Archives par mot-clé : Wildfires

better to know...?, climate-debate, press and newspapers

Amazon Rain Forest Fires: Here’s What’s Really Happening

by Alexandria Symonds, August 23, 2019 in TheNewYorkTimes

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These fires were not caused by climate change. They were, by and large, set by humans. However, climate change can make fires worse. Fires can burn hotter and spread more quickly under warmer and drier conditions.

When it comes to the future of climate change, widespread fires contribute a dual negative effect. Trees are valuable because they can store carbon dioxide, and that storage capacity is lost when trees burn. Burning trees also pumps more carbon into the atmosphere.

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climate-debate

Is Amazon Rainforest Burning At Record Rates? What Is The Way Forward?

by R. Walker, August 21, 2019 in Science20

Short summary: we have had wild fires for many years now in the Amazon, even in the tropical rainforest – mainly started by humans for forest clearing and ranching. It is not enough to impact significantly on the Paris agreement pledges yet, though it is important in the long term if this continues for decades. It does of course have major and immediate impacts on forest residents, nature services and the biodiversity in Brazil.

This image is being shared widely, for instance in National Geographic’s “The Amazon is burning at record rates – and deforestation is to blame”. Similarly, the BBC is reporting it as ‘Record number of fires’ in Brazilian rainforest.

Yet, NASA’s own description for this photo says that it is burning at close to the average for the last 15 years. So, what is going on here?

APOLOGIES – UPDATE FROM NASA FROM 19TH AUGUST – THEY NOW CONFIRM INPE INSTEAD OF SAYING IT IS BELOW AVERAGE

Previous version of this article was mistaken. I have made a copy on my website here (the comments on this article are based on that earlier version):

NASA Say Amazon Rainforest Burning At Close To Average Rates – Yet Many News Stories Say Record Rates – Which Is It?

It accurately summarized the article it linked to from NASA (Fires in Brazil) and that page showed as updated on 22nd August which lead me to believe it was up to date. But apparently it isn’t, that’s just the date for a minor update of the page.

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climate-debate, to keep an eye on...

Amazon Fire History Since 2003

by Les Johnson, August 23, 2019 in WUWT

We are told that Amazon fires are at record levels right now. This is a blatant lie. The only “record” is that Amazonian fires have DECREASED over the “record”.

This (is) what the data actually looks like, to August 22. Yes, its updated daily.

This comes from a wonderful site, https://www.globalfiredata.org/forecast.html#elbeni

It uses NASA MODIS data, from the Terra and Aqua satellites, and is updated daily. By going to the website, you can look at individual regions in the Amazon, or as I have done, look at the totals for the Amazon. This site also has global data, but I am only looking at the Amazon region here.

The Interactive Graphs are very informative. Hovering the cursor over the graph will show the data at that point.

You can highlight individual years, by clicking on a year in the legend at the bottom of the graph. That year remains bright, while the rest are dimmed. Using Eyeball Mark 1 Trend Indicator (EBM1TI), 2019 is slightly high, but not at record levels. Not even close.

One thing I saw by looking at each year, was a rough pattern – one or two bad years, one or two years at much lower levels, then a bad year. This pattern is there until 2010. 2010 was the last “bad year”. Levels since 2010 have been 1/2 or less of the “bad years”. The old pattern has been broken.

 

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See also here

better to know...?, climate-debate

Why California burns — its forests have too many trees

by T.M. Bonnicksen, November 12, 2018 in San FranciscoChronicle

The reason wildfires are burning California with unprecedented ferocity this year is because our public forests are so thick. It is our fault. We don’t manage our forests, we just let them grow. That is the simple truth. However, it is easier to deny the truth and blame a warming climate instead of admitting our guilt and taking action to prevent wildfires.

Hot, dry weather doesn’t cause catastrophic wildfires. It only makes them worse. In order for any fire to burn, it must have fuel. To spread wildly, it must have abundant fuel. Efforts in the 20th century to prevent fire and preserve forests have been too successful — they have disrupted the ecological balance and allowed more and more trees to grow.

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climate-debate

Wildfires Declining In Southern Europe

by P. Homewood, March 28, 2019 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

1. Introduction Fires are an integral component of ecosystem dynamics in European landscapes. However, uncontrolled fires cause large environmental and economic damages, especially in the Mediterranean region. On average, about 65000 fires occur in Europe every year, burning approximately half a million ha of wildland and forest areas; most of the burnt area, over 85%, is in the European Mediterranean region. Trends in number of fires and burnt areas in the Mediterranean region are presented in Fig. 1. Recent analyses of the available data in the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) show that over 95% of the fires in Europe are human-induced. The split of causes shows that most of them are due to misuse of traditional practices of straw burning of shrub-burning to recover areas for cattle feeding. Although European countries have collected information on forest fires since 1970s, the lack of harmonized information at the European level has prevented a holistic approach for forest fire prevention in the Region. The European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) has been developed jointly by the European Commission (EC) services (Directorate General Environment and the Joint Research Centre) and the relevant fires services in the countries (forest fires and civil protection services) in response to the needs of European bodies such as the Monitoring and Information Centre of Civil Protection, the European Commission Services and the European Parliament. EFFIS is a comprehensive system covering the full cycle of forest fire management, from forest fire prevention and preparedness to post-fire damage analysis (see Fig. 2). The system is providing information to over 30 countries in the European and Mediterranean regions, and receives detailed information of forest fire events from 22 European countries. It supports forest fire prevention and forest fire fighting in Europe through the provision of timely and reliable information on forest fires.

climate-debate

Was Global Warming A Significant Factor in California’s Camp Fire? The Answer is Clearly No.

by Cliff Mass Weather and Climate Blog, November 20, 2018 in WUWT

The Camp Fire that struck the northern California town of Paradise and vicinity is a profoundly disturbing environmental disaster of first magnitude.  Nearly 100 people have lost their lives, approximately 10,000 homes have been lost, a major community has essentially been destroyed, and millions of people have been exposed to high concentrations of smoke.  Tens of thousands of people have been displaced and lives of millions substantially affected.

And beyond the heart-wrenching losses noted above, it is doubly tragic that this disaster was both foreseeable and avoidable, resulting from a series of errors, poor judgment, lack of use of available technology, and poor urban planning.
It is more than unfortunate that some politicians, environmental advocacy groups, and activist scientists are attempting to use this tragedy as a tool for their own agenda, make the claim that the Camp Fire was result of global warming.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

#CampFire #WoolseyFire Blaming climate – ignoring incompetence

by Paul Driessen, November 18, 2018 in WUWT

Foreword:

Over 8,000 homes and businesses have been reduced to ashes and rubble by the latest California conflagrations. Well over 60 people have perished, over 50,000 are homeless, hundreds remain missing. “This is the new abnormal,” Governor Jerry Brown insists. “Dryness, warmth, drought, all those things are going to intensify,” because of climate change. Even if we do more on forest management, that won’t stop climate change. “And those who deny that are definitely contributing to the tragedies.”

Those assertions have no basis in fact. The hard, incontrovertible reality is that California has always been a largely arid state, afflicted by prolonged droughts, interspersed with periods of intense rainfall, and buffeted almost every autumn by strong winds that can whip forest fires into infernos. The problem isn’t climate change. It’s ideological, even criminally incompetent forest management practices demanded by politicians, regulators, judges and environmentalists in recent decades. My article presents the real story.

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climate-debate

Forest Fires in the Golden State

by Willis Eschenbach, November 12, 2018 in WUWT

Our charmingly incompetent California Governor, Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown, has announced that all climate-change deniers are “definitely contributing” to the wildfires in the northern and southern parts of the state over the past few days, as well as blazes “in the coming years.” So look out, you dang “deniers”, it’s all your fault!

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So … did scientists actually “predict” that past temperatures have gone up by one degree? Can scientists actually predict the past? And can we really expect half a degree of warming in the next decade? To get some perspective on these questions, I thought I’d take a look at the records. I found an interesting site, the Western Regional Climate Center (WRCC), which has a variety of weather-related data state by state. So with no further ado, here is the average temperature in California from January of 1895 to the present, October 2018.

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climate-debate

Wildfire aerosols remain longer in atmosphere than expected

by Michigan Technological University, October 2, 2018 in ScienceDaily

… “Wildfires are such a huge source of aerosol in the atmosphere with a combination of cooling and warming properties, that understanding the delicate balance can have profound consequences on how accurately we can predict future changes,” says Claudio Mazzoleni, professor of physics, and one of the authors of the paper.

As wildfires increase in size and frequency in the world’s arid regions, more aerosol particles could be injected into the free troposphere where they are slower to oxidize, contributing another important consideration to the study of atmospheric science and climate change.

climate-debate

NASA alarmism headline: ‘A World On Fire’

by Anthony Watts, August 23, 2018 in WUWT

The world is on fire. Or so it appears in this image from NASA’s Worldview. The red points overlaid on the image designate those areas that by using thermal bands detect actively burning fires. Africa seems to have the most concentrated fires. This could be due to the fact that these are most likely agricultural fires. The location, widespread nature, and number of fires suggest that these fires were deliberately set to manage land. Farmers often use fire to return nutrients to the soil and to clear the ground of unwanted plants. While fire helps enhance crops and grasses for pasture, the fires also produce smoke that degrades air quality.

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climate-debate

Climate Scientist Calls Out Media (and Mann) ‘Misinformation’ On Wildfires And Global Warming

by Michaele Bastach, August 10, 2018 in WUWT

With wildfires engulfing over 620,000 acres of California, there’s been a concerted media campaign to single out man-made global warming as the primary force behind the deadly blazes.

But that’s not what the data suggests, according to University of Washington climate scientist Cliff Mass.

“So there is a lot of misinformation going around in the media, some environmental advocacy groups, and some politicians,” Mass wrote in the first of a series of blog posts analyzing the California wildfires.

climate-debate

L. A. Times Ca. climate alarmist wildfire story hides key studies showing global & Ca. wildfires in decline

by Larry Hamlin, August 1, 2018 in WUWT

The L. A. Times published a Ca. climate alarmist wildfire story falsely claiming that the states most recent wildfires are result of “heat like the state has never seen”.

As usual with climate fear articles like this one in the L. A. Times the scientific reality present a far different picture. The latest scientific study completed by the Royal Society concludes that global wildfires are in decline.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

A Geological Perspective of Wildfires

by David Middleton, July 31, 1018 in WUWT

This post was inspired by Anthony Watts’ recent post about wildfires and their unwillingness to cooperate with the Gorebal Warming narrative.

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A Geological Perspective of Wildfires

The Fire Window

Geological evidence for ancient wildfires generally consists of sedimentary charcoal deposits (inertinite).  Fossil charcoal is also a key factor in understanding the evolution of Earth’s atmosphere, particularly oxygen content.  The first clear evidence of fire is in the Late Silurian.

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