LYNN BERGMAN: FAKE NEWS’ “PANTS ON FIRE”
Excerpts of an Epoch Times Article by H. Sterling Burnett, PhD
California was one of the least populated regions of our country before European colonizers spread across the continent. Research shows that droughts in the region have on occasion lasted on the order of 100 years; evidence also suggests that massive wildfires regularly swept through the region in the past.
A 2007 paper in the journal Forest Ecology and Management found that prior to European colonization in the 1800s, more than 4.4 million acres of California forest and shrub land burned annually, far more than the area of California that has burned since year 2000, which ranges from 0.09 million acres to 1.59 million acres per year.
A 2012 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that wildfires in the western United States attained “the lowest levels… during the Little Ice Age (circa 1400-1700 AD) and during the 1800s.”
Wildfires have declined sharply over the course of the past century in the United States and globally. As reported in The Heartland Institute's “Climate at a Glance; Wildfires”, long term data from U.S. National Inter agency Fire Center (NIFC) show that wildfires have declined in number and severity since the early 1900s. NIFC reports the numbers of acres burned is far less now than it was throughout the early 20th century, with the current acres burned running about one-fourth to one-fifth of the record values that occurred in the 1930s.
Globally, the data on wildfires are just as clear. In his book “False Alarm”, Bjorn Lomborg observes:
“There is plenty of evidence for a reduction in the level of devastation caused by fire, with satellites showing a 25 percent reduction globally in burned area just over the past 18 years… In total the global amount of area burned has declined by more than 540,000 square miles, from 1.9 million square miles in the early part of last century to 1.4 million square miles today.”
Recent years' modest increases in the extent of wildfires are mostly due to government timbering policies and demographic shifts. After the end of Reagan's presidency, forest policy shifted, and not for the better. Ecological and recreational values were placed above timber production. Thousands of miles of forest roads were ripped out, roads that had been used both for timbering AND for firefighter access to the remote areas, preventing the fires from reaching populated regions. While timber harvests plummeted by up to 84% from 12 billion board feet per year to 2 billion board feet per year.
The result across much of the western United States has been an unnaturally high tree density, allowing formerly isolated pockets of insect infestations to morph into massive infestations, killing large swaths of forests. There are now more dead trees than live ones in many federal forests, more fuel for catastrophic fires. Too many trees, too mush brush, and bureaucratic regulations and lawsuits filed by environmental extremists are to blame.
In Colorado, the population has grown five-fold since 1940, from a little more than 1 million to 5.76 million today. Former small mining towns have become cities. Colorado's population had grown 14.5 percent since the 2010 census, the fourth largest growth in the nation.
Across the West, a growing rural-urban interface means more people and property are in the way when wildfires inevitably occur. The absolute cost of wildfires have increased dramatically over the past century even as the number of acres burned has declined. The higher costs are not caused by climate change but from the rise in the number of people and the value of assets place in the “bulls eye”. A large part of the solution would involve selective increases in timber leases and the associated rebuilding of forest access roads for logging AND firefighting. Such roads would also provide access to larger areas deep within our forests for hiking, hunting and backpacking.
When it comes to wild fires, “we have met the enemy, and it is not climate change; it is us.” For the complete article “Separating Fact From Fiction About Wildfires” by H Sterling Burnett, PhD. Click on the following link:
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