Don's Tuesday Column

                     THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson   Red Bluff Daily News   9/22/2020

    No to AGW-caused fires; Yes to SC judge

There’s only been about 0.4-degree warming in 40 years—that’s one-tenth of a degree per decade averaged over 4 decades. So, whatever cause you wish—human/anthropogenic, nature, sun, cosmic rays, aliens—that (0.4-degree Centigrade) is barely perceptible over an hour, let alone over a year or 4 decades. The “margin of error” in the computer models and projections is invariably greater than the amount of warming they’ve predicted; it’s anything but “scientifically proven.”

Predictions based on computers are no better than the data, logarithms and (to state the obvious) the biases and fallibility of those doing the programming. There is a good reason that around 95 percent of the temperature projections over decades have been wildly off—meaning they predicted more warming than has actually occurred (See: “drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/,” “UAH Satellite-Based Temperature of the Global Lower Atmosphere—Version 6.0”).

Other extreme weather events—hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts and, yes, wildfires on a global basis—have declined, defying predictions. Readers’ eyes would glaze over if this column delved into the technical, research-based analysis I’ve read on the subject. There are natural disasters, they cost a lot of money and kill people, but the scale is nowhere near what the doomsayers and their “models” said they would be. They just abandon the old disproven predictions and go on feeding new ones to their media and favored governmental mouthpieces which support: More government control.

More people die because more people live in fire and flood vulnerable areas. The acreage of forested land in the western U.S. is essentially no different from a century ago. The difference is that, whereas Native tribes routinely lit fires as they left the “high country” (fires created more meadows which fed more deer to eat), “Smoky Bear” policies said to put every fire out. The forest lost its natural cleanser.

The western part of the country has the most federally owned land, subject to the whims of environmentally indoctrinated scientists, who produced the “Roadless Rule” under Bill Clinton. It “restricted the use of existing roads and construction of new roads on 49 million acres of National Forest, making it difficult for officials to scan the land for the kind of kindling that fuels massive conflagrations.” See: “Wildfires Will Get Worse Under Decades-Old Liberal Policies, Veteran Forester Says,” by Chris White, 9/14, citing Bob Zybach, experienced forester with a Ph.D. in environmental science.

“(Zybach) cited warnings he made years ago, telling officials that warding off prescribed burns in Oregon and California creates kindling that fuels fires. Such rules make it more difficult to deploy prescribed burns…designed to cull all of the underbrush in forests to lessen the chance of massive fires, Zybach noted.

“Years of keeping these areas in their natural state result in dead trees and dried organic material settling on the forest floor, which become like matchsticks soaked in jet fuel during dry seasons, he said. Zybach’s comments come as wildfires continue churning through California, Oregon, and Washington.”

Decades of such short-sighted policies were designed, whether they admit it or not, to return as much of the national forest to so-called “wilderness” without going through the cumbersome legal process of creating “Wilderness Areas.” Add well-funded environmental litigators—happy when efforts to thin, clear or prescribe-burn forests get bogged down in the courts—it has all produced deadly, destructive conflagrations.

Lightning is predictable in general; arsonists should be shot. Thick, fuel-rich tinder-box forests are created by foolish, heavy-handed governmental policies and mandates, not “climate change.”

New York Times headlines: (Jan. 2018) “California Today: 100 Million Dead Trees Prompt Fears of Giant Wildfires”; (Nov. 2018) “Trump’s Misleading Claims About California’s Fire ‘Mismanagement’”. What bleeping hypocrites. Find “Fire Fanaticism” and “Fire Fanaticism (2)” at Powerlineblog.com and see the graph, “Millions of Acres Burned in Wildfires, 1930-2019.” It declined from about 50+ million acres in 1930 to 5+ million acres per year from 1960 to 1990, rising to 10 million acres in some recent years.

“Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California.” Between 1982 and 1998, state land managers burned about 30,000 acres per year, dropping to about 13,000 per year from 1999 to 2017. “Nature Sustainability” estimated that burning 20 million acres would restabilize the forest environment. See NASA’S Earth Observatory graph showing the decline in “Global Burned Area” from 2003-2015. Let’s start clearing and burning around towns and cities.

On replacing the much-praised Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who I doubt ever crossed the ideological line to vote with conservatives (God rest her soul), there is only one rule regardless of ballyhooed “principles” and “precedents”: President Trump was elected to place conservative, originalist, Scalia- and Thomas-type jurists on every court, in every vacancy up to and including the Supreme Court whenever they arise. He owes nothing to the pleadings, demands and pressure from Democrats to do otherwise, reprehensible threats of rioting, burning and civil unrest be damned.

Every Republican U.S. Senator owes the Republican electorate, and their state’s voters, a debt of fidelity to that same principle. Vote for Trump’s nominee within the 30 to 40 days it took to confirm both Ginsburg and Sandra Day O’Conner, respectively—before the election, period.

Democrats would do no less if a conservative died when a Democrat president and Senate majority were in office. Decades of despicable character assassination and malicious, phony accusations lodged against nominees from Robert Bork to Clarence Thomas to Brett Kavanaugh have destroyed even the veneer of civility and bipartisanship in this process. They play for keeps—“just win, baby”—it’s time we do, too.