FIRST FEATURED IN WEBWIDE NEWS
Intro by Steve Cook
We are incessantly gaslighted by the media that repeats over and over alarming news about “all these ‘unprecedented’ storms/droughts/forest fires”.
Repetition is how advertising and propaganda work, especially if the endlessly repeated datum appears to come at us from all directions (ie several newspapers, the telly etc).
Coupled with lurid and disturbing pictures, they imprint or bludgeon ideas into the public mind by a sort of hypnosis.
A datum, seen “everywhere” almost at the level of subliminal marketing, becomes accepted, assumed to be true because it is “everywhere’, a process helped by a censorship that heavily filters out views or interpretations that might challenge the narrative.
Thus we assume that droughts, heatwaves or hurricanes are fiercer or more frequent than they used to be, when actually looking at the actual records shows they are not and that sometimes the reverse is true.
Similarly the Co2/greenhouse gas datum is accepted when historical evidence shows that rises in Co2 levels have often come AFTER rises in temperature, not before it as would be the case if rising Co2 was causing rising temperatures.
And of course, the relentlessly repeated datum that every change in the climate is due to rising man-made Co2 even though the climate was changing continually long before Man started burning fossil fuels and was often hotter than it is now.
And of course, there are forest wildfires in various places on the planet all lumped together and presented as “proof” that the planet is on fire when actual records show that their numbers are historically normal as the following article from the Daily Sceptic describes so well.
And just to take an example closer to home -my home in fact – it is worth mentioning the Ashdown Forest in England on he edge of which I live. I recall that decades ago, in the 1970s and 1980s if memory serves, Ashdown Forest fires happened most years and one could see the smoke from my town.
But the summers were hotter then and the forest drier and it has now been a long time since there was a major fire in the Ashdown Forest, so long that my kids who are now in their 30s probably have no recollection of them.
I can imagine if we should again have a hot, dry summer with a proper heatwave, the Ashdown Forest might burn again.
If it does, the gaslighting media and allied Merchants of Fear will milk the event for all it is worth and for those too young to remember earlier routine fires it will seem a terrifying ‘unprecedented’ calamity of a planet about to spontaneously combust.
After All the Media Hype, Wildfires Across Southern Europe Were Completely Normal in 2023
This is perhaps not surprising. Fire ‘weather’ is a potent tool in stoking up general climate anxiety and helps promote the need for a collectivist Net Zero political solution.
The Guardian used video footage of tourists moving away from one wildfire last year to claim “survival mode” could easily pass for a “TV climate crisis awareness raising campaign”. An Agence France-Presse report in the Guardian quoted EU spokesman Balazs Ujvari as stating that fires are getting more severe. “If you look at the figures every year in the past years, we are seeing trends which are not necessarily favourable.”
Let us look at some of the figures, starting first with the graph below compiled by the investigative climate writer Paul Homewood.
As noted, the five major countries of southern Europe show many years since 1980 when wildfires consumed more hectares of land. Last year was an average period, easily beaten by 2017 and dwarfed by 1985. In fact the graph above from EU data shows that wildfire acreage over these countries has actually declined over the last 43 years.
Economic damage can be considerable, although the trend on this front shows little overall change over the last two decades across the EU.
Like many natural events, wildfires cause lives to be lost. Using this tragic loss of life to whip up climate fear is deplorable, not least since many wildfires are deliberately or accidentally started by humans.
Greece had a bad wildfire season last year with the BBC reporting that 79 arrests had been made for arson. The BBC accepts that wildfires are common in Greece but “scientists say” there is a link between extreme weather events and climate change. Stefan Doerr of the Centre for Wildlife Research at Swansea University notes that arson “can more easily turn into fast-moving wildfires”. Arsonists, it seems, just love climate change.
Last year, the climate scientist Patrick Brown admitted that he had written a paper published in Nature that focused exclusively on how climate change had affected extreme wildfire behaviour and ignored other key factors.
In particular he downplayed the information that 80% of wildfires are lit by humans.
He laid out his whistle-blowing claims in an article titled: ‘I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published’. He knew not to try to quantify key aspects other than climate change because it would dilute the message journals like Nature want to tell, he observed, adding: “To put it bluntly, climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change.”
Wildfires are an easy propaganda win for climate alarmists. People die, property is destroyed and the published images are spectacular.
But fires are a vital part of nature, always have been. They help clear away the debris that accumulates naturally in forests and scrub land and provide a path for regenerative growth.
There is little evidence that natural trends are on the increase around the world, and none to suggest that humans play a part in natural ignition by burning hydrocarbons and releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In its sixth assessment report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) specifically ruled out human involvement in ‘fire weather’, both in the past and going forward to the turn of this century.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
Stop Press: Met Office update:
As regular readers will recall, the Met Office recently came a cropper with a senior meteorologist stating last month on the BBC that storms in the U.K. were becoming more intense due to climate change.
In reply to a subsequent freedom of information request from Paul Homewood, the Met Office admitted it had no evidence to back up the claim, but failed to correct the original statement.
In a further letter to Homewood, it now accepts that there is no evidence ‘yet’ for an increase in wind gust speeds, although these are “projected to increase with future climate change”.
Hardly a retraction since it still claims rainfall intensity, storm surges and wave heights are increasing with climate change. None of this can be proved – climate models are opinions, not evidence – while the IPCC also rules out human involvement in severe wind storms. It also rules out changes in river floods and heavy rain, along with coastal flooding and erosion.
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