Scientists agree: CORRUPTION CHANGE is real. CORRUPTION CRISIS will doom us.
But it's OK; it's "noble-cause corruption"
LA TIMES FRONT MONDAY: Gov. Brown blamed 'climate change' for California's wildfires.
Scientists don't agree...
Scientists who study climate change and fire behavior say their work does not show a link between this year's wildfires and global warming, or support Brown's assertion that fires are now unpredictable and unprecedented.
Pielke said it is easier to make a political case for change using immediate and local threats, rather than those on a global scale, especially given the subtleties of
climate change research, which features probabilities subject to wide margins of error and contradiction by other findings.
"That is the nature of politics," Pielke said, "but sometimes the science really has to matter."
Even climate ecologists who describe a strong tie between fire frequency and weather say they cannot attribute that connection to phenomena beyond normal, multi-decade variations seen throughout California history.
Today's forest fires are indeed larger than those of the past, said National Park Service climate change scientist Patrick Gonzalez. At a symposium sponsored by Brown's administration, Gonzalez presented research attributing that trend to policies of fighting the fires, which create thick underlayers of growth, rather than allowing them to burn.
"We are living right now with
a legacy of unnatural fire suppression of approximately a century," Gonzalez told attendees.
"One hundred years of fire suppression is building fuel beds," Tunnell said. "Almost any year can produce a fire like this one."
Edited by Rogerdodger, 18 October 2015 - 10:20 PM.