Presenting the following question to Vance, she said that CBS polling found that “more than 60 percent of Republicans under the age of 45 favor the U.S. taking steps to try and reduce climate change,” and she asked him what the Trump administration would do to reduce the alleged impact of climate change.
I want to isolate that bit about the CBS polling for a moment. I wasn’t able to easily find the poll they were referencing, but I won’t worry over the numbers there anyway, because people can claim to be in favor of the government doing “something” all they want. Yet when real policy hits pocketbooks and people have to see what their virtue signaling actually costs, their tune changes drastically.
For example, a poll conducted by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research (UC/AP) found that only 38 percent of Americans surveyed said that they would be willing to pay a $1 per month carbon fee to fight climate change. As the amount of monthly fee increased, support continued to fall. This same trend is seen in multiple polls, which means it is misleading to suggest that the “someone needs to do something” polling translates to voter support for higher energy costs and Green New Deal radicalism. //
The most astonishing part of this section of the debate, however, came at the very end of the relatively reasonable discussion about energy and foreign manufacturing and emissions, and it did not come from either of the candidates. After a short response from Walz in which he lied, saying that there had been no moratorium on natural gas and oil, moderator O’Donnell cut him off to tell him his time was up and, without even taking a breath, concluded with, “[t]he overwhelming consensus among scientists is that the earth's climate is warming at an unprecedented rate. Margaret?”
And moderator Margaret Brennan seamlessly pivoted to the next question on immigration.
She gave no time for either candidate to respond to her very random injection of the scientific establishment ad populum climate narrative argument, and it really seemed as if it was simply a line she was instructed to say at some point during the question period. //
CBS is partnered with a radical climate propagandist group called Covering Climate Now, which urges journalists to connect everything to climate change and environmental justice, and instructs them to never platform “climate denialists.” Who is a climate denialist? Anyone who balks at their definition of “rapid, forceful action” or anyone who disputes the consensus narrative. It is a nightmare of an organization, baldly propagandistic, and news organizations like CBS News take their marching orders from them. //
Musicman
4 hours ago
The response should always be, “Increased CO2 and temperatures is resulting in a greening of the planet, not its destruction. Yes, it will cause some disruption as the SW deserts become hotter and Canada milder and more fertile, but we humans are ingenious at taking advantage of nature’s bounty.”. //
Adler von Pfingsten
3 hours ago
Trump and Vance would be well advised to answer questions about climate change with a virtual challenge i.e. I followed the “science” of climate change and gender identity to its logical conclusion:
Lysenkoism: In modern usage, the term Lysenkoism has become distinct from normal pseudoscience. Where pseudoscience pretends to be science, Lysenkoism aims at attacking the legitimacy of science itself, usually for political reasons. It is the rejection of the universality of scientific truth, and the deliberate defamation of the scientific method to the level of politics.
Climate and energy policies must balance the risks and benefits of a changing climate against growing demand for reliable, affordable, and clean energy. To strike that balance, policymakers must consider society’s values and priorities, its tolerance for risk, equities among generations and geographies, and efficacies, costs, and collateral impacts. This paper reviews the scientific, technoeconomic, and societal facts that should inform policy decisions and draws some straightforward conclusions from them.
The REPOWER plan rests on four pillars:
1) Replacing all subsidies and mandates with a CO2 fee, which shall be set by Congress.
2) A grid of ratepayer owned coops which provide local power distribution and backup power.
3) Coops or consortia of coops contracting with merchant providers for the bulk of their power, or possibly building their own base load plants.
4) Unshackling nuclear from a regulatory system based on the Two Lies. Nuclear's remarkable energy density, combined with competition will drive the cost of nuclear down to its should-cost of less than 3 cents per kilowatt-hour.
The end result will be a largely nuclear grid, backed up by local fossil generation and supplemented in some areas by hydro, wind, or solar. //
The REPOWER plan has been criticized on the grounds it not only does not get rid of fossil fuel, it requires extensive expansion of fossil fuel capacity. The goal here is reducing CO2 emissions, not eliminating fossil fuel capacity. And we must reduce CO2 emissions in a way that uses the planet's resources efficiently. If we end up in a situation where we could have both less CO2 and less cost, we are being criminally stupid.
REPOWER will result in nuclear at a naive LCOE of less than 3 cents/kWh. That makes drastically reducing grid CO2 emissions so easy it's almost automatic. Figure 1 summarizes the results of a study of the German grid in which nuclear's overnight CAPEX was set at $2000/kW. (In the 1960's, we were building nuclear plants at less than $1000/kW in today's money.) //
Currently, the grid is producing about 25% of man-made CO2 emissions. If we cut that by a factor 20 with should-cost nuclear, we are down to about 1% of the total. At that point, we are far better off going after the other 99%, then expending resources on further reducing the 1%.
Takeaway
Unless we have cheap electricity, decarbonization in going nowhere. The Good News is we can have both very low grid emissions and cheap electricity. All we have to do is:
a) Put the ratepayer in charge of the grid.
b) Let the underwriters balance nuclear safety and cost.
Modern doomsayers have been predicting climate and environmental disaster since the 1960s. They continue to do so today.
None of the apocalyptic predictions with due dates as of today have come true.
What follows is a collection of notably wild predictions from notable people in government and science.
More than merely spotlighting the failed predictions, this collection shows that the makers of failed apocalyptic predictions often are individuals holding respected positions in government and science.
While such predictions have been and continue to be enthusiastically reported by a media eager for sensational headlines, the failures are typically not revisited. //
1974: Ozone Depletion a ‘Great Peril to Life’
But no such ‘great peril to life’ has been observed as the so-called ‘ozone hole’ remains: //
2008: Al Gore warns of ice-free Arctic by 2013
But… it’s still there:
Hurricanes in the United States end up hundreds of times deadlier than the government calculates, contributing to more American deaths than car accidents or all the nation’s wars, a new study said.
The average storm hitting the U.S. contributes to the early deaths of 7,000 to 11,000 people over a 15-year period, which dwarfs the average of 24 immediate and direct deaths that the government counts in a hurricane’s aftermath, the study in Wednesday’s journal Nature concluded. Study authors said even with Hurricane Helene’s growing triple digit direct death count, many more people will die partly because of that storm in future years.
“Watching what’s happened here makes you think that this is going to be a decade of hardship on tap, not just what’s happening over the next couple of weeks,” said Stanford University climate economist Solomon Hsiang, a study co-author and a former White House science and technology official.
“After each storm there is sort of this surge of additional mortality in a state that’s been impacted that has not been previously documented or associated with hurricanes in any way,” Hsiang said.
Hsiang and University of California Berkeley researcher Rachel Young looked at hurricane deaths in a different way than previous studies, opting for a more long-term public health and economics-oriented analysis of what’s called excess mortality. They looked at states’ death rates after 501 different storms hitting the United States between 1930 and 2015. And what they found is that after each storm there’s a “bump” in death rates.
It’s a statistical signature that they see over and over, Hsiang said. Similar analyses are done for heat waves and other health threats like pollution and disease, he said. They compare to pre-storm times and adjust for other factors that could be causing changes in death rates, he said. Complicating everything is that the same places keep getting hit by multiple storms so there are death bumps upon death bumps.
Just how storms contribute to people’s deaths after the immediate impact is something that needs further study, Hsiang said. But he theorized it includes the health effects of stress, changes in the environment including toxins, people not being able to afford health care and other necessities because of storm costs, infrastructure damage and government changes in spending.
“When someone dies a few years after a hurricane hit them, the cause will be recorded as a heart attack, stroke or respiratory failure,” said Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler, who wasn’t part of the study but has done similar studies on heat and cold deaths. “The doctor can’t possibly know that a hurricane contributed/triggered the illness. You can only see it in a statistical analysis like this.”
According to Resources for the Future, 83 percent of people believe that human actions have been partly responsible for the cause of global warming, and 81 percent believe global warming will be a serious problem for the world. Funny enough, 78 percent of Americans think the government should do something about it.
And yet, the environment is never very high on the list of concerns when elections roll around.
Why, you ask? Easy. Because it's too expensive. When green energy comes for your wallet, all that concern for the climate disappears. It's too expensive. Which means that most people actually don't think it must be all that much of a threat. In fact, they see combating climate change as a greater threat to their wallet than climate change in total.
According to the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, when Americans are given the option to pay an extra monthly fee to combat it, they shut their wallets and walk away:
While the majority of Americans support climate policies, including a carbon tax on companies, when it comes to paying for these policies in the form of a monthly fee on their energy use they are much less supportive. In fact, more than half of Americans are unwilling to pay any amount of money to combat climate change. Forty-five percent are willing to pay $1—more than last year, but down from prior years of the poll. That said, a consistent minority is willing to pay a significant amount (even $100) to combat climate change. //
Mildred's Oldest Son
3 hours ago
None of these climate-cultists have been able to express what the goal is. If we did everything that they want, what would happen to the climate? Will we never have a blizzard in winter, heat wave in the summer, will everyday around the world be a balmy 75 degrees during the day and 60 degrees at night? What's the goal? The goal is total control of the economy and the government while we proles live stone-age lives and the elites live the same lives they have always lived. That's the goal
Legal Insurrection readers may recall that in 2019. I covered a book entitled “The Polar Bear Catastrophe that Never Happened” by Dr. Susan Crockford. The University of Victoria professor analyzes the latest data and reviews the questionable values in official estimates, concluding that polar bears are thriving.
Subsequently, she was fired from her position at the university.
However, it didn’t stop what she wrote from being true.
The polar bear, the iconic image of the climate crisis, has entirely lost its eco-activist mascot status. Climate expert Bjorn Lomborg (President of the Copenhagen Consensus and Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution) recently examined the numbers in a New York Post piece and came to the same conclusion. //
henrybowman | September 17, 2024 at 8:19 pm
Polar bears, ozone holes, rampant famines, rising sea levels, killer bees, COVID, insurrectionists, space aliens, Godzilla.
In any field of endeavor where one is gathering data, like, say, temperature, it's important to first determine if your measurements will be valid. If you are measuring the temperature inside an oven used for curing ceramics, you would not place your thermocouples in the lunch room. That wouldn't make any sense.
Nor does it make sense to place temperature-monitoring stations gathering data to prove global climate change, say, within a few feet of a tarmac on which jet airliners taxi for takeoff. But the United Kingdom's Met Office seems to have done just that. At the Daily Sceptic, Environment Editor Chris Morrison has brought photos: //
Teddington Bushy Park is a junk class 4 station with internationally-recognised “uncertainties” of 2°C. Joke class 4 station might be a more apt description. How anyone can think information taken at this site is suitable for scientific work that ultimately produces a global mean temperature is a mystery.
It is a mystery, unless, of course, you contemplate the idea that it may well be deliberate. I'm generally more inclined to accept incompetence rather than malice, but there sure seems to be a pattern here.
This website was created in response to the realization that very little physical site survey data exists for the entire United States Historical Climatological Network (USHCN) and Global Historical Climatological Network (GHCN) surface station records worldwide. This realization came about from a discussion of a paper and some new information that occurred on Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. Research Group Weblog.
Mid term census report of the Surface Stations Project: Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable? - click cover image at left to download a PDF document. Now at 80%, and with a majority sample that is spatially well distributed, a full analysis will be coming in the next few months. We will however continue to survey stations in the hope of locating more CRN1 and CRN2 stations due to their rarity.
The upcoming papers will feature statistical analysis of the nationwide USHCN network in the context of siting.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/surfacestationsreport_spring09.pdf
What do the climate activists really want? Do they have nothing more in mind than a noble crusade to prevent the burning sky from falling on us? Or is the global warming scare just another piece of the revolution? It’s of course the latter. We know this because they’re constantly telling us it is.
The most recent admission comes from Los Angeles Times environmental reporter Rosanna Xia, whose exhausting essay under the headline “To fix climate anxiety (and also climate change), we first have to fix individualism” was posted on Wednesday – yes, Sept. 11.
Xia dwells a great deal on “climate anxiety” caused by environmental events that have afflicted the planet since its creation but are now blamed on human progress through the combustion of fossil fuels. She worries “we’ll never go back to normal” without defining sufficiently “normal” – maybe because, in a world that has never stopped changing, there is no normal. She is angry, frustrated, helpless, and exhausted.
https://issuesinsights.com/2024/05/30/climate-hysterics-keep-saying-the-quiet-part-out-loud/
Regan Fan
5 hours ago
I've always found it humorous that those activists, Progressives, etc act like they're part of the group that will have the power. They are not. They're in the back of the line for the same guillotine they believe deniers of their causes are.
They just haven't realized it yet. //
Blue State Deplorable
2 hours ago
It’s never been about a genuine concern for the climate or the planet, it’s about collectivism and enslaving you to the state. //
bk
4 hours ago
When you boil it down, they are interested in population control above all else. Kill a few billion people and maybe the earth becomes sustainable.
I've always thought a great bumper sticker for these morons would be something like
EARTH WOULD BE A GREAT PLACE TO LIVE
IF WE GOT RID OF ALL THE DAMN PEOPLE //
American Deplorable ™
5 hours ago
Glue their hands to a Demolition Derby track and let's get on with it.
Just Stop Oil will become Please Just Stop. //
surfcat50
3 hours ago
I’m experiencing some climate annoyance and the only cure is to toss some activists down an active volcano.
I’m skeptical it’ll work but why take a chance? //
NavyVet KNUCKLES
3 hours ago
Without CO2, there is no photosynthesis.
No photosynthesis, no life.
Therefore, treating CO2 as an enemy is to declare war on life itself.
Hurricane forecasters are bewitched, bothered, and bewildered. The Atlantic hurricane season was supposed to be epic. Instead, it's turned into a real dud.
Huge storms wreaking havoc on coastlines from Aruba to Long Island were supposed to line up in the Eastern Atlantic in June and hit us one at a time until late September. The damage was going to be historic and the TV coverage was going to give climate change fanatics plenty of air time to vent that "this is just a foretaste" of what's to come.
But something puzzling occurred on the way to hurricane Armageddon: not much has happened. The Atlantic Ocean has seen five named storms: two tropical storms, two hurricanes and one major hurricane this season. //
There's a lesson to be learned from the errors in hurricane forecasting. While we know a lot about the weather and how hurricanes form, what we don't know far exceeds our stored knowledge of how complex, chaotic systems behave to create deadly storms or a bright, sunny day.
It's a lesson that will go unlearned by many who could use that knowledge to realistically predict climate change.
A new study has found that a vast majority of climate policies enacted since 1998 across 41 countries have been utterly ineffective. //
The study, published in the Journal of Science, evaluated about 1,500 climate policies implemented between 1998 and 2022 by 41 OECD countries (The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development). The study found only 63 policies (about 4 percent) that, combined, had successfully “reduced total emissions between 0.6 and 1.8 Gt CO2.” Due to the low success rate, researchers estimate the CO2 emissions from the 41 nations they studied will exceed the Paris Climate Agreement target by 23 billion metric tons by 2030.
More importantly, the study found that two popular tools most governments’ climate policies rely on — subsidies and regulations — rarely reduce emissions. Researchers found some form of carbon tax approach was more effective at reducing emissions. //
Following the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) that pledged over $110 billion in climate and energy funding, the administration introduced its Green New Deal with a grossly misleading label, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), in 2022, with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the deciding vote in the Senate. The IRA purported to allocate $369 billion for climate change and energy over the next decade. However, the latest Congressional Budget Office’s projection of the IRA’s climate tax credit through year 2033 has already jumped to a staggering $428 billion, a rapid 16 percent increase than the IRA originally planned. //
The Harris-Walz campaign, as pointed out by The Wall Street Journal editorial board, has shamefully used the word “freedom” to “disguise that Democratic policies seek to restrict liberty across American society.” Voters who want to be free from the government’s wasteful spending and infringement on individual rights should not fall for the Democrat’s and Harris’ deception in the upcoming election.
Whatever the reason for the development of the Atlantic Niña this year, there is no climate emergency. //
Daniel Horowitz @RMConservative
·
Ocean is warming...no ocean is cooling!! But either way, it's your fault and we need to take your energy and food to reverse it
newscientist.com
Part of the Atlantic is cooling at record speed and nobody knows why
8:18 AM · Aug 23, 2024
It turns out the headline is not entirely…accurate. The temperature drop is part of a climate phenomenon known as the Atlantic Nodal Mode. The pattern is like the Pacific Ocean’s El Niño/La Niña cycles but more localized.
The natural climate pattern swings between cold and warm phases every few years. Sea surface temperatures (SST) in the eastern equatorial Atlantic have a somewhat surprising seasonal cycle. The warmest waters of the year occur in spring, while the coolest waters occur during the summer. //
Perhaps the most significant aspect of the developing Atlantic Niña is its potential impact on hurricane seasons. As hurricanes strengthen in warm waters and weaken in cool ones, this could be good news for Legal Insurrection fans along the Gulf Coast and Atlantic seaboard.
Science is all too often wielded as a weapon. Whenever anyone claims, "science says," they are betraying a very real lack of understanding as to how the scientific method works; science is not a body of people or an authority — it is a tool, a method of looking at data, drawing conclusions from that data, forming hypotheses, testing those hypotheses, and seeing if others can reproduce the results. And when new data becomes available, all of the conclusions previously drawn must be evaluated, dispassionately, against that new data. Science should not — must not — be cited in support of an agenda, as that drives people claiming to be doing science to act in contradiction to the scientific method — working backward from a conclusion, discarding inconvenient data, and so on.
All of these things are happening right now in the arena of climatology.
On his Substack, science journalist Roger Pielke Jr. has described five such cases, and they merit consideration, as they show how science is being abused in pursuit of this particular agenda. Let's look at a couple.
... //
Too many people, especially people with an agenda, are not interested in the scientific method. They aren't interested in the truth. They aren't interested in decoupling science from politics. That's how we have come to this pass, where a loud, vocal, and at some times criminal element is demanding economic ruin, the end of our modern, technological society, and the return of mankind to the 19th century, all in the name of human-caused climate change that the data just doesn't support. The problem here lies not with the people who are doing science; it lies with the Al Gores, the John Kerrys, the Greta Thunbergs, the people who wave the term "science" like a battle ensign, and the vast majority of whom, like Al Gore, like John Kerry, have the carbon footprint of a medium-sized Third World nation.
This isn't science. This is the opposite of science. And these people are willing to destroy our modern lifestyle because of this — because of the bugaboo of anthropogenic climate change. //
anon-201n
8 minutes ago
More recently, scientific theories have become bandwagons, on which research grant grifters jump to get money. Right now, a lot of scientific research in the U.S. is being dominated by the paradigm of human-caused climate change. Into this maelstrom, faulty data and outright falsehoods are being swept around, and overwhelming responsible scientific research which attempts to find truths about earth's ecosystems. Without a framework of adherence to truth, scientific research is crowded out by political pressure exerted by ignorant advocates. //
C. S. P. Schofield
an hour ago
Sadly, science is often like this; called in to support a pre decided position. Or, an old theory hanging on in the face of new data until the men whose reputation were built on the old theory have retired; continental drift is supposed to have been adopted only father a mechanism for it was established, but the truth seems to be that it was accepted by the young blood, and became official after the old guard were no longer blocking it.
My late father was a Professor of the History of Science and Technology, so I gat a lot of this over the dinner table.
Yes, in theory, when the data contradicts theory, the theory gets junked. Seldom happens that directly, though.
Climate Change activism is a particularly squalid case. It doesn’t help their case that their proposed ‘solutions’ are mostly fairy tales. Wind, solar, and battery powered cars will not help, and may cut ally harm the environment more than what they are supposed to replace. I would, in particular, like to see somebody, ANYBODY, taking a hard look at what having wind and solar farms taking energy out of the environment does in terms of side effects. The enviroweenies act like that energy is free, and There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. //
COUltraMAGA
an hour ago
There are so many “climate science” articles that are almost immediately outdated by real-world observations it’s almost funny.
Case in point: I just ran across a recent study that showed that the Great Barrier Reef had rebounded from its 2009 lows to an unprecedented level (30% higher than standard levels of coral colonies) in just 15 years. Remember how all the coral was “dying” and being “bleached” because of CO2 and ozone blah blah blah? Not so much.
Turns out those lows in 2009 (and they were pretty low then) were due to a cyclone that passed almost directly over the entire GBR a year before. Causing widespread damage to the corals (which happens from time to time).
Rest assured, the GBR is not going anywhere, and in fact seems to be sticking a big middle finger to the climatistas by rebounding to far greater numbers than were thought possible. //
C. S. P. Schofield COUltraMAGA
an hour ago
Some decades back I made the observation that at least half the ‘environmental emergencies’ talked about would vanish if we executed the board of directors of The Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and the like. I think a fair proportion of the others - runaway wildfires spring to mind - could be solved by taking large tracts of land away from various governments and making them privately owned. In the developing world, too much damage is done because the companies working the land have leases from the government instead of owning, and know they have to make all the money they are going to get before tge lease runs out.
Last November, Virgin Atlantic Airways made headlines for completing the world’s first transatlantic flight using “100 percent sustainable aviation fuel.”
This week, the Advertising Standard Authority (ASA) of the U.K. banned a Virgin radio ad released prior to the flight, in which they touted their “unique flight mission.” While Virgin did use fuel that releases fewer emissions than traditional supplies, the regulatory agency deemed the company’s sustainability claim “misleading” because it failed to give a full picture of the adverse environmental and climate impacts of fuel.
A forthcoming study seeks to inform how courts consider challenges to these regulations by establishing once and for all that the lawmakers who shaped the Clean Air Act in 1970 knew scientists considered carbon dioxide an air pollutant, and that these elected officials were intent on limiting its emissions.
The research, expected to be published next week in the journal Ecology Law Quarterly, delves deep into congressional archives to uncover what it calls a “wide-ranging and largely forgotten conversation between leading scientists, high-level administrators at federal agencies, members of Congress” and senior staff under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. That conversation detailed what had become the widely accepted science showing that carbon dioxide pollution from fossil fuels was accumulating in the atmosphere and would eventually warm the global climate. //
“The argument that the Clean Air Act for some reason should not include the regulation of greenhouse gases is simply wrong,” Burger said
CO2 makes the planet greener.
Plant transpiration is vital to plant growth and terrestrial ecosystems.
The rising CO2 trend over the last 30 years (1990-2020) has been the primary driver of planetary greening, or increases in Leaf Area Index (LAI).
The greening, in turn, is predominantly responsible for the widespread increase in plant transpiration over this period.
These elevated trends in greening and plant transpiration are expected to continue unabated to 2100, accelerating with the increases in emissions.
“The trend attribution analysis results show that the change in leaf area index (LAI) can explain 66.2% of the global PT trend, indicating that elevated LAI due to global greening is the dominant factor contributing to the upward trend in global PT. The elevated LAI can be largely attributed to the CO2 fertilization effect induced by elevated atmospheric CO2 concentration.”
That's a lot of science-speak for "rising CO2 levels result in increased plant growth."
Increased plant growth means plants, which are, in effect, carbon sinks, increase their takeup of CO2 and their output of O2 — oxygen. That's good for plants, good for animals, and good for the planet — all without wrecking our economy with drastic carbon-emissions measures.
Who are we to determine what the Earth’s “correct” temperature range is? This little blue-green sphere is a tad over four and a half billion years old. Through most of that time, it’s been a lot warmer than it is now. As recently as the Eocene, maybe the Oligocene, there were no polar ice caps. In the more recent interglacials, global temps were higher than now. During the Roman occupation of Britain, there were vineyards that would not survive today’s British climate.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921818124000420
Somehow, the NYT and their bevy of so-called experts think they can divine the cause of these fires. In each case, the NYT has blamed climate change as either a driver or contributor to these three fires without so much as a shred of proof. In fact, the NYT contradicts their own claims in the table of the top ten fires in California by acreage burned provided in their article. //
While there was indeed a heat wave prior to the Park Fire, that had no bearing on the fire at all. The area where the fire ignited, Butte County, California, and the most-burned area in Tehama County are not in drought conditions according to the U.S. Drought Monitor for July 23 – the day before the Park Fire was ignited by a criminal arsonist.
So, “climate change caused drought” creating abnormally dry conditions didn’t figure into the Park Fire at all. The fire wouldn’t exist without the criminal act of arson.
The arson ignition point in Chico’s Bidwell Park is in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Just to the north of that point, huge acreages of grassland and scrubbrush exist. Combine that ignition with the sustained southerly winds that day of 20-25 mph, and it is no surprise that the fire rapidly spread north. Rick Carhart, the Public Information Officer for CalFire in Butte County and a Chico resident for decades, confirmed in a telephone interview that the area “had not naturally burned in several decades, and had no control burns to reduce fuel loads.” He added that these “high fuel loads, combined with the wind that day made a very aggressive fire.”
Climate change contributed nothing to the actual circumstances or rapid spread of the fire – local weather and a criminal act are at fault. The drying of grasses (which happens every spring) and the heat wave (which happens every summer) are both weather patterns that operate on short-term time scales as opposed to long-term climate change.
My colleague, Heartland Institute Research Fellow Linnea Lueken, published a scathing factual rebuttal last year of a case with The Sacramento Bee making similar, baseless claims like the NYT when they attempted to connect climate change to wildfires and their natural drivers, such as lightning. She writes:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finds no climate signal, nor increasing trend, behind thunderstorms, or lightning occurrences. Also, NASA satellites have documented a global long-term decline in wildfires. NASA reports satellites have measured a 25-percent decrease in global lands burned since 2003.
Examining wildfires in California in particular, research shows massive wildfires have regularly swept through the state. Indeed, a 2007 paper in the journal Forest Ecology and Management reported that prior to European colonization in the 1800s, more than 4.4 million acres of California forest and shrub-land burned annually. As compared to the 4.4 million California acres that burned each year prior to European colonization, only 90,000 acres to 1.6 million California acres burn in a typical year now.Clearly, there is no climate change component to California wildfires at all. If there were, fires in the present would be consuming much more than 4.4 million acres annually – but this isn’t happening. The simple fact is: Arsonists are responsible for more wildfires than climate change. The intensity and coverage of wildfire varies greatly from year to year, as evidenced by the 2022 NYT story: Why California’s 2022 Wildfire Season Was Unexpectedly Quiet. A map of fires from year to year in the article demonstrates this well.
A stack of one trillion one-dollar bills would reach the Moon and back four times. Janet Yellen is proposing to spend a stack, not a fistful, of dollars that would reach to the Moon and back twelve times. That's the scale of spending she's talking about - it is, literally, astronomical. And she wants to spend this money on the nebulous idea of anthropogenic climate change.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on Saturday that the global transition to a low-carbon economy requires $3 trillion in new capital each year through 2050, far above current annual financing, but that filling the gap is the biggest economic opportunity of the 21st century.