The New York Times Knows Nothing About Climate and #ParkFire – What Does Watts Have to Do With It?
New York Times (NYT), on July 30th The story is titled “Why was the fire in the park so big and so fast?” declare that “[h]“Eating has been breaking records all summer and Dr Williams said records are likely to continue to be broken over the next few years as burning fossil fuels continues to release more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.”
This is false. The article itself provides no data or citations to support this claim, relying solely on the opinions of so-called climate experts who have no actual connection to the fires.
Having lived in Chico, CA for 35 years, the Park Fire is one of three recent wildfires that I have direct, hands-on experience with. The other two are the Camp Fire in 2018 and the Dixie Fire in 2021. All of these fires have affected me personally and those around me.
Yet somehow, the NYT and its so-called panel of experts think they can guess the causes and conditions that caused these fires from their remote offices. In each case, the NYT blames climate change as a cause or contributing factor in these three fires without a shred of evidence. In fact, the NYT contradicts its own claim in its article on the table of California’s ten largest fires by acreage burned:
Climate change is not listed as a cause in the any of themThat didn’t stop the “experts” they interviewed for this story from trying to make a climate connection where none existed, however:
July 22, two days before the fires started, was Earth Day. hottest day on recordJune is 13th consecutive month broke global temperature records. Some burned areas in the park had experienced their hottest 30 days on record just before the fires broke out.
Dr. Williams compared the drought conditions to California’s previous conditions. second major forest fireThe 2021 Dixie Fire, which started during a drought and burned nearly a million acres, has since emerged from drought, making the impact of temperature on fuels even more noticeable, he said.
“It’s been an unusually hot and dry spell,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Wetter winters have led to less severe fire seasons in 2022 and 2023. But this summer’s extreme heat, with even hotter weather forecast, means “we’ve dried out all that excess fuel,” Dr. Swain said.
The park fire started as arson, according to Cal FireDr Swain said the dry vegetation that allowed the fires to spread so quickly was a clear sign of climate change.
In my observation, this type Cause and Effect wear shoes (to coin a phrase) is becoming increasingly popular among journalists and climate advocates as they try to weave any weather event or disaster into the climate change story.
Swain’s claim that there was a “very clear trace of climate change” in the dry vegetation that caused the fires in the Park is purely his personal opinion. He did not provide any scientific citations or basis for his claim.
While there was indeed a heat wave before the Park Fire, it had nothing to do with the fire. The area where the fire occurred, Butte County, California, and the worst-burned area in Tehama County, are not in drought conditions according to the US Drought Monitor July 23rank – yesterday The park fire was caused by a criminal arsonist..
So, “climate change caused drought” and the unusually dry conditions therefore had nothing to do with the Park Fire. The fire would not have existed without criminal arson. I wouldn’t be surprised if the next episode of causal stuffing is a story that says “Climate change causes more arson.”
The ignition point, in Chico’s Bidwell Park, is located in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Just north of that point are large acres of grassland and brush. Combine that ignition point with the consistent southerly winds that day, gusting 20-25 mph, and it’s no surprise the fire spread rapidly north. Rick Carhart, CalFire Public Information Officer for Butte County and a Chico resident for decades, confirmed in a phone interview that the area “had not burned naturally in decades and there had been no controlled burns to reduce the fuel load.” He added that “this high fuel load, combined with the winds that day, created a very intense fire.”
Climate change did not contribute to the actual circumstances or rapid spread of the fires – local weather and criminal behavior did. Dry grass (which happens every spring) and heat waves (which happen every summer) are both short-term weather patterns as opposed to long-term climate change.
My colleague, Heartland Institute researcher Linnea Lueken, published a scathing rebuttal last year. of a case with Sacramento Bee makes similar but unfounded claims as the NYT when it tries to connect climate change to wildfires and their natural triggers, such as lightning. She writes:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found no climate signalThere is also no tendency to increase, after thunderstorms, or lightning strikes. In addition, NASA satellites have recorded a long-term global decline in wildfires. NASA reports that satellite-measured land area burned globally has decreased by 25 percent since 2003.
When looking at California wildfires in particular, research shows that large wildfires occur frequently in the state. Indeed, a 2007 wildfire paper in magazine Forest ecology and management reports that before European settlement in the 1800s, more than 4.4 million acres of California’s forests and shrublands burned annually. Compared to the 4.4 million acres of California that burned each year before European settlement, today only 90,000 to 1.6 million acres of California burn in a typical year.
It’s clear that climate change is not driving California’s wildfires. If it were, the current wildfires would burn more than 4.4 million acres a year – but they aren’t. The simple truth is, Arsonists responsible for more wildfires than climate change. The intensity and extent of wildfires vary greatly from year to year, as demonstrated by a 2022 NYT story, Why California’s 2022 wildfire season is surprisingly quiet. The map of fires by year in the article illustrates this clearly:
Of course, in that article they couldn’t help but blame climate change, presenting only cherry-picked data from 1990 to back up their claim, while completely ignoring past megafires.
The NYT believes that, like a kind of diagnostic “telemedicine” call, they and their experts can predict the connection between climate and fires from their offices in New York and from so-called “climate experts” sitting in their offices elsewhere, who have a better understanding of what’s going on than those directly involved.
This is a shameful and clear demonstration that the NYT is more interested in pushing the climate agenda than reporting the facts.
Original article published on ClimateRealism.
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for climate and environment at the Heartland Institute. Watts has worked in the weather industry in front of and behind the camera as a broadcast meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasting. He has created graphic weather presentation systems for television, specialized weather measuring equipment, and co-authored peer-reviewed articles on climate issues. He runs the world’s most viewed climate website, the award-winning wattsupwiththat.com.
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