Climate Change

I never said anything about arsonists always existing. I’m saying that many of the current fires are shown to be started by arsonists, and therefore the blame needs to be put where it is due. As for the remaining fires per the “time bomb” analogy, I’m demonstrating that forest fires have always existed.

So is manmade climate change to blame?

Forest fires have always existed, even before humans did.

 

I need to put this discussion in perspectives. I worked for the US Forest Service for more than 35 years. Including a stint on the Clark National Forest which had the highest incidence of arson fires in the Nation. Yes arson fires are locally an issue but do not explain the massive increase in acres burned in the past 40 years…about 300%. The increase is explained by changes in types of wild land vegetation, population living in fire prone areas and increasingly the number of days with weather favorable for extreme fire behavior…..a clear measure of climate change.

You can look up the statistics for various locations yourself. I’m not holding my breath tho; folks dwelling in innuendo, conspiracy nonsense, and factoids are rarely motivated to explore rigorous data sets or any type of scientific inquiry. If they were the reality of climate change due to CO2 and other human related releases of greenhouse gasses would have relegated the climate change denial to the scrap heap of history long ago.

 

I’ll ask you to provide your evidence, because that’s what normies who tout “Science” always require of Conspiracy Theorists.

Here’s some stats:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1617394114

“The economic and ecological costs of wildfire in the United States have risen substantially in recent decades. Although climate change has likely enabled a portion of the increase in wildfire activity, the direct role of people in increasing wildfire activity has been largely overlooked. We evaluate over 1.5 million government records of wildfires that had to be extinguished or managed by state or federal agencies from 1992 to 2012, and examined geographic and seasonal extents of human-ignited wildfires relative to lightning-ignited wildfires. Humans have vastly expanded the spatial and seasonal “fire niche” in the coterminous United States, accounting for 84% of all wildfires and 44% of total area burned. During the 21-y time period, the human-caused fire season was three times longer than the lightning-caused fire season and added an average of 40,000 wildfires per year across the United States. Human-started wildfires disproportionally occurred where fuel moisture was higher than lightning-started fires, thereby helping expand the geographic and seasonal niche of wildfire. Human-started wildfires were dominant (>80% of ignitions) in over 5.1 million km2, the vast majority of the United States, whereas lightning-started fires were dominant in only 0.7 million km2, primarily in sparsely populated areas of the mountainous western United States. Ignitions caused by human activities are a substantial driver of overall fire risk to ecosystems and economies. Actions to raise awareness and increase management in regions prone to human-started wildfires should be a focus of United States policy to reduce fire risk and associated hazards.”

Study Shows 84% of Wildfires Caused by Humans | Smart News| Smithsonian Magazine

And yes I’m aware that they mention climate change. But on a personal level I see the arson part to be much more important.

 

Arson, schmarson! Human caused fires do not equate to arson….there are many fires that have nothing to do with arson…like diesel train engines ( I personally saw one train engine start seven fires when returning from a lead mine in the Ozarks). Like burning trash outside ones home in the urban wild land interface. Like carelessly discarded cigarettes. Like power lines going down in wind storms. Like campfires left for out but weren’t. Like land clearing fires that escape. Just to name a few. The agency I worked for was aware of other human caused fires that were increasing as more and more people moved into locations where forest fuels are an issue….and raising the concern for at least the past 5 decades. These other human caused fires may not have the conspiratorial taint of malicious arson but are the majority of human caused fires.

 

Right on!

 

These are the crucial questions. I tend to trust experts unless there is clear and convincing evidence not to. But nothing is certain, not even that. I love my wife dearly, and trust her. But if I really think about it, I must conclude it's possible she could be slowly poisoning me by putting undetectable poisons in my breakfast cereal. Anything is possible. I tend to discount that possibility because I have no evidence or reason to think she's doing this, and based on experience and intuition she strikes me as somebody I can trust. I trust climate scientists because there are a lot of them, they have devoted much of their lives studying the phenomenon, and my judgment tells me it's unlikely they're all involved in a grand conspiracy to deceive us. In general, I prefer beliefs supported by empirical evidence, that are parsimonious (vs. complex), and falsifiable. I tend to distrust fossil fuel companies because they have a vested economic interest in discrediting climate change and have funded contrarian scientists like Richard Siegmund Lindzen, much as the tobacco industry funded maverick scientists who denied a link between cigarette smoking and cancer.

This discussion reminds me of one I had years ago on the Christian forum with a guy about evolution and the age of the earth. I was arguing that scientists who devoted their professional lives to studying the subject had found considerable evidence that the earth is over 4 billion years old and that macro-evolution happened. I asked if he thought they could all be lying or deluded. He said "Yes".

For some reason, Chinacat has a radically different take on reality than mine. He distrusts the climate scientists and environmentalists and thinks they're part of a grand conspiracy to rule us and rob us of our freedom. Maybe so. But so far, I don't think he's presented evidence to back that up. I wonder where he got the ideas. Why people believe conspiracy theories has been extensively studied by psychologists, who identify a number of likely causes or contributing factors: a need for control and safety (Douglas, Sutton, & Cichocka, 2017), a tendency to rely on conspiratorial information sources https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/...on/202009/the-psychology-conspiracy-theories; a tendency to prefer dispositional explanations to situational ones (i.e., to attribute unexplained events to agency or intention instead of circumstancehttps://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight-therapy/202004/true-false-believers-the-psychology-conspiracy-theories, confirmation bias; a desire to be uniquely knowledgeable; pareidolla and apophenia (the tendency to see patterns where none are there) Why Do People Believe in Conspiracy Theories? a need to preserve cherished beliefs in the face of uncertainty https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5724570/; https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0963721417718261 Not being a psychologist, I don't know whether or not any of these might apply. Maybe it's me. I don't think so, but I'm admittedly biased on the matter.

 

I think conspiracies are very real, that there are truly evil sociopaths who are out to get us and to take over this country and rule the world. In fact, one of these is running for President and has a lot of minions who are helping him. They're even called co-conspirators in the Rico charges. The evidence is spelled out in four indictments! And sinister corporate forces are deliberately manipulating the news to mislead us about climate. We just disagree about who these are. I doubt that it's the Club of Rome!

 

This post you attempt to go into an analysis of why some people are conspiracy theorists…

 

And this post you declare yourself to be a conspiracy theorist. Lol ok

 

It’s just wrong to blame human-started fires on climate change, arson or accidental. If most fires are started by humans, then most fires are started by humans. Why are you willing to blame humans for climate change but not fires that are started by humans?

 

I already stated that I’m aware that they mention climate change; I would put in bold many things that you chose not to, such as the part in the article that says humans are the source of the ignitions.

However, even with a projected increase in the number of lightning strikes as a result of anthropogenic climate change (50% by 2100) (35), humans would still remain the dominant ignition source across the majority of the United States land area.

Our findings reinforce the strong imprint of people on fire regimes through changes in wildfire seasonality, which has been documented globally (39). In the past few decades, early onset of warmer and drier conditions has promoted greater fire activity across the western United States (6, 7, 40). However, our study highlights the equally important role of human ignitions in changing modern fire regimes by increasing the fire season length to encompass the entire year.

Observations suggest that climate change has extended the duration of the fire weather season across most of the globe, including parts of the United States by a couple of weeks over the past three decades (5, 9), whereas we show that human ignitions in the United States increased the length of the fire season by more than three mo.

In conclusion, we demonstrate the remarkable influence that humans have on modern United States wildfire regimes through changes in the spatial and seasonal distribution of ignitions. Although considerable fire research in the United States has rightly focused on increased fire activity (e.g., larger fires and more area burned) because of climate change, we demonstrate that the expanded fire niche as a result of human-related ignitions is equally profound.

Personally I find it more than equally profound, especially if 84% of fires are started by humans. Stop starting fires and would your climate change argument really hold up?

It’s just an overall outlook on things that I don’t think we will ever agree on. I’m going to emphasize the fact that a lot of fires are started by humans. Feels like a huge cop-out to blame this on climate change. It’s like blaming gun murder on guns, robbery on a bad economy, rape on slutty women, etc.

 

The difference lies in the supporting evidence. What's yours?

Of course fires can be and are started by humans. They can be and are started by other things as well. They are more likely in climates that result in combustible conditions. What on earth do you think this has to do with the topic of measurable climate change?

 

Well since wildfires have always existed literally forever pretty much, I just don’t find this to be a convincing argument. Did climate change start fires 450 million years ago? If so, then is climate change manmade?

As far as “what’s my evidence?”…that’s just such a blanket umbrella question. I’ve provided much data in regards to my arguments. I already am aware I’m not going to change your mind, the experts are correct, Orange Man Bad, etc.

 

I think we've identified the source of the arson fires LOL

 

This statement shows how much you know about a serious issue. Arson fires in the Ozarks and other areas in the South are the result of a cultural tradition that “burning the woods will get rid of ticks and chiggers”. A widespread and mistaken tradition. Another contributing problem was patrons driving home from backwoods beer halls who would stop and start a fire(s). Who knows why….excitement, inebriation, ??

Many men and women working in fire suppression for State, local an Federal agencies in the region are not laughing and spend many hours protecting lives, natural resources, and homes from fire.

 

For evidence and arguments debunking the claim that arson instead of climate change is the major source of wildfires, see:
Why wildfires happen: Debunking the myth that arson is to blame more than climate change | CNN
Climate Deniers and the Phantom Arsonists They Can't Get Enough Of
How climate change drives heatwaves and wildfires in Europe
Climate change creates more opportunities for arsonists and assures that the scope and intensity of the conflagrations will be greater.

Your "data" so far seems to be comparable to the Flat Earther's "It looks flat to me, and I don't feel it moving". Given enough assumptions, it's possible still to cling to the theory that the earth is the center of the universe (Hollywood backlots, Satanic deception, more epicenters, etc.) But those of us with a preference for simpler explanations, apply Occam's razor.

Wildfires are one--only one--sign that climate change is a reality. There are lots of other signs, from global temperature rise to melting ice sheets, the evidence of a warming planet abounds. Although the planet's climate has changed throughout history, and arsons have been going on since man discovered fire, the current warming is happening at a more rapid rate not seen in the past 10,000 years. What's causing these changes? Secret government experiments in weather control? MTG's Jewish lasers from Outer Space? As I said, my own inclination to believe in the likely reality that the changes are a result of increased emission of greenhouse gases from human activities is grounded on a general trust of science, parsimony (i.e,. Occam's razor), and the weight of the evidence.
Evidence | Facts – Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet
Effects | Facts – Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet
Climate change: How do we know it is happening and caused by humans?
What Is the Evidence for Human-Caused Climate Change?
Global Warming Effects

For evidence of a link between increased damage from wildfires and climate change, see:
Climate Change Indicators: Wildfires | US EPA
https://www.usgs.gov/science-explorer/climate/wildfire
Wildfire risk has increased, but we can still influence where and how fires strike
Wildfires and climate change: What's the connection? » Yale Climate Connections
Note: the point isn't that climate change is the main cause of the wildfires, but that the wildfires are becoming more frequent and intense.

In a trial, each side will come up with the most plausible case it can on the basis of the facts at hand. If the prosecution produces evidence the defendant was observed by witnesses shooting the victim, it's recorded on a surveillance camera, ownership of the gun was traced to him, etc., the defense is going to have a hard time. He could argue that his client was framed, the surveillance camera was doctored, the gun was planted and record of ownership altered, etc. Maybe the jury will believe it. It could even be true. But it would be an uphill battle. Your own plight with the evidence of human-induced climate change is similar.

BTW, what is your own science background? And what are your information sources?

 

That is, of course the way the right operates. The discussion is about climate change so let’s throw extraneous garbage into the discussion and focus on arson. Fires are driven by fuel changes…climate change is the big factor not ignitions. Red herrings are not useful.