IN ENVIRONMENT
Here in the Twin Cities, around mid afternoon the skies took on a pink haze. The air burned one’s eyes and smelled slightly smoky. It was smoke from Canadian wildfires, wafting southward.
These days, pretty much any inconvenient phenomenon is blamed on the all-purpose hobgoblin of “climate change.” Thus with the out of control Canadian fires. But in fact, the North American climate has not changed in any way that is relevant to forest fires. If you go back to the records of the 1920s and 1930s, vastly more acres of forest burned annually than is the case today. And farther back in history, the disproportion was even greater.
Jason Hayes of the Mackinac Institute writes:
Rolling Stone judged the Canadian fires to be part of a “growing trend of longer, hotter wildfire seasons,” concluding, “The crisis adding fuel to the fire, quite literally, is climate change.” Canadian Minister of Natural Resources Jonathan Wilkinson added to the foreboding tone as he balefully predicted, “We are now experiencing a new reality.”
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Wildfire science confirms a basic fact: Dry weather tends to dry out materials that fuel and intensify wildfires. But climate change is not to blame for this year’s or any year’s wildfires.“North American boreal forests burned much more 150 years ago than they do today,” three University of Quebec ecology professors concluded in a recent research paper. “[B]etween 1700 and 1850, the annual area burned was between two and more than 10 times greater than what has been observed over the past 40 years.” The scope of wildfires seems to have decreased despite any measured or predicted changes in climate (warming or other). In a weird twist, the same study then argues, “It seems more likely that climate change is the primary cause of the decrease in fires.”
Heh. Send that one down the memory hole!
Forest management policies play the key role in determining whether wildfires increase or decrease in number and intensity. Research by the Mackinac Center and other groups on forest management and wildfire policies in Michigan, Arizona, and North Carolina shows how a preservationist mindset has impacted forest health and wildfires. Competing demands over forested resources have made it nearly impossible for managers to manage the forest effectively while addressing demands that these areas be set aside and preserved.
These conflicts lead decision-makers to pause, effectively defaulting to non-management. As a result, ever-larger areas of dead and dying trees, shrubs, and grasses in North American forests give wildfires the fuel they need to grow out of control.
We described these threats in Extinguishing the Wildfire Threat, co-published with Arizona’s Goldwater Institute. “Attempting to administer national forests as pristine wilderness—with little to no human activity apart from fire suppression—has allowed our public lands to become dangerously overgrown, overmature, and prone to disease, insect infestations, and fire.”
Wildfires are vastly less devastating today than they were 100 years ago, but to the extent they have spiked a bit in recent years, the environmentalists are to blame. As in so many areas, they are anti-science and have dumbed down forest management practices.
A final thought: there must be environmentalists, and other liberals, who understand that blaming forest fires on “climate change” is idiotic. But where are they? Is there an honest liberal somewhere who will point out that the “climate change” claims are nonsense? If you hear of one, let me know. I am not aware of any. The Left’s dishonesty is an impenetrable shield.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/06/about-those-wildfires.php
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