The Patriot Post® · Don't Blame Climate Change for Massive Wildfires

According to Democrats and the mainstream media, the primary culprit for the massive wildfires currently consuming vast swaths of the Pacific Northwest is climate change. However, according to the scientific data accumulated over years of observation, the real reason has little to do with the changing climate and more to do with changes to forestry-management practices instigated by politicians unduly influenced by flawed environmentalist ideology.

Analysis of the historical records show that wildfires regularly burned millions of acres annually in the U.S. up until the late 1950s. Beginning in the 1930s, the U.S. Forest Service, along with state agencies, began efforts to better control and limit the amount of acreage burned annually. Ironically, these efforts to suppress and prevent fires has contributed to the massive fires America is seeing today. The reason is simple: By not being control burned, these forests have accumulated vast amounts of fuel (overgrowth) and have become literal tinderboxes primed for igniting, whether by lightning or, in many cases, arson.

A 2012 paper titled “Long-Term Perspectives on Wildfires in the Western USA” from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded, “There is now a ‘fire deficit’ in the western United States attributable to the combined effects of human activities, ecological [factors], and climate change. Large fires in the late 20th and 21st century fires have begun to address the fire deficit, but it is continuing to grow.”

A further indicator that climate change is not the cause of the Pacific Northwest’s massive wildfires is the fact that globally the number of wildfires has been steadily declining since 2003. Talk about an inconvenient truth refuting Joe Biden’s ridiculous and spurious labeling of President Donald Trump as a “climate arsonist.”

The solution to addressing California’s and other western states’ destructive and deadly wildfire problem is better forestry management. As Steven Hayward argues, “Forest management isn’t rocket science; native Americans actually practiced it. Active forest management is especially necessary if serious climate change is real, but instead of forest management, the climatistas think we can stop destructive forest fires by banning fracking and the internal combustion engine.”