Forestry

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Western Wildfires Are Due to Arson and Stupidity, Not Climate Change | American Thinker

By Chris Talgo <ctalgo@heartland.org>

Unfortunately, we are living in a world where facts don’t matter much anymore. For instance, the wildfires that have swept across the western United States over the past few weeks are being almost universally blamed on climate change, even though the facts tell otherwise.

The fires in California and Oregon are not due to climate change. They are due to arson and sheer stupidity on the part of many, including those who are responsible for the environmental stewardship that is supposed to prevent them in the first place.

According to the Cal Fire San Bernardino Unit, “the El Dorado Fire, burning near Oak Glen in San Bernardino County, was caused by a smoke generating pyrotechnic device, used during a gender reveal party.” Chalk this one up to stupidity, not climate change.

Likewise, the Almeda Fire in Oregon, which has burned more than 600 homes, cannot be tied to climate change whatsoever because it was caused by arsonists. As Ashland Police Chief Tighe O’Meara said, “We have good reason to believe that there was a human element to it. We’re going to pursue it as a criminal investigation until we have reason to believe that it was otherwise.”

There are several more reports of arsonists instigating the blazes that are currently destroying hundreds of thousands of acres in the West.

Despite these facts, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), recently said, “Mother Earth is angry. She’s telling us, whether, she’s telling us with hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, fires in the West, whatever it is, that climate crisis is real and has an impact.”

Of course, Pelosi didn’t offer one iota of evidence to support her contention that climate change is somehow responsible for all this. And since when did Mother Earth begin speaking to the Speaker of the House?

Not to be outdone, California Gov. Gavin Newsom also laid blame for his state’s out-of-control wildfires on climate change. “I say this lovingly — not as an ideologue, but as someone who prides himself on being open to argument, interested in evidence — but I quite literally have no patience for climate change deniers,” Newsom said. “It’s completely inconsistent, that point of view, with the reality on the ground, the facts as we are experiencing. You may not believe it intellectually, but your own eyes, your own experiences tell a different story.”

Conveniently, Newsom failed to mention that California has one of the poorest records of implementing commonsense environmental stewardship protocols, which no doubt has played a significant factor in the Golden State’s proclivity for wildfires over the past several years.

According to California’s state oversight agency, “During its review, the Commission found that California’s forests suffer from neglect and mismanagement, resulting in overcrowding that leaves them susceptible to disease, insects and wildfire.”

In other words, under decades of Democratic leadership, California has woefully underinvested in forest management efforts, which have left forests grossly overgrown and prone to wildfire.

Making matters worse, California’s insistence on becoming the renewable energy utopia of the United States has led the state’s primary energy utility, PG&E, to disregard properly maintaining existing energy infrastructure.

As the San Diego Union Tribune reports, “every dollar spent on additional costs of renewable energy results in a dollar not available to spend on culling vegetation, insulating power lines, placing lines underground and other measures.”

As if that were not enough, the article also notes, “a report prepared by the independent consulting firm Beacon Economics for the San Francisco-based think tank Next 10 estimated California wildfires last year produced about nine times more emissions than were reduced across the entire state’s economy between 2016 and 2017 — and wildfires contributed more than the commercial, residential or agriculture sectors did in 2017.”

Ironically, Newsom’s naïve attempt (and his predecessors) to make the Golden State the renewable energy mecca has actually led to more carbon emissions because the state’s abundant forests have been turned into a giant tinderbox.

Adding insult to injury, Newsom has pledged to double-down on his efforts to make California more reliant on renewable energy, regardless of the uptick in wildfires and rolling blackouts.

And the claim that wildfires are increasing is 100 percent false. According to the Congressional Research Service, the prevalence of wildfires has decreased over the past three decades. As the report notes, “Over the past 10 years, there were an average of 64,100 wildfires annually and an average of 6.8 million acres burned annually. In 2019, 50,477 wildfires burned 4.7 million acres nationwide, below the annual average for both statistics.”

John Adams once said, “Facts are stubborn things. They cannot be altered by our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions.”

Fact-shunners like Gov. Newsom and Rep. Pelosi ought to put their wishes and passions aside and deal with the reality that their state is being decimated by wildfires due to their incompetence and ignorance, not because of so-called climate change.

Source: American Thinker

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Study touts planting 1 trillion trees as most effective climate change solution | The Hill

Healthy green trees in a forest of old spruce, fir and pine trees in wilderness of a national park. Sustainable industry, ecosystem and healthy environment concepts and background.

The cheapest way to halt the effects of climate change could be planting 1 trillion trees, according to a new study.

The study in the journal Science, first reported by The Associated Press, found that planting trees could be the most effective way to remove carbon from the atmosphere, but cautioned that it would have little effect without a reduction of emissions around the globe.

“This is by far — by thousands of times — the cheapest climate change solution” study co-author Thomas Crowther, an ecologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, said.

“It’s certainly a monumental challenge, which is exactly the scale of the problem of climate change,” he added.

Though, Crowther cautioned, “None of this works without emissions cuts.”

Scientists with the United Nations have called for a major reduction in carbon emissions over the next decade to stave off the worst effects of climate change, including rising sea levels and dangerous weather phenomena.

Lawmakers around the world have debated on how to address the issue, and in 2017 the U.S. withdrew from a major accord meant to battle climate change due to President Trump‘s opposition to the pact.

Democratic candidates for president, including former Vice President Joe Biden, have called for the U.S. to rejoin the agreement. Progressives are pushing an ambitious plan to cut U.S. carbon emissions, the Green New Deal, introduced earlier this year by Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

If enacted, the Green New Deal calls for the transition of America’s energy grid away from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

Source: The Hill

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Planting Billions of Trees Is the ‘Best Climate Change Solution Available Today,’ Study Finds | EcoWatch

Planting more than 500 billion trees could remove around 25 percent of existing carbon from the atmosphere, a new study has found. What’s more: there’s enough space to do it.

The study, published in Science Friday, set out to assess how much new forest the earth could support without encroaching on farmland or urban areas and came up with a figure of 0.9 billion hectares, an area roughly the size of the U.S., BBC News reported. That makes reforestation “the most effective solution” for mitigating the climate crisis, the researchers concluded.

“Our study shows clearly that forest restoration is the best climate change solution available today and it provides hard evidence to justify investment,” senior study author and ETH-Zürich Professor Tom Crowther said, as BBC News reported. “If we act now, this could cut carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by up to 25 percent, to levels last seen almost a century ago.”

The new trees would remove around 200 gigatonnes of carbon, or two thirds of what humans have pumped into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution.

However, the researchers emphasized that tree planting was not a replacement for reducing greenhouse gas emissions or phasing out the use of fossil fuels.

“None of this works without emissions cuts,” Crowther told Time.

Even if tree planting began today, it would take 50 to 100 years for the new trees to soak up those 200 gigatonnes of carbon, he told The Guardian. And, as National Geographic pointed out, the researchers found that potential tree-planting land could shrink by one-fifth by 2050 even if global temperature rise is limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, as some tropical areas could grow too hot to support forests.

Even so, Crowther said tree planting was an important means of immediate climate action.

It’s “a climate change solution that doesn’t require President Trump to immediately start believing in climate change, or scientists to come up with technological solutions to draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere,” Crowther told The Guardian. “It is available now, it is the cheapest one possible and every one of us can get involved.”

Assistant-Director General at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization René Castro praised the study’s utility.

“We now have definitive evidence of the potential land area for re-growing forests, where they could exist and how much carbon they could store,” Castro said, as The Guardian reported.

To reach their conclusions, the researchers first looked at around 80,000 satellite photographs of protected forest areas around the world to assess the tree cover in each. They then used Google Earth Engine mapping software to develop a model for predicting where new trees could grow, National Geographic explained. They found that more than half of the world’s reforestation potential was located in six countries: China, the U.S., Russia, Australia, Canada and Brazil.

However, trends are moving in the opposite direction in Brazil, where deforestation is on the rise under the right-wing government of President Jair Bolsonaro. Recent satellite images show that a football-field-sized swath of the Amazon is being lost every minute, according to National Geographic.

Bolsonaro has also been hostile to the rights of indigenous communities to the forest. But such rights are essential for conservation: deforestation rates are much lower in forests that recognize indigenous claims.

“We have served as guardians of these lands for generations … We also understand how to restore them to health,” Joan Carling, a member of the Kankanaey tribe in the Philippines and co-convener of the Indigenous Peoples Major Group for Sustainable Development, told National Geographic by email. “With the security of our lands and resources, we can prevent destructive logging, mining, agri-business, and other projects from occurring in our territories.”

Political realities are why some scientists criticized the optimism of Crowther’s findings.

“Planting trees to soak up two-thirds of the entire anthropogenic carbon burden to date sounds too good to be true. Probably because it is,” University of Reading professor Martin Lukac told BBC News. “This far, humans have enhanced forest cover on a large scale only by shrinking their population size (Russia), increasing productivity of industrial agriculture (the West) or by direct order of an autocratic government (China). None of these activities look remotely feasible or sustainable at global scale.”

University College London professor Simon Lewis, meanwhile, said that the amount of carbon the study said trees would absorb was too high. He said the study had not accounted for the carbon already in the soil before trees were planted or the hundreds of years it would take for the trees to achieve their full storage potential, The Guardian reported.

Source: EcoWatch