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.