New York Times (New York Times), July 30th The story is titled “How did the park fires get so big and so fast? claim”[h]Eating amounts have been breaking records throughout the summer, and Dr. Williams said records are likely to continue to fall in the coming years as the burning of fossil fuels continues to add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
This is wrong. The article itself provides no data or citations to support this claim, instead relying on the opinions of so-called climate experts who have no actual connection to the fires.
I have spent 35 years in Chico, California, and the Park Fire is one of three recent wildfires that I have hands-on, field experience with. The other two fires are the Camp Fire in 2018 and the Dixie Fire in 2021.
Yet somehow, The New York Times and their group of so-called experts thought they could deduce the causes and conditions that sparked these fires from their offices far away. In each case, the New York Times blamed climate change as a driver or contributor to the three fires, without any evidence. In fact, the New York Times article on California's top 10 fires (by area burned) contradicts their own statement:
Climate change is not listed as a cause any one. However, that didn’t stop the “experts” they interviewed for this story from trying to make a climate connection where none exists:
July 22, two days before the fire, was Earth's hottest day on record. June marked the 13th consecutive month that global high temperature records have been broken. Just before the fires broke out, some areas burned by the Park Fire experienced their hottest 30 days on record.
Dr. Williams compared drought conditions to those before California's second-largest wildfire, the 2021 Dixie Fire, which started during the drought and burned nearly 1 million acres. He said the state has emerged from drought, which makes the impact of high temperatures on fuels more significant.
“This is an unusual heat wave and the vegetation is unusually dry,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Wetter winters will lead to less severe fire seasons in 2022 and 2023.
According to Cal Fire, the park fire was caused by arson. Dr Swain said dry vegetation allowed it to burn so quickly, which had very clear implications for climate change.
According to my observation, this causation Shoe pulling (to coin a phrase) is becoming increasingly common among journalists and climate advocates as they work to fit any weather event or disaster into the climate change narrative.
Swain's claim that the dry vegetation that caused the park fires “has very clear signs of climate change” is nothing more than his personal opinion. He provides no scientific citations or support for his claims.
While there was indeed a heat wave before the park fire, it had no impact on the fire. According to data from the U.S. Drought Monitor on July 23, the most severely burned areas in Butte and Tehama counties in California, where fires broke out, are not in drought conditionsRD – The day before the park fire, an arsonist set the park on fire.
Therefore, “climate change-induced drought” and the resulting abnormally dry conditions are simply not included in the scope of park fires. Without the crime of arson, fires would not exist. I wouldn't be surprised if the next episode causation This is a story that claims “climate change is leading to more arsonists.”
The arson site was located in Chico's Bidwell Park, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Just north of this point, large areas of grass and scrub exist. Combine the ignition with the day's sustained southerly winds of 20-25 mph, and it's no surprise that the fire quickly spread northward. Rick Carhart, public information officer for Cal Fire in Butte County and a resident of Chico for decades, confirmed in a phone interview that the area “hasn’t had a natural fire in decades, nor has it. There was no controlled burning to reduce the fuel load. “The high fuel load, combined with the winds that day, created a very intense fire,” he added. “
Climate change has no impact on the actual appearance or rapid spread of fires—local weather and crime are both at fault. Grass drying (occurring every spring) and heat waves (occurring every summer) are weather patterns that occur on short-term time scales, rather than long-term climate changes.
My colleague Linnea Lueken, a fellow at the Heartland Institute, published a scathing factual rebuttal last year refuting a case sacramento bees They, like the New York Times, make similar but unfounded claims when they try to link climate change to wildfires and their natural drivers, such as lightning. She wrote:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found no climate signal behind the occurrence of thunderstorms or lightning, nor an increasing trend. Additionally, NASA satellites have documented a long-term decline in wildfires around the world. NASA reports that satellite measurements show that the amount of burned land worldwide has decreased by 25% since 2003.
Research on wildfires in California in particular has found that large wildfires regularly sweep through the state. In fact, a 2007 paper in the journal Forest Ecology and Management According to reports, before European colonization in the 1800s, more than 4.4 million acres of forest and scrub burned in California every year. California now burns only 90,000 to 1.6 million acres annually, compared with 4.4 million acres burned annually before European colonization.
Clearly there are no climate change drivers of California wildfires at all. If they existed, current fires would consume more than 4.4 million acres of land each year – but that's not happening. The simple fact is that arsonists cause more wildfires than climate change. The intensity and coverage of wildfires vary greatly from year to year, as evidenced by a 2022 New York Times report, “Why California’s 2022 Wildfire Season Is Surprisingly Quiet.” The year-by-year fire map in the article demonstrates this well:
Of course, in that article they couldn't resist blaming climate change, providing only select 1990 data to support their claims and completely ignoring past fires.
The New York Times believes that, like some kind of remote diagnostic “telemedicine” phone call, they and their experts can extrapolate climate and fire consequences from their offices in New York and from so-called “climate experts” sitting in offices elsewhere. Contact, these experts know more about what's going on with the climate than the people wearing boots on the ground.
This is a shameful and obvious demonstration that the New York Times cares more about advancing the climate agenda than reporting the facts.
Originally published in Climate Realism .
Anthony Watts
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow in environment and climate at the Heartland Institute. Since 1978, Watts has been in the weather business both in front of and behind the camera as a live television meteorologist and currently oversees daily broadcast forecasts. He created television weather graphics presentation systems, professional weather instruments, and co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He runs the world's most viewed climate website, the award-winning wattsupwiththat.com.
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