Don's Tuesday Column

              THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson Red Bluff Daily News   11/13/2018

Preventable fires, so-so election

Such a target-rich week of news events presents itself but the wall-to-wall (and “burned” tree-top tall) coverage of the Camp fire—preempting the local, Chico-based broadcast and radio shows—is a sobering slap of reality. Many local readers are surely impacted by the friends and relatives evacuated and/or burned out of their homes, as well as the destruction of the forested beauty awaiting a day trip down the road and up the hill. The Camp fire notches a “worst ever” claim in the record books; it’s the worst kind of news.

So, which came first: The knee jerk assignation, by Gov. Jerry Brown et al, of blame on global warming/climate change/climate disruption (insert latest iteration), and accusing anyone disagreeing of ignorant malintent? Or President Trump’s knee jerk criticism of California’s (lack of) forest management practices? They both jumped out of the gate together, with Trump ahead by about a nose.

Having a view on all things but expertise on none, I can’t help but make simple observations: 1) Nearly 100 years of fire suppression, and decades of cut-no-trees, environmentalist-driven policy, have left us with state and federal forest tinderboxes composed of thick undergrowth with hundreds of trees-per-acre. That provides continuous access to the crowns which send fiery, cinder-laden “fire-nados” downwind to start further conflagrations. Is it humanly possible to clear-cut forests around communities and along power transmission lines? Of course, it is. It’s eminently more possible to thin those forests for safe fire breaks.

Why hasn’t it been done on a regular pace over decades so that nearly insurmountable fire breaks protect towns and deprive forests of fuel near those power lines and transformers? Has PG&E requested permission to clear under and around such areas? Do they know that such requests and plans will be met with lawsuits and regulatory roadblocks? I suspect those answers are discoverable but unlikely to be provided to the public. If only there was an institution dedicated to ferreting out such obscure-but-discoverable things.

I do know that a bill was making its way through Sacramento, maybe to Brown’s desk, that would have relaxed the prohibitions against harvesting larger trees while clearing underbrush by private land owners. That’s the only way to show a necessary profit on the process. It would also have allowed for opening and re-commissioning forest roads to transport logs out. Environmentalists lobbied against both the roads aspect and cutting large trees. It wouldn’t have made a difference in current fires but could have been enacted years ago, providing breaks around towns. It’s nature over people for the enviros.

2) Absent actual significant global warming, verified by reliable satellite and weather balloon instruments that are not subject to revision and manipulation, there cannot be “human caused” warming, climate change or any other such phenomenon. We know—and, more importantly, scientists know—that the earth has been warmer than current measurements in Medieval, Roman and Minoan times going back over 10,000 years.

It’s their ice core evidence, whether they choose to admit it or not. It was about 12,000 years ago that the earth emerged from an ice age that lasted tens of thousands of years—no human warming. That cycle has repeated itself for a half million years, according to those ice core “proxy” measurements.

What those satellite and weather balloon readings tell us can be seen in the graph at www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/ and it’s pretty obvious that, over 40 years, there has been about four tenths of a degree of warming (centigrade). That’s warming, you say, but put in the perspective of what the admittedly pro-warming scientists say is the target temperature trend of less than 1.5 degrees of warming over a century—that 40-year record equals about one degree over a century. No big deal.

That’s not denial—that’s science on their terms and it refutes, with statistics, the catastrophic warming scenarios. Sorry, Jerry, but tree ring records in California show that there have been droughts and fires as long as aboriginal humans have been here. Foresters have calculations, based on science, of how much forest growth occurs per year; if government laws and policies—written to placate environmental leftists and their ready lawsuits—stand in the way, that is not on us who doubt the alarmists. Trump’s right.

I recall, when I lived in SoCal in the 1980s, before any discernible warming occurred, seeing the same horribly magnificent plumes of smoke in some of the same canyons and areas north and west of LA that we see today. Native Indians called the basin now occupied by Los Angeles the “valley of smokes.” However, when homeless people (or illegal migrants) illegally camp and start campfires, as happened earlier this year, upslope from places like Bel Air and other expensive enclaves, that’s not climate change.

Last week’s election, setting up divided government for 2 years, has been over-, under- and rightly-analyzed. I thought our side would hold the majority in the House; I called the Senate about right. There is now Democrat rule in one-half of one-third of the federal government. The reason I got that wrong is the same reason it is not a mandate against Trump and Republicans: About 44 retirements from Republican House seats, had they not occurred, would have retained Republican control, given the 90 percent reelect rate for incumbents.

Did they bail out on Trump and his presidency? Did they all get tired and want to “spend more time with families.” If so, they created, through their infidelity to party and Trump, opportunities for fired-up Democrats to pump in huge amounts of money (bad for politics unless it’s used to elect Democrats). That brought about, not a “blue wave” or “tsunami” but a “blue ripple” or blue trickle. It shows how tenuous it is when you consider that if a relative handful of House races had been won by our side, Democrats would have been a seat or two short. Hardly a repudiation of Trump’s party.