heat wave down the memory hole)

In short, it is unscientific and nothing short of political lobbying to jump on a heatwave to claim ‘proof’ of man-made global warming. Climate activists’ new motto should be: Never let an opportunity go to waste to blame a heatwave or a flood or hurricane or building collapse or immigration — on ‘climate change.’

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climate-debate

US Government Tries To Erase Historical Forest Fire Data To Fabricate Another Fake Crisis

by P. Gosselin, June 8, 2021 in NoTricksZone

The US government deletes more than 50 years of early data on forest fires in order to make it look like forest fires are more widespread, and linked to CO2. Should be Investigated under the RICO Act. 

There’s a reason why Smokey the Bear has been around more than 75 years with his message. “Only you can prevent forest fires.” The US government had known for decades that forest fires were a serious problem – much more serious than today.

They have forest fire data going back over 100 years. But suddenly, since January of this year, the US government is acting like there had never been a Smokey the Bear before 1983 and that forest fires are just a recent problem caused by manmade climate change.

It’s all a fraud, explains data analyst and software expert Tony Heller in his latest video.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Number Of Global Wild Fires Trending Down Since 2003. Northern Ocean Heat Content Drops Since 2010

In his latest video the veteran geologist looks at wild fires worldwide and the CO2 they emit. He reports that both have been decreasing.

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Citing the results of the European Copernicus satellite atmosphere monitoring service (CAMS), total wildfires globally have fallen steadily, along with their corresponding CO2 emissions:

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climate-debate

Data Show Canadian Wildfires At Lowest Level In Decades

by A. Watts, Sep 29, 2020 in WUWT

Here’s something surprising from Paul Homewood, Not A Lot Of People Know That. While USA wildfires are running higher the last couple of years, according to Canada’s National Forestry Database, the number of forest fires in Canada has been at the lowest since 1990. Of course, Canada takes a management approach to forests compared to the USA’s “let it be or litigation” mess.

Source: http://nfdp.ccfm.org/en/data/fires.php

According to the Met Office, global warming is leading to record breaking fires in North America.

Canada, of course, is a large part of North America, so surely fires should be getting worse there too.

In fact wildfires this year are running at just 8% of the 10-year average:

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climate-debate

Global Warming Drives Wildfires Study–Ignores Pre 1979 Data

by P. Homewood, Sep 25, 2020 in WUWT

Climate change is driving the scale and impact of recent wildfires that have raged in California, say scientists.

Their analysis finds an “unequivocal and pervasive” role for global heating in boosting the conditions for fire.

California now has greater exposure to fire risks than before humans started altering the climate, the authors say.

Land management issues, touted by President Donald Trump as a key cause, can’t by themselves explain the recent infernos.

The new review covers more than 100 studies published since 2013, and shows that extreme fires occur when natural variability in the climate is superimposed on increasingly warm and dry background conditions resulting from global warming.

“In terms of the trends we’re seeing, in terms of the extent of wildfires, and which have increased eight to ten-fold in the past four decades, that trend is driven by climate change,” said Dr Matthew Jones from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, who led the review.

“Climate change ultimately means that those forests, whatever state they’re in, are becoming warmer and drier more frequently,” he told BBC News.

“And that’s what’s really driving the kind of scale and impact of the fires that we’re seeing today.”

In the 40 years from 1979 to 2019, fire weather conditions have increased by a total of eight days on average across the world.

However, in California the number of autumn days with extreme wildfire conditions has doubled in that period.

The authors of the review conclude that “climate change is bringing hotter, drier weather to the western US and the region is fundamentally more exposed to fire risks than it was before humans began to alter the global climate”.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-54278988

Now why should they start their study in 1979? After all, there is loads of data from earlier years.

A look at NOAA’s rainfall graph for California shows just why:

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/national/time-series

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better to know...?

Bjorn Lomborg: CA Fires Caused By Century Of Suppressing Controlled Burns

by R. Kraychik, Sep 18, 2020 in ClimateChangeDisptach

Ongoing forest fires in California are mostly a function of poor forest management, particularly insufficient controlled burns to clear away accumulated fuelwood, explained Bjorn Lomborg, presidentof the Copenhagen Consensus Center and author of False Alarm,offering his remarks on Thursday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.

“It has fairly little to do with climate change, and it has almost everything to do with the fact that we haven’t managed our forest well,” said Lomborg of California wildfires. “We haven’t done prescribed burning. We haven’t ensured that these fires won’t burn out of control.”

Lomborg added, “We’ve just simply allowed fuelwood to build up to cause almost uncontrollable fires in California.”

Prescribed burnings are necessary to reduce the risk of uncontrollable forest fires, Lomborg stated. “If we did prescribed burning, we could, in a few years, reduce the fire risk dramatically and actually get people’s lives back to — pretty close — to normal.”

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climate-debate

Scientists: No Correlation Between Climate Change And Wildfires In California – Or Anywhere Else On Earth

by K. Richard, Sep 17,2020 in NoTricksZone

A “potential connection” between anthropogenic global warming and the frequency or intensity of wildfires in California has yet to emerge in the trend observations.

Scientists have found a “lack of correlation between late summer/autumn wildfires” and “summer precipitation or temperature” in coastal California. In fact, “there is no long-term trend in the number of fires over coastal California” in the last 50 years (Mass and Ovens, 2019).

mage Source: Marlon et al., 2012

As CO2 concentrations have risen from 300 ppm to 400 ppm (1900 to 2007), the decline in global burned area has been significant (Yang et al., 2014)

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better to know...?, climate-debate, unclassified

FIRE

by J. Curry, Sep 15, 2020 in WUWT

Subtitle: our failure to live in harmony with nature.

I’m taking a breather today from nonstop hurricane stuff. Well, ‘breather’ may not be quite the right word.

As I’m writing this, I’m looking out into the smoke from the California fires that are blowing into Reno (not to mention much of the rest of the U.S.).  Schools in Reno are supposed to be open (they have a good COVID protocol), but have been closed more than half the time for the past month owing to bad air quality from the fires.

The mantra from global warming activists that manmade global warming is causing the fires, and therefore fossil fuels must be eliminated,  is rather tiresome, not to mention misses the most important factors.  More importantly, even if global warming is having some fractional impact on the wildfires, reducing fossil fuels would fractionally impact the fires but only a time scale of many decades hence.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

California Has Always Had Fires, Environmental Alarmism Makes Them Worse Than Necessary

by M. Schellenberger,  Sep 10, 2020 in Forbes

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“California was a very smoky place historically,” says Malcolm North of the US Forest Survey.“Even though we’re seeing area burned that is off-the-charts, it’s still probably less than what used to be burned before Europeans arrived.”

Many reporters note that more area has burned this year in California than at any other point in “the modern period,” but that period began in 1950. For the last half of the 20th Century, the annual area burned in California was just 250,000 acres a year, whereas the best-available science suggests 4.4 and 12 million acres burned in California annually before the arrival of Europeans.

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See also: California Has Always Had Fires, Environmentalism Makes Them Worse
climate-debate

Al Gore Uses Heatwaves, Wildfires To Fuel Global Warming Angst

by V. Richardson, Sep 9, 2020 ClimateChangeDispatch

A burst of wild September weather brought a “climate crisis” warning Tuesday from Al Gore as Californians struggled with heat and wildfires, Atlantic storm trackers raced through the alphabet and Coloradans traded their flip-flops for snow boots.

California firefighters fought to contain 23 active fires that charred a record 2.3 million acres as the state headed into the peak of its fire season fueled by a heatwave. On Sunday, the Los Angeles County town of Woodland Hills set a record at 121 degrees.

“It reached a record high of 121 degrees F in LA county over the weekend,” Mr. Gore tweeted Tuesday. “Extreme heat is fueling a longer, more intense, and more destructive wildfire season in CA. This is what an unabated climate crisis looks like.”

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In a warming climate, temperatures become more stable, not less, because the differences between the poles and the equator become smaller, Mr. Taylor said.

“Assuming for the sake of argument that a large temperature swing is a crisis like climate alarmists assert, global warming will make such temperature swings less likely and severe,” he said. “So this is happening despite our recent modest warming, not because of it.”

better to know...?, climate-debate

California’s Creek Fire Creates Its Own Pyrocumulonimbus Cloud

by NASA, September 9, 2020 in WUWT

On Friday September 4, 2020 at about 6:44 PM PDT the Creek Fire began in the Big Creek drainage area between Shaver Lake, Big Creek and Huntington Lake, Calif. NASA’s Suomi NPP satellite captured these images of the fire on Sep. 05 through Sep. 07, 2020. From the series of images the spread of the fire can be seen in the outward movement of the red hot spots, although the huge cloud on the 6th obscures all readings due to its size.

The huge, dense cloud created on Sep. 05 and seen in the Suomi NPP image was a pyrocumulonimbus cloud (pyroCb) and the resulting smoke plume that grew upward was spotted and confirmed on Sep. 06, 2020. A pyrocumulonimbus cloud is also called a cumulonimbus flammagenitus. The origins of the latter word are from the Latin meaning “flame” and “created from.” This perfectly describes a cloud that is caused by a natural source of heat such as a wildfire or volcano. Rising warm air from the fire can carry water vapor up into the atmosphere causing clouds. Any type of convective cloud can be created. In this case, the cumulonimbus, or thunderhead cloud, was created. Precipitation and lightning can also occur with these types of clouds creating a risk that the fire will expand due to increased wind from precipitation downdraft or by creating new fires due to lightning strikes. These are all things that fire managers must keep in mind while continuing to try to fight the fire.

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unclassified

No Fuel, No Fire

by Mike Jonas, August 25, 2020 in WUWT

With wildfires devastating California, it may be worth while seeing if lessons can be learned from Australia. Connections between American and Australian firefighters go back many years, with each helping the other from time to time. There were devastating bushfires in Australia last summer, and, tragically, three Americans who had come to help were killed when their water tanker plane crashed. It’s now Australia’s turn to help California, and let us all hope there is a better outcome.

Gum trees burnt in the bushfires in The Blue Mountains in Australia

Submissions to Enquiries

Australia’s federal enquiry into the bushfires is not due to report until 28 October 2020 but the NSW [New South Wales] state enquiry report was published today. There were nearly 2,000 public submissions. Before I go into the report’s recommendations, it may be worth looking at a couple of the public submissions in order to understand the extreme level of public frustration with green tape and the way that the fire hazard has been allowed to grow ever larger over the years.

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climate-debate

PBS Blames Hurricanes, Wildfires On Climate Change, Defying UN ‘Consensus’

by H.S. Burnett, August 20, 2020 in ClimateChangeDispatch

PBS News Hour attacked climate science this weekend, publishing alarmist claims about hurricanes and wildfires that defy findings of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

In an interview between PBS reporter Hari Sreenivasan and Andrew Freedman, editor of Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang, the two journalists blamed global warming for severe wildfires and hurricanes.

According to the IPCC, however, there is little or no evidence indicating global warming is impacting hurricanes or drought.

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Figure 1: Total wildfire acreage burned by year in the United States, 1926 to 2019. Data from NIFC. Graph by meteorologist Anthony Watts

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climate-debate

Stop Blaming Climate Change For California’s Fires–Michael Schellenberger

by P. Homewood, August 26, 2020 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

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It’s Not About The Climate

Nobody denies climate change is occurring and playing a role in warmer temperatures and heatwaves. Keeley notes that, since 1960, the variation in spring and summer temperatures explain 50% of the variation in fire frequency and intensity from one year to the next.

But the half-century since 1960 is the same period in which the U.S. government promoted, mostly out of ignorance, the suppression of regular fires which most forests need to allow for new growth.

For much of the 20th Century, U.S. agencies and private landowners suppressed fires as a matter of policy. The results were disastrous: the accumulation of wood fuel resulting in fires that burn so hot they sometimes kill the forest, turning it into shrubland.

The US government started to allow forests in national parks to burn more in the 1960s, and allowed a wider set of forests on public lands to burn starting in the 1990s.

“When I hear climate change discussed it’s suggested that it’s a major reason and it’s not,” Scott Stevens of the University of California, Berkeley, told me.

Redwood forests before Europeans arrived burned every 6 to 25 years. The evidence comes from fire scars on barks and the bases of massive ancient trees, hollowed out by fire, like the one depicted in The New York Times photograph.

“There was severe heat before the lightning that dried-out [wood] fuel,” noted Stevens. “But in Big Basin [redwood park], where fire burned every seven to ten years, there is a high-density of fuel build-up, especially in the forests.”

climate-debate

Wildfires, Blackouts And High Gas Prices: Californians Fight Familiar Foes Amid Pandemic

by C. Rotter, August 20, 2020 in TheDailyCaller/WUWT

  • Wildfires are scorching California amid a massive heatwave, which is prompting citizens to consume more energy in hopes of staying cool. The increase in consumption resulted in rolling blackouts, as energy regulators managed an over-taxed energy grid. 
  • The wildfires and blackouts are also coming amid a severe economic downturn caused in part by government-imposed lockdowns designed to slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.
  • At the same time, a recent fuel tax increase is forcing Californians to pay more at the gas pump. California now has the highest gas prices in the country, data show. 

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 See also Californian Wildfires–Due To Climate Change?

unclassified

During The Last Glacial Maximum Fires Were 10 Times More Common And Summer Temps 3-4°C Warmer Than Today

by K. Richard, August 3, 2020 in NoTricksZone

A new study finds that 26 to 19 thousand years ago, with CO2 concentrations as low as 180 ppm, fire activity was an order of magnitude more prevalent than today near the southern tip of Africa – mostly because summer temperatures were 3-4°C warmer.

We usually assume the last glacial maximum – the peak of the last ice age – was signficantly colder than it is today.

But evidence has been uncovered that wild horses fed on exposed grass year-round in the Arctic, Alaska’s North Slope, about 20,000 to 17,000 years ago, when CO2 concentrations were at their lowest and yet “summer temperatures were higher here than they are today” (Kuzmina et al., 2019). Horses had a “substantial dietary volume” of dried grasses year-round, even in winter at this time, but the Arctic is presently “no place for horses” because there is too little for them to eat, and the food there is to eat is “deeply buried by snow” (Guthrie and Stoker, 1990).

In a new study (Kraaij et al., 2020) find evidence that “the number of days per annum with high or higher fire danger scores was almost an order of magnitude larger during the LGM [last glacial maximum, 19-26 ka BP]  than under contemporary conditions” near Africa’s southernmost tip, and that “daily maximum temperatures were 3-4°C higher than present in summer (and 2-4°C lower than present in winter), which would have contributed to the high severity of fire weather during LGM summers.”

Neither conclusion – that surface temperatures would be warmer or that fires would be more common – would seem to be consistent with the position that CO2 variations drive climate or heavily contribute to fire patterns.

climate-debate

Siberia on fire – every summer

by Pasi Autio, July 14, 2020 in WUWT

Northern hemisphere summer – the season when forest fires in Siberia are on the loop. And usually every single new article about the Siberian forest fires somehow links them to climate change. Therefore it is good time to see how the forest fires has changed during the years. Is there really an increasing trend of Siberia forest fires as the news suggests and what is continuously predicted based on climate models?

With an area of 13.1 million square kilometres (5,100,000 sq mi), Siberia accounts for 77% of Russia’s land area. Majority of the Siberia is sparsely inhabited wilderness with little or no roads. Therefore, what sets on fire, usually burns until rain or other natural factor ends the fire. Southern Siberia also has extensive logging.

Getting reliable fire area data based on available literature seems to be problematic. According to the literature (1) USSR-era fire area data is unreliable and was consistently and severely underreporting fires on sparsely populated areas due to incomplete reporting structure that left most of the country unmonitored (6). The situation was improved only after western satellite data was taken in use by post-USSR Russia. But considering the size of Siberia and the fact that it is very sparsely populated, it is not wonder that no reliable data can be generated without the help of satellites. But even on satellite era some smaller fires goes undetected due to cloud cover or sensor detection limits (6).

After extensive literature study, I found no actual study providing satellite-based dataset for Siberian forest fires for post-USSR era either, which is strange considering how much coverage the Siberian forest fires have got lately. There seem to be an effort going on to create such a dataset for USSR-era years, however, by digitizing old satellite images taken since 1979, but let’s discuss that later a bit more.

Annual burned area in Siberia 1997-2016

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Wildfire, Siberia: 123rf.com

Figure: Natural forest fire in Russia.

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better to know...?

Feux californiens : le climat innocenté

by Benoît Rittaud, 19 juin 2020

Dans un silence remarquable, on vient d’apprendre que les incendies qui ont ravagé la Californie en 2018 ont été causés par des défauts de maintenance dans le réseau électrique et ne devaient rien au réchauffement climatique, rapporte Benoît Rittaud, mathématicien et président de l’Association des climato-réalistes. Tribune.

Calomniez, calomniez, il en restera toujours quelque chose, dit-on. Dans notre monde où l’écologisme est un réflexe pavlovien, ce slogan s’est fait encore plus simple : dès que se produit un drame, toute explication fondée sur le « dérèglement climatique » est présumée correcte. Cette vérité immédiate a alors de bonnes chances de devenir vérité tout court, car qui ira perdre son temps à rétablir les faits après coup, tandis qu’entre-temps tant d’autres drames auront à leur tour « démontré une fois de plus la réalité de la crise ».

 

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