Forest Fire Discussion II

OPS-29 This OPS focuses in on California specifically and touches on the Australian Bush Fire Season. The Australian data was not readily available, so I have not included my own plot here. The plot shown here was put together by Dr. Roy Spencer. The Hectares Burned plot clearly shows that the Australian bush fires do not correlate to rising CO2 levels. And when combined with the Annual Rainfall Anomaly plot, the Fire/Drought Narrative also has some major issues. The largest (by far) Australian bush fire season was 1974/75, a period with unusually high precipitation levels. And isn’t it strange how the Australian precipitation levels can be correlated to the rising CO2 levels? The 2019 precipitation levels were the lowest since 1900 but they do not represent a change in the general trends. Australia has experienced significantly more precipitation under the higher human CO2 emission period (80+% of human CO2 emissions have occurred post-1950).

#showusthedata #globalwarming #climatechange

The California situation also has no correlation to CO2 levels. Given California’s geographic position, their climate is strongly dependent on the various Pacific Ocean natural cycles. The strongest regular influence is the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). A warm PDO leads to warmer/drier conditions in California and a cold PDO means cooler/wetter conditions. The el Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) also has a direct effect on California but is not as regular as the PDO.

We have just entered a cold PDO. Strange how the “Never Ending” California drought somehow ended despite the continually rising CO2 levels. Are the unusually high precipitation levels (rain and snow) over the last few years due to CO2 increases? Couldn’t be those pesky ocean cycles (an indirect solar forcing), could it?

There was lots of California forest fire news coverage in 2018 and it was a bad fire year. Where did the news coverage go in 2019 (a particularly good fire-year)? CO2 was still increasing. Maybe, just maybe part of the problem is human related but not necessarily focussed on CO2 emissions. Forest management and human incursion into natural areas might be more important. For example, what is PG&E doing to improve their safety record (their transmission lines caused 1,500 wildfires in the 2014-2019 period). A lot of that damage (to life and property) occurred in 2018.

Forest Fires are a problem. They can be and have been devastating. But the neither the number of forest fires nor the acreage burned correlates with the atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Strange how the fire statistics do correlate to the MEASURED TEMPERATURES and not the manipulated (“homogenized”) temperature records. The 1930’s and 40’s still hold most of the high temperature records (remember that pesky little drought that NASA and others have tried to homogenize out of existence). And the temperature rise through the Modern Solar Maximum has added to the fire risks. California fires were briefly back to the dirty 30 levels. But a cold PDO and a Grand Solar Minimum will make short work of the so-called extreme, Climate Change related California fire risk. Assuming they get PG&E and the arsonist community under control. I am still waiting for anyone (scientist or not) to put forward an empirical CO2/Temperature data set that shows CO2 driving the climate on any statistically significant historical time scale.