Tag Archives: Arson

Climate Change Did Not Cause the Maui Fires

15 Tuesday Aug 2023

Posted by in Climate, Wildfires

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Several years ago my wife and I dined on the roof of Mick Fleetwood’s restaurant in beautiful Lahaina on Maui. Sadly, that restaurant was destroyed by this week’s wildfire, along with the famous banyan tree and most of the town. The death toll keeps climbing in what was an unimaginably tragic event.

Climate alarmists, including Hawaii Governor Josh Green and one of my favorite personalities, Steve Parrish, jumped to the immediate and wrong-headed conclusion that this fire was caused by climate change. They believe that sounds so sensible, but nothing could be further from the truth. As I noted in a post last week, this year has seen relatively little burning around the globe. It just so happens that the western side of Maui is particularly prone to grass fires, and this one happened to be huge.

Here’s a good explanation from James Steele of the circumstances which culminated in the fire that destroyed Lahaina. He first acknowledges that wildfires are quite common in Hawaii, but very few are caused by lightning strikes:

“According to Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization, 98% of all Hawaiian fires are started by people, of which 75% are due to carelessness. .. As retirees flock to Hawaii seeking the health benefits of a warmer climate, the population has tripled since 1980, which only increases the probability of a careless fire being started.”

Arson is part of the story, but I don’t know of any reports of arson that might be implicated in this conflagration. Fires from electrical lines have also been mentioned as possible triggers.

The western part of Maui tends to be much drier than more eastern parts of the island. Here’s Steele again:

“Lahaina is situated on the leeward side of Maui’s mountains. These highlands wring out the moisture carried by the trade winds, with only 15” of rain falling in Lahaina compared to 300” on the mountains to the east.”

Expanding acreage of invasive grasses has led to excessive fire risk. This has occurred with declining production of agricultural products like pineapples and sugar cane. These “small diameter” grasses dry-out very quickly and become dangerous fuel for wind-blown fires. Even worse, a very wet spring led to more growth in the grasses than normally occurs. Once dry weather set in, a tinder box was created in western Maui.

Cliff Mass makes some of the same points, and he offers some detail on strong trade winds that developed last week between a powerful high-pressure system to the north of Maui and Hurricane Dora to the south. And no, climate change is not increasing the frequency or severity of hurricanes. Maui’s position between other islands, and the mountains east of Lahaina, create a funneling effect for the winds. Mass speculates that these high winds blew down power lines, igniting the fires.

The risk of catastrophic fires in West Maui has been known for years. The link summarizes statements made by a director of a non-profit involved in planning and preparing earlier reports on fire risk:

“… significant progress in implementing the community-based work since [her] organizations inception in 2002. But the necessary ‘enormous infrastructure’ investments have not come.

‘I don’t know if I understood the urgency of those bigger investments.’ ….”

The recommended investments included 70 miles of fire breaks and 90 miles of fuel breaks. Essentially, these breaks would be bare land intended to reduce fire spread and intensity. Apparently that work was never initiated, nor was work begun on other types of infrastructure needed to minimize risk.

The tragic fire in West Maui resulted from a confluence of declining agriculture, invasive and fire-prone grasses, an especially wet spring followed by a dry summer, a few days of unusually strong trade winds, and geography that funnels and focuses the intensity of those winds. The “spark” or “sparks” might well have been from downed power lines, or possibly some other kind of accident, carelessness, or even arson. It was not caused by global warming, as much as the climate change activists might like to convince you. The assertion that fires are becoming more frequent and severe has absolutely no basis in fact.

Feckless Greens Burn Aussie Bush

09 Thursday Jan 2020

Posted by in Forest Fires, Global Warming, Wildfires

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The raging Australian bush fires have been expansive and deadly. Country-wide, over 12 million acres have burned over the past few months, an area approaching twice the size of Massachusetts. The burnt areas in some regions rival or exceed individual fires of the past, such as the Black Friday fire of 1939, which burned about 5 million acres. As bad as the recent fires have been, note that various outlets in the U.S. have felt it necessary to exaggerate the size of the burnt area (also see here). And the season’s burnt area has not even approached the total for 1974-1975, when over 250 million acres burned.

So what causes these bush fires? Dry weather and plenty of fuel from dead vegetation create the hazard, of course. A spark is needed, as from lightning, an accident, an arsonist, or perhaps even a blistering sun, but warm temperatures are unnecessary. Nevertheless, the narrative we hear year-in and year-out is that global warming is to blame for wildfires. My commentary on the climate-change hubbub over the 2018 California fires is here. As for Australia’s fires, there is similarly ample evidence that climate change or warming has nothing to do with it. Rather, as in California, there is a pattern of mismanagement of forests and brush combined with population growth, accidents, and arson, and of course a dry spell. This dry spell has been severe, but the trend in Australia over the past 120 years has been toward more precipitation, not less, and the past 25 years have been relatively rainy. The rain comes with a downside, however: it encourages growth in vegetation, much of which dies every dry season, leaving plenty of fuel for fires. And the fuel has been accumulating.

Mike Shedlock at Mishtalk offers some pertinent observations. First, he quotes James Morrow in the Wall Street Journal:

“Byzantine environmental restrictions prevent landholders from clearing scrub, brush and trees. State governments don’t do their part to reduce the fuel load in parks. Last November a former fire chief in Victoria slammed that state’s ‘minimalist approach’ to hazard-reduction burning in the off-season. That complaint is heard across the country.“

Prescribed burns have been in decline and focused on areas adjacent to suburbs, leaving vast areas of accumulating fuel. This is a product of wrongheaded conservation efforts and resistance to CO2 emissions. These policymakers haven’t done favors for Australia or the world on either count. Shedlock reinforces this point with the following statement from Patrick Michaels and Myron Ebell:

“Australia has been ready to explode for years. David Packham, former head of Australia’s National Rural Fire Research Centre, warned in a 2015 article in the Age that fire fuel levels had climbed to their most dangerous levels in thousands of years. He noted this was the result of ‘misguided green ideology.'”

Eucalyptus trees grow thickly in many fire-prone areas of Australia, and Shedlock says these trees act as a multiplier on the fire hazard. Yet these trees remain a favorite landscape feature for suburbians even in fire-prone areas. He quotes Marc Lallanilla in LiveScience:

“Fallen eucalyptus leaves create dense carpets of flammable material, and the trees’ bark peels off in long streamers that drop to the ground, providing additional fuel that draws ground fires up into the leaves, creating massive, fast-spreading ‘crown fires’ in the upper story of eucalyptus forests. … Additionally, the eucalyptus oil that gives the trees their characteristic spicy fragrance is a flammable oil: This oil, combined with leaf litter and peeling bark during periods of dry, windy weather, can turn a small ground fire into a terrifying, explosive firestorm in a matter of minutes. That’s why eucalyptus trees — especially the blue gums (Eucalyptus globulus) that are common throughout New South Wales — are sometimes referred to wryly as ‘gasoline trees.’“

The introduction of non-native invasive grasses has also been blamed for increasing the fuel load in the bush. And as incredible as it may seem, certain birds native to Australia are spreading bushfires by carrying and dropping burning sticks in grasslands to flush out prey. Birds are indeed tool users! The Whistling Kite and the Black Kite are sometimes called “arson raptors”, according to Leslie Eastman at this link.

The hypothesis that climate warming from CO2 emissions is the cause of the bushfires is undermined by all of the above. Then, of course, there are the arsonists and accidental fires. Over 180 people have been arrested for setting recent brushfires intentionally in New South Wales alone, and 103 others in Queensland. (Also see here.) Jim Steele reports that human ignitions account for 66% of bush fires, while just 11% are caused by lightning. Population growth has brought more people into close proximity with the bush, which increases the exposure of humans to fire danger and might well add to the number of accidents and potential arsonists. Obviously, human and avian arson, and accidents, are not within the line of causation that climate alarmists have in mind.

Roy Spencer addresses some of the inconsistencies in the claimed link between climate warming and the Australian bushfires. First, of course, is the trend in rainfall. Climate models based on CO2 forcings predict no long-term trend in Australia’s rainfall, but again, rainfall has increased in Australia during the era of accelerated forcings. Interestingly, the fires of 1974-75 occurred during a period that was quite rainy, but that rain might have added so much to the annual vegetation cycle that it exacerbated the effect of dry season. Temperatures in Australia were quite warm in 2019, but the climate models cannot account for that variation, especially as Australian temperatures are subject to high variability from year-to-year. It’s been hotter before, though the temperature records in Australia have been subject to some controversial “editing”. Finally, Spencer notes that global wildfire activity has been in decline for many years, despite the mild warming we’ve experienced over the past 50 years (also see here).

Australia has bush fires every year, and this year has been particularly bad, but it might not reach the proportions of the fires in 1974-75. The causes are: poor burn management practices, or sometimes neglect and no burn management at all, allowing dead vegetation to accumulate to dangerous levels; arson, which has been implicated in a large number of fires this year; and 2019 was a very dry year. The contention that global warming or climate change is responsible for these bush fires is a dangerous distraction from reforms that can minimize fire hazards in the future.

For additional reading of interest, see “Australia Fires … and Misfires” by Willis Eschenbach and “The Mathematics of Connectivity and Bush Fires: A Note From David Ward” a post from Jennifer Marohasy’s blog.

Forest Fires Ignite Climate Change Delusions

10 Friday Aug 2018

Posted by in Global Warming, Wildfires

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The geographic extent of this summer’s forest fires won’t come close to the aggregate record for the U.S. Far from it. Yes, there are some terrible fires now burning in California, Oregon, and elsewhere, and the total burnt area this summer in the U.S. is likely to exceed the 2017 total. But as the chart above shows, the burnt area in 2017 was less than 20% of the record set way back in 1930. The same is true of the global burnt area, which has declined over many decades. In fact, this 2006 paper reported the following:

“Analysis of charcoal records in sediments [31] and isotope-ratio records in ice cores [32] suggest that global biomass burning during the past century has been lower than at any time in the past 2000 years. Although the magnitude of the actual differences between pre-industrial and current biomass burning rates may not be as pronounced as suggested by those studies [33], modelling approaches agree with a general decrease of global fire activity at least in past centuries [34]. In spite of this, fire is often quoted as an increasing issue around the globe [11,26–29].”

People have a tendency to exaggerate the significance of current events. Perhaps the youthful can be forgiven for thinking hot summers are a new phenomenon. Incredibly, more “seasoned” folks are often subject to the same fallacies. The fires in California have so impressed climate alarmists that many of them truly believe global warming is the cause of forest fires in recent years, including the confused bureaucrats at Cal Fire, the state’s firefighting agency. Of course, the fires have given fresh fuel to self-interested climate activists and pressure groups, an opportunity for greater exaggeration of an ongoing scare story.

This year, however, and not for the first time, a high-pressure system has been parked over the West, bringing southern winds up the coast along with warmer waters from the south, keeping things warm and dry inland. It’s just weather, though a few arsonists and careless individuals always seem to contribute to the conflagrations. Beyond all that, the impact of a warmer climate on the tendency for biomass to burn is considered ambiguous for realistic climate scenarios.

And what of the “mega-fires” burning in the West, like the huge Mendocino Complex Fire and last year’s Thomas Fire? Unfortunately, many decades of fire suppression measures — prohibitions on logging, grazing, and controlled burns — have left the forests with too much dead wood and debris, especially on public lands. From the last link:

“Oregon, like much of the western U.S., was ravaged by massive wildfires in the 1930s during the Dust Bowl drought. Megafires were largely contained due to logging and policies to actively manage forests, but there’s been an increasing trend since the 1980s of larger fires.

Active management of the forests and logging kept fires at bay for decades, but that largely ended in the 1980s over concerns too many old growth trees and the northern spotted owl. Lawsuits from environmental groups hamstrung logging and government planners cut back on thinning trees and road maintenance.

[Bob] Zybach [a forester] said Native Americans used controlled burns to manage the landscape in Oregon, Washington and northern California for thousands of years. Tribes would burn up to 1 million acres a year on the west coast to prime the land for hunting and grazing, Zybach’s research has shown.

‘The Indians had lots of big fires, but they were controlled,’ Zybach said. ‘It’s the lack of Indian burning, the lack of grazing’ and other active management techniques that caused fires to become more destructive in the 19th and early 20th centuries before logging operations and forest management techniques got fires under control in the mid-20th Century.”

The annual burnt area from wildfires has declined over the past ninety years both in the U.S. and globally. Even this year’s wildfires are unlikely to come close to the average burn extent of the 1930s. The large wildfires this year are due to a combination of decades of poor forest management along with a weather pattern that has trapped warm, dry air over the West. The contention that global warming has played a causal role in the pattern is balderdash, but apparently that explanation seems plausible to the uninformed, and it is typical of the propaganda put forward by climate change interests.