4.25 What about Wild Fires. Aren't They Caused By Global Warming?
I write this while breathing bad air from a fog of pollution caused by wild fires in Canada in June 2023. I wondered what was causing those wildfires and went to my browser in my cell phone to find out. Web site after web site including the web site of the Washington Post, blamed the fires on drought caused by climate change. Politicians like AOC, Bernie Sanders and President Joe Biden also blamed the fires on climate change. What they mean is that the carbon dioxide produced by our societies is heating up and drying up the planet and causing those wildfires. One of the places hit hard by the fires was Quebec in Canada. There lighting is thought to have started the wildfires. I decided to look on the web for a record of the precipitation in Quebec over the years. If the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the last couple of hundred years is responsible than as the carbon dioxide increased year after year we'd expect the rainfall to decrease year after year.
Here is a graph that I found for the precipitation in Quebec.
If you look at the last bar in the graph which is the precipitation for 2023 it looks like it went way down, however that's because the last bar is only the precipitation until June 8 (which is when I copied it) and not for the whole year. Even so it is lower than most other years, however if you look at the entire graph starting from 1946 you see that there is no obvious trend downward. Probably this was a relatively dry year in Canada but dry years happen and are not proof of global warming.
So why were there such bad wildfires in Canada this year? Why are there so many wildfires in the United States? One reason is ironically the efforts to stop small forest fires that burn the underbrush. The result is the amount of dead trees and flammable wood on the forest floor increases to the point where a fire becomes a lot harder if not impossible to stop once it starts.
Another reason is arson (people setting fires). Yosemite National Park in the United States had a big forest fire that was blamed on climate change. It is now being blamed on a 71 year old named Ed.
Canada actually sets fires to burn the forests in advance to control where the fire goes according to Mike Morrow an ignition specialist for the fire department. One can't help but wonder if there is a better way.
You can see the wildfires in the video below.
In the video below you can see pictures of the effect the smoke had on New York and Washington D.C.. Again you hear the statement that these fires are caused by climate change.
There is a record of yellow days in the U.S. and Canada due to smoke from wildfires that goes back to 1706. The industrial revolution that led to an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere didn't start till 1750. Tony Heller did a video about previous wildfires that you can watch by clicking here. Just because the sky turns yellow doesn't mean climate change due to fossil fuel burning has anything to do with it.
In early August 2023, a series of wildfires broke out in the U.S. state of Hawaii, predominantly on the island of Maui. The wind-driven fires, caused widespread damage, killing at least 115 people and leaving 385 others missing in the town of Lāhainā. These fires were blamed on climate change by a lot of the media. What was left out was the human role that lead to the disastrous fires. The Hawaiian Electric Company knew about the danger of wildfires but they were under pressure to replace the output of two conventional power plants with renewable energy and focused on that instead. What was left out was that the water needed to put out the fires was withheld because of animosity of Polynesian Hawaiians to white people. Patrick Brown, a climate scientist, wrote about why explanations, other than climate change, are withheld from the public. He even admits to withholding such information in order to get his articles to be accepted in prestigious scientific journals when he was a professor. He also pointed out that 80% of wildfires are started by humans.
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