When something unusual happens weather-wise, we often hear shrieks of terror that this is all just climate change pressing in on us. And, therefore, as the mantra goes, we should shut down industrial civilization and go back to shivering in the dark beside a caveman’s fire.
As it happens, I’m just fine with the basic idea that climate change is happening, we’re causing it, and something should be done. Further, as someone who has actually gone and read all the reports, I believe we need a carbon tax, and that’s all. This makes me deeply unpopular, as I both agree that something should be done but not that industrial civilization must be shut down – annoying everyone except those who have bothered to read the reports.
That still leaves us with much shrieking, the latest claims being that expensive parts of California are going up in smoke because we still burn dead dinosaurs. This is not the case, but it doesn’t stop people from insisting it is.
The Atlantic tells us it’s about climate change, as do the Los Angeles Times, PBS, Inside Climate News, Pacific Standard, and The Guardian. All are telling us that Bel Air is going up in smoke because of climate change. Vox gets an honorable mention for at least mentioning, even if not emphasizing, the true reason.
Like any physical process, there are a number of determinants. Late rains this year kept California’s brush dry for longer, the Santa Ana winds don’t blow every year nor this late, and so on. But those are well within normal variations. And the major determinant of a large or small wildfire season isn’t what happens now at all. It’s what happened last winter.
It’s true that I stopped living in California some years ago, but I now live in southern Portugal, a place with much the same ecosystem and wildfire problems. I speak both from experience and also from that error described above, bothering to read actual reports about things. They’re places where things are a bit odd to those from more northerly climates: The major growth period of the native vegetation is winter and spring, when the rains are falling.
The reason we like the places, after all, is that they don’t get any rain from, say, April through October – great for the beach and that cocktail on the terrace. Plants tend not to like that though, so they grow when it’s wet then spend the rest of the year shrivelling up into just tremendously great feed for a brush fire. How bad the fires are going to be depends, from mostly to near entirely, upon how much rain there was and thus how much growth that then shrivels into tinder. Last winter’s rains determine this fall’s fire season.
And what happened last winter? California had good rainfall, great actually. It was the end of what some called a thousand-year drought in fact, from 2011 on a near absence of winter rains that created serious worries about California being able to continue as she is. So, what does climate change have to do with it? Is it the breaking of the drought, which is caused by dead dinosaurs? Or was it the drought before it that was?
And there’s our little problem (or the problem for those who are shrieking). For those same outlets called out above, and many more, really did insist that the drought was a sign of climate change. If that’s true, then we cannot call last winter, when rains returned to their normal pattern, a result of the same thing which caused the absence of them, can we? That is, if the drought was climate change, then normal winter rains just aren’t climate change.
As I say, I’m persuaded that we have a general, although not imminently catastrophic, problem with emissions and climate. Just as I really have read the reports and know that a 50-cent tax on gas, (OK, maybe 75 cents), is what we need to do about it – and lower other taxes equally.
But these stories about Ventura going up in smoke are about good rains last winter and very little else. It’s just not climate change at fault here.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute.
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