California fires.....how does this become political?

California's Devastating Fires Are Man-Caused -- But Not In The Way They Tell Us

California is once again on fire. Northern California’s Carr Fire has killed six people, two of them firefighters, and continues to burn out of control, claiming more than 700 homes and about 100,000 acres.

As a citizen-soldier in the California Army National Guard for two decades, I often heard the gallows humor quip that California’s four seasons were: flood, fire, earthquake and riot.

But, what was once an expected part of living in the Golden State is now blamed on larger forces. A crisis, we are told, should never go to waste.

In that vein, the Sacramento Bee editorial board blamed the Carr Fire foursquare on a man-caused buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In an editorial headlined, “The Carr Fire is a terrifying glimpse into California’s future,” they write, “This is climate change, for real and in real time. We were warned that the atmospheric buildup of man-made greenhouse gas would eventually be an existential threat.”


The Bee editorial board goes on to attack President Trump for proposing to end California’s exceptional waiver from federal law regarding auto emissions—in this case, California’s push to curtail tailpipe carbon dioxide, something never envisioned when the Clean Air Act was debated in 1970. At the time, the concern was pollution that directly harmed health rather than carbon dioxide, a naturally occurring gas exhaled by every living animal.

The problem with the Bee’s editorial is that making a passionate argument is no substitute for the truth.

In 2005 while a freshman California Assemblyman, I had the chance to visit Northern California and meet with the forest product industry professionals who grew, managed, and harvested trees on private and public lands. They told me of a worrisome trend started years earlier where both federal and state regulators were making it more and more difficult for them to do their jobs. As a result, timber industry employment gradually collapsed, falling in 2017 to half of what it was 20 years earlier, with imports from Canada, China, and other nations filling domestic need.

As timber harvesting permit fees went up and environmental challenges multiplied, the people who earned a living felling and planting trees looked for other lines of work. The combustible fuel load in the forest predictably soared. No longer were forest management professionals clearing brush and thinning trees.

But, fire suppression efforts continued. The result was accurately forecast by my forest management industry hosts in Siskiyou County in 2005: larger, more devastating fires—fires so hot that they sterilized the soil, making regrowth difficult and altering the landscape. More importantly, fires that increasingly threatened lives and homes as they became hotter and more difficult to bring under control.

In 2001, George E. Gruell, a wildlife biologist with five decades of experience in California and other Western states, authored the book, “Fire in Sierra Nevada Forests: A Photographic Interpretation of Ecological Change Since 1849.” Gruell’s remarkable effort compared hundreds of landscape photographs from the dawn of photography with photos taken from the same location 100 years later or more. The difference was striking. In the 1850s and 1860s, the typical Sierra landscape was of open fields of grass punctuated by isolated pine stands and a few scattered oak trees. The first branches on the pine trees started about 20 feet up—lower branches having been burned off by low-intensity grassfires. California’s Native American population had for years shaped this landscape with fire to encourage the grasslands and boost the game animal population.

As the Gold Rush remade modern California, timber was harvested and replanted. Fires were suppressed because they threatened homes as well as burned up a valuable resource. The landscape filled in with trees, but the trees were harvested every 30 to 50 years. In the 1990s, however, that cycle began to be disrupted with increasingly burdensome regulations. The timber harvest cycle slowed, and, in some areas, stopped completely, especially on the almost 60% of California forest land owned by the federal government. Federal lands have not been managed for decades, threatening adjacent private forests, while federal funds designated for forest maintenance have been "borrowed" for fire suppression expenses. The policies frequently reduce the economic value of the forest to zero. And, with no intrinsic worth remaining, interest in maintaining the forest declined, and with it, resources to reduce the fuel load.

Some two decades ago, California produced so much wood waste from its timber operations, including brush and small trees from thinning efforts, that the resulting renewable biomass powered electric generating plants across the length of the state. But cheap, subsidized solar power, combined with air quality concerns (wood doesn’t burn as cleanly as natural gas) and a lack of fuel due to cutbacks in logging, led to the closure of many biomass generators. What used to be burned safely in power generators is now burned in catastrophic fires. Including the growing capture and use of landfill methane as a fuel, California’s biomass energy generation last year was 22% lower than it was 25 years before.

The issue was summarized by the Western Governors’ Association in their 2006 Biomass Task Force Report which noted:

…over time the fire-prone forests that were not thinned, burn in uncharacteristically destructive wildfires, and the resulting loss of forest carbon is much greater than would occur if the forest had been thinned before fire moved through. …failing to thin leads to a greater greenhouse gas burden than the thinning created in the first place, and that doesn’t even account for the avoided fossil fuel greenhouse gas emissions due to the production of energy from the forest thinnings. In the long term, leaving forests overgrown and prone to unnaturally destructive wildfires means there will be significantly less biomass on the ground, and more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The Sacramento Bee editorial concludes with a stark warning: “California must plan now for these and other aspects of global warming, as more of the state becomes too hot, too dry, or too fire- or flood-prone to safely live in, and as more of the world braces for the era of climate refugees.”

Whether global climate change is a problem that can be solved by California is a dubious proposition—one year’s worth of emission growth in China is greater than California’s total emissions. But the action needed to reduce the state’s growing forest fire threat would be the same regardless of one’s belief in any problems posed by climate change: start managing our forests again.

Chuck DeVore is Vice President of National Initiatives at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. He was a California Assemblyman and is a Lt. Colonel in the U.S. Army Retired Reserve.

Oct 9, 2014,
NOAA Report Destroys Global Warming Link To Extreme Weather

Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have demolished claims by global warming activists that global warming caused or worsened many extreme weather events last year.

According to NOAA’s new publication, Explaining Extremes of 2013 from a Climate Perspective, there is no discernible connection between global warming and 2013 extreme weather events such as the California drought, Colorado floods, the UK’s exceptionally cold spring, a South Dakota blizzard, Central Europe floods, a northwestern Europe cyclone, and exceptional snowfall in Europe’s Pyrenees Mountains.

The California drought provides a good example of global warming activists making false and irresponsible claims regarding global warming to deliberately mislead people who aren’t familiar with scientific studies and evidence. The liberal Center for American Progress and its media allies such as the Washington Post, San Jose Mercury News, Associated Press, and others have all published stories claiming global warming caused or worsened the ongoing California drought. Scientists, however, say just the opposite. “[F]or the California drought, which was investigated by three teams from the United States, human factors were found not to have influenced the lack of rainfall,” NOAA reported in an accompanying press release.

Adding additional emphasis to the NOAA publication’s findings, scientists reported in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that natural factors such as ocean current cycles and varying wind patterns caused most of the warming along the U.S. West Coast since 1900.

So, scientists report that most of the warming in California is natural, and the evidence shows no link between global warming and the California drought. Nevertheless, agenda-driven activist groups and their media lapdogs repeatedly tell the lie that global warming is causing California’s drought. Ironically – or not – President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry frequently claim global warming is responsible for the California drought, all the while claiming people who disagree with them are members of the Flat Earth Society. Somebody tell that to the federal government’s own scientists at NOAA.

Similarly, global warming alarmists frequently claim global warming causes extreme cold temperatures and extreme snowstorms. Analyzing two of these claims, NOAA found no evidence linking the events to global warming. To the contrary, NOAA reported “Analysis of UK cold spring showed the probability of occurrence may have fallen 30-fold due to global warming.” So, global warming not only played no role in the UK’s cold 2013 spring, but global warming made the disruptive event 30 times less likely than would otherwise be the case. Nevertheless, shameless alarmists such as National Geographic News claimed global warming was responsible for the extremely cold spring. Despite the NOAA findings, National Geographic News has yet to issue a retraction.

The disparity between science on the one hand and global warming activists and alarmist media coverage on the other hand is particularly striking regarding the Colorado floods of September 2013. Global warming activists and their media allies wasted absolutely no time exploiting the victims of the deadly floods to make irresponsible claims that global warming was to blame. NOAA scientists, however, report global warming played no role and may be making such tragic events less likely. Modeling of past and present Colorado rainfall events "found that the probability of another extreme 5-day rainfall, like the one that caused widespread flooding in Boulder, is estimated to have decreased because of human-caused climate change," NOAA reported.

According to NOAA, heat waves were nevertheless exacerbated by global warming. Of course, any amplification in heat waves is counterbalanced by extreme cold events becoming 30 times less likely. Importantly, global warming’s reduction of extreme cold events provides more human health and welfare benefits than any harm caused by an increase in heat waves. Official government mortality statistics show people are much more likely to die during winter months and extreme cold events than during summer months and heat waves.

The next time you hear politicians and global warming activists claim global warming is causing or worsening extreme weather events, know that the objective science shows they are telling self-serving lies.