Someone recently wrote to us, "Wondering if you can help me with this? I've gotten myself into a friendly debate with a family member on climate change and he sent me this infographic. His argument is that combustion engines are bad for the environment and causing things like fires to happen. What would be a good rebuttal to this?"Here's the infographic:So, how to respond?The number of problems in that graphic is amazing. Here are some quick points:Mark Twain said there are “lies, damned lies, … [Read more...]
Does Climate Change Cause More and Bigger Wildfires?
I've been looking into the subject of wildfires and their alleged connection with climate change. In mid-February I looked at Wikipedia's account of the “Camp Fire” that occurred in November 2018 in Paradise, California. Wikipedia, not known for its even-handedness when it comes to matters political, slips in the possibility of climate-change having played a role in that destructive and deadly fire. It identifies a broken power line owned by Pacific Gas and Electric as the igniter and … [Read more...]
Are Australia Bushfires Worsening from Human-Caused Climate Change?
Summary Points1) Global wildfire activity has decreased in recent decades, making any localized increase (or decrease) in wildfire activity difficult to attribute to ‘global climate change’.2) Like California, Australia is prone to bushfires every year during the dry season. Ample fuel and dry weather exists for devastating fires each year, even without excessive heat or drought, as illustrated by the record number of hectares burned (over 100 million) during 1974-75 when above-average … [Read more...]
Record Heat and Cold Expose Climate Alarmists’ Bias
Australia was literally on fire in December. Record heat made headlines in global media. So did the extreme rainfall in east Africa. You and everybody else on earth can guess what climate alarmists blamed for both: man-made global warming, a.k.a. climate change. But record cold in northern India at the same time didn’t make headlines in any major media in the United States or the United Kingdom. Why? Because it didn’t fit expectations.It’s a perfect example of climate alarmists’ obvious bias … [Read more...]
The Uninhabited Mind of David Wallace-Wells
David Wallace-Wells shook up a lot of people with a "horrifying 2017 essay in New York magazine about climate change. It was an attempt to paint a very real picture of our not-too-distant future, a future filled with famines, political chaos, economic collapse, fierce resource competition, and a sun that 'cooks us.'" Now he's got a book out that builds on that article, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming, which Vox describes as "a brutal read," "more terrifying" than the "terrifying … [Read more...]
Fire Facts Foil Climate Fraud
The 4th National Climate Assessment (NCA), released Friday, November 23, is a hodge-podge of cherry-picked data, outright lies, and scare-mongering at its worst. It predicts the premature deaths of tens of thousands from the effects of climate change, including deaths from starvation, mosquito-borne illnesses, extreme heat, flooding, and other natural disasters. The poster-child of this apocalyptic vision for the Earth was man-made warming-driven wildfire. Forests in flame were prominently … [Read more...]
Are Western Wildfires Driven by Global Warming—Manmade or Otherwise?
The news media have made the number and intensity of wildfires in western states this summer a household topic: as of August 14, there were hundreds of them, and of major ones, 17 were burning in Alaska, 11 in Arizona, 10 each in Oregon and Colorado, and 9 in California. The media and many environmentalists blame them on global warming. The numbers sound bad to people not studied in the field, but in actuality they're not unusual. In fact, the number of fires has been decreasing since the … [Read more...]
Bringing Much-Needed Reality to Extreme Weather Claims
For decades, headlines around the world have claimed that various extreme weather events---hurricanes, typhoons, floods, droughts, heat waves, wildfires, even cold snaps---are driven by global warming. Similar claims have persisted in the record-breaking cold afflicting North America this winter. Such claims become rationale for expensive policies to mitigate the warming by cutting CO2 emissions, achievable only by reducing fossil fuel use and substituting wind and solar energy … [Read more...]
