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Using Fires To Sell Global Warming

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, October 31, 2007 4:20 PM PT

Climate Change: We don't know which is weirder ? Dennis Kucinich's belief in UFOs or the House holding hearings on Harry Reid's claim that global warming caused California's wildfires. The "scientific link" doesn't exist.

Related Topics: Global Warming

We thought we had heard the ultimate absurdity when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid politicized a tragedy the other day by claiming, "One of the reasons we had the fires in California is global warming."

Then came the announcement that the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming was holding a hearing today (Thursday) "examining the scientific link between a changing climate and the frequency and intensity of wildfires."

The committee, chaired by warming zealot Ed Markey, D-Mass., was formed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, it says, "to increase the visibility and priority given to America's oil dependence and global warming challenges."

More accurately, it was formed to rake the Bush administration over the coals, so to speak, for its reluctance to embrace Kyoto.

The media has done its part to fan the flames of controversy.

On Oct. 20, CBS' "60 Minutes" began with a segment called "The Age of Mega-Fires," a piece clearly intended to fuel the blame-global-warming argument.

CNN's Anderson Cooper plugged the series "Planet in Peril" by saying, "Fire, drought, global warming, climate change, deforestation, it is all connected."

He forgot arson, the cause of at least two of the major California fires. That's man-made warming.

As Steven Milloy, adjunct scholar at the Competitive Industry and founder of junkscience.com, points out, the history of California wildfires proves no link to warming-induced drought.

First, he notes, during the period of 1900-2005, during which global temperatures rose about 1 degree Fahrenheit, precipitation has actually increased in areas above 30 degrees north latitude, which includes California, according to the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

During that interval there have been moderate-to-severe drought conditions in Southern California during 34 of those years, or about one-third of the time. An analysis of those years, using data provided by the National Climatic Data Center, provides a very interesting pattern of drought.

Seven occurred from 1900 to 1940, the period when most of last century's warming occurred.

But 11 of those drought years occurred from 1941 to 1975, when temperatures were dropping so fast that major news magazines like Newsweek were actually warning of a new ice age.

From 1976 to 1990, when global temperatures rose back to their 1940 levels, there were 8 drought years.

Since then, there have been another seven years of moderate-to-severe drought. If there's a pattern there of warming-induced climate change, we fail to see it.

The Santa Ana winds that fanned the flames didn't come out of the exhaust pipe of anyone's SUV.

We would suggest that the extent of the tragedy has been enhanced by the anti-logging and anti-thinning agenda of the greenies ? an agenda that encourages overgrowth and prohibits sensible forest management, including the removal of dead trees as well as underbrush that is said to be the habitat of endangered species who ironically become crispy critters.

The same naturally warm and dry conditions in which these fires occur are the same conditions that bring people to Southern California to build their homes in fire-prone areas in the first place.

If, as some point out, the fires in California these days seem "so much worse than in the past" it's for that very reason: The Golden State's population has soared in the past decade or so by nearly 10 million. Hundreds of thousands of new homes have been built in the state's brush-filled mountains, canyons and arroyos.

But when Democrats suggest it is our inattention to allegedly man-induced global warming that is the culprit, they're only generating more hot air that we don't need.

I just love this part, here it is again for the stupid liberal who never learned a thing when he lived in a condo in Prineville

We would suggest that the extent of the tragedy has been enhanced by the anti-logging and anti-thinning agenda of the greenies ? an agenda that encourages overgrowth and prohibits sensible forest management, including the removal of dead trees as well as underbrush that is said to be the habitat of endangered species who ironically become crispy critters.