Contradicting Data, Media Claim Canadian Wildfires And Heat Waves Made Worse By Climate Change

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by H. STERLING BURNETT

Smoke from Canada’s ongoing wildfires continues to darken skies in the United States, and mainstream media outlets like Yahoo News and the New York Times blame climate change. They are wrong.

Data disprove a causal connection between the modest warming the Earth has experienced over the past century with Canada’s wildfires and the heat wave Texas recently experienced. [emphasis, links added]

In an article titled “What the Canada wildfire smoke and Texas heat wave have in common: Climate change,” Yahoo News writes:

“With over 120 million U.S. residents across the Midwest and Northeast under an air quality alert and 60 million residents in the South under heat advisories on Thursday, Americans are contending with two different effects caused by climate change.

In the article “Record Pollution and Heat Herald a Season of Climate Extremes,” the New York Times assessed the situation thusly:

Fires are burning across the breadth of Canada, blanketing parts of the eastern United States with choking, orange-gray smoke. Puerto Rico is under a severe heat alert as other parts of the world have been recently. Earth’s oceans have heated up at an alarming rate.

Human-caused climate change is a force behind extremes like these.

Neither the current wildfires in Canada nor the heat wave in Texas, which has dissipated a bit— meaning temperatures are currently below the average for the date— can be attributed to long-term climate change.

Wildfires happen every year across the United States and in Canada, which is why both countries have designated “wildfire seasons.” So nothing is new there.

Smoke from wildfires in Canada has periodically darkened or yellowed the skies on the U.S. East Coast and beyond in the past, as they have done in recent weeks.

Long before anyone used fossil fuels to generate electricity or for transportation, the New England Historical Society (NEHS) reports smoke from Canadian wildfires created “yellow” or “dark” days multiple times in history, in particular:

On May 12, 1706; October. 21, 1716; August, 9 1732; May 19, 1780; July 3, 1814; November, 6-10, 1819; July 8, 1836; September. 2, 1894; and September 24-30, 1950.

So contrary to media reportsthe smoke drifting into the United States from Canada’s wildfires is hardly unprecedented.

Canada’s May 1780 wildfires delivered so much smoke to the Eastern United States, that May 19, 1780, became known as “New England’s Dark Day. Reports from the time explain the smoke was so bad that candles had to be lit at midday to see.

As was true in the past when smoke from Canadian wildfires was blown into the United States, the cause is temporary weather conditions, not climate change.

Gunnar Schade, D.Sc., an associate professor with Texas A&M University’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences, says that after hitting the airstream, the smoke from Canada’s wildfires was delivered by a”

“North Central Canadian (Arctic) high-pressure system and a persistent, slow-moving, low-pressure system off the northeast coast [which] combined [to] cause large-scale southerly to southeasterly air movement, which has taken the smoke to the U.S. upper Midwest, southeast and east coast.”

Not only were this year’s fires not unique, but they also did not, as media stories consistently implied, represent a trend in Canadian wildfires that could be attributed to climate change.

Indeed, the evidence shows wildfires in Canada and globally have been declining during the recent period of modest warming.

As pointed out in a previous Climate Realism post by meteorologist Anthony Watts on this topic, data from Canada’s National Forestry Database show declining trends for both the number of fires and area burned over the past 31 years.

study by scientists with the Canadian Forest Service, in fact, attributed the decline in forest fires in Canada over the past few decades to the combined effect of carbon dioxide fertilization and modestly rising temperatures, which resulted in improved soil moisture conditions.

Because plants lose less water via the process of transpiration under conditions of high CO2 and higher temperaturesless moisture is drawn from the soil.

Globally, NASA satellites have also recorded a significant decline in the number of wildfires. In the report Researchers Detect a Global Drop in Fires, NASA wrote:

“Globally, the total acreage burned by fires declined 24 percent between 1998 and 2015, according to a new paper published in Science.”

Following the science, therefore, one must conclude that climate change is not to blame for the recent fires in Canada or the smoke they delivered to the eastern U.S. streets and newsrooms.

Indeed, even as wildfires ravage Canada, as of late June, the number of acres consumed by wildfires in the United States through mid-June 2023 is only 51 percent of the ten-year average, and data show that Alaska is experiencing its smallest wildfire season in more than 30 years.

The factors responsible for the severity of the 2023 wildfire season in Canada are short-term weather conditions, for instance, a drought in some regionsless winter snowfall and warmer temperatures, and long-term poor forest management.

As one peer-reviewed study cited by the Canadian Fraser Institute stated:

Canada has failed to fund the proactive management of forest fires sufficiently and is not poised to do better moving forward. “Wildfire management agencies in Canada are at a tipping point. Presuppression [sic] and suppression costs are increasing but program budgets are not.” But clearly, a lack of fire suppression is also a problem: “Wildfire suppression contributes to a wildfire problem but paradoxically it is wildfire use that will help to solve this problem.

The wildfire management toolbox must include wildfire use to manage wildfires at the landscape scale because it is not feasible to effectively use prescribed burns and/or fuel management treatments alone to restore expansive wildfire-dependent ecosystems.” That’s a somewhat academic long-winded way of saying you need to fight fire with fire, but the point is valid nonetheless.

Canada is no different in this regard than the United States. As Climate Realism has discussed repeatedly, it takes three things to start a wildfire: fuel, the right weather conditions, and a source of ignition.

Shifting forest management policies in the United States since the presidency of Ronald Reagan have resulted in a growing fuel load, with many national forests having more dead-standing timber than growing trees, and other forest packed tightly with small trees and underbrush.

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Like gun control, the left falls all over themselves to exploit every tragedy to further their money-grubbing global warming scheme.

It would be that liberal Rag NYT’s who would print this lie this leftists rag has been lying to their readers and subscribers since 1932 when they covered up for Stalin and Later Hitler, Castro, The Viet Cong and are behind this whole 1619 project. This rag should be placed on every Americans Boycott List

08/09/23 – Maui surveys the burned wreckage caused by the deadliest US wildfire in years

The search of the wildfire wreckage on the Hawaiian island of Maui on Thursday revealed a wasteland of burned out homes and obliterated communities as firefighters battled the stubborn blaze that has already claimed 36 lives, making it the deadliest in the U.S. in five years.

Fueled by a dry summer and strong winds from a passing hurricane, the fire started Tuesday and took the island by surprise, racing through parched growth and neighborhoods in the historic town of Lahaina, a tourist destination that dates to the 1700s and is the biggest community on the island’s west side.

Maui County said late Wednesday that at least 36 people had died, making it the deadliest U.S. wildfire since the 2018 Camp Fire in California, which killed at least 85 people and laid waste to the town of Paradise. The Hawaii toll could rise, though, as rescuers reach parts of the island that had been unreachable due to ongoing fires or obstructions. Officials said earlier Wednesday that 271 structures had been damaged or destroyed and that dozens of people had been injured, including some critically.

“We are still in life preservation mode. Search and rescue is still a primary concern,” Adam Weintraub, a spokesperson for Hawaii Emergency Management Agency, said Thursday…

In case you haven’t noticed, extreme weather events have become routine. Uncontrolled wildfires have become routine.

06/30/22 – Climate change will increase chances of wildfire globally — but humans can still help reduce the risk
(The problem is that they won’t, because stupid humans have been organized by politicians representing powerful special interest to prevent any collective intelligent response.)

Key findings from the analyses include:

  • The length of the annual fire weather season has increased by 14 days per year (27%) during 1979-2019 on average globally and the frequency of days with extreme fire weather has increased by 10 days per year (54%) during 1979-2019 on average globally.
  • Fire weather has risen significantly in most world regions since the 1980s. Increases have been particularly pronounced in western North America, Amazonia and the Mediterranean. Fire weather has already emerged beyond its natural variability in the Mediterranean and Amazonia due to historical warming.
  • At 2°C this will also be the case in the boreal forests of Siberia, Canada and Alaska and the temperate forests of the western US. At 3°C, virtually all world regions will experience unprecedented fire weather.
  • Globally, the area burned by fires has decreased by around one-quarter — or 1.1 million km2 — during 2001-2019. Much of the decrease — 590,000 km2 — has been in African savannahs, where 60-70% of the area burned by fire occurs annually. Local/regional human impacts have reduced the area burned by fire in tropical savannahs, in combination with lower grassland productivity during (increasingly drier) wet seasons.
  • Large increases in burned area have been observed elsewhere, and especially in temperate and boreal forests. For example, the area burned by fire has increased by 21,400 km2 (93%) in east Siberian forests and by 3,400 km2 (54%) in the forests of western North America (Pacific Canada and US combined)…

EXCLUSIVE: Multi-Million Dollar GBI Strategies LLC – The Target in the Unearthed 2020 Michigan Police Report Involving Election Crimes – Was Dissolved in Tennessee in 2017

08/22/23 – We Are Witnessing the First Stages of Civilization’s Collapse

…When do we know that a civilization is on the verge of collapse? In his now almost 20-year-old classic, Diamond identified three key indicators or precursors of imminent dissolution: a persistent pattern of environmental change for the worse like long-lasting droughts; signs that existing modes of agriculture or industrial production were aggravating the crisis; and an elite failure to abandon harmful practices and adopt new means of production. At some point, a critical threshold is crossed and collapse invariably follows.

Today, it’s hard to avoid indications that all three of those thresholds are being crossed…