Fighting the climate scare to defend life

Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor emeritus of atmospheric meteorology Dr Richard Lindzen's statement in the November 30, 2009 The Wall Street Journal still applies today:

The notion that complex 'catastrophes' are simply a matter of the response … to a single forcing, CO₂ (or solar forcing for that matter), represent a gigantic step backward in the science of climate. Many disasters associated with warming are simply normal occurrences whose existence is falsely claimed to be evidence of warming. And all these examples involve phenomena that are dependent on a confluence of many factors.

Ottawa politicians, former Mayor Watson in particular, really take the cake when it comes to sensationalism about flooding as well. In reality, we have not seen any increase in flooding in the City in the past decades. Indeed, there has been a decrease in extreme rainfall throughout Ontario. There are twice as many statistically significant decreasing trends as increasing ones in southern Ontario (per the version 2.3 Engineering Climate Datasets on the slides here). Moreover, the relationship between temperature and extreme rainfall has been disproved by research at MIT, Columbia and the University of Western Ontario.

There have always been floods in history, and nothing we see now is abnormal. Data from Environment Canada since the 1950s has shown that there has been no significant change in the frequency of flooding, and the UN IPCC has also admitted that there is no increase in climate-driven changes in the magnitude and frequencies of floods in the 20^th and 21^st centuries around the world.

Oh but what about wildfires that so concerned Ottawa politicians that,in the city's nonsensical Declaration of Climate Emergency, they blamed climate change for supposedly increasing intense wildfires. There is no convincing historical evidence to support this idea. It doesn't even make sense on a theoretical science basis.

In "Extreme wildfires caused by extreme stupidity, not global warming," published on February 1, 2021, by historical climatologist Dr. Tim Ball and myself, we explained:

Rising temperatures and increasing CO₂ both act to increase soil moisture and so reduce the potential of fires. When temperatures rise, evaporation increases, causing more precipitation which increases soil moisture and so lessens fire risk. As CO₂ rises, stomata, the pores in plant's leaves, are open for shorter lengths of time. Plants therefore lose less water to the air and so more of it stays in the soil, again reducing fire potential.

The natural cycle of forest fires creates what are called crown fires. They move through quickly, burning off dead debris but leaving most of the plants still alive. When governments decided to stop forest fires, they upset the natural dynamics completely. The bureaucracies, now populated by graduates of the biased environmental education system, willingly allowed the environmental extremists' demands to end the former sensible practice of cleaning the undergrowth. Activists complained that such forest tending was not 'natural,' when it was, in fact, a reasonable facsimile of 'nature.'

So, the debris built up, leaving the forest a tinder box all ready to ignite. Making matters worse, when a fire takes hold, it now often creates what is referred to as a base fire. These fires are very difficult to extinguish - the heat allows such fires to burn into the ground and, days after a fire is supposedly out, it will flare up again.

What this means, of course, is that intense wildfires are not caused by global warming or CO₂ rise, but by inept policy decisions by those responsible for managing our forests.

In the final part of this series, I will explain why sea level rise is yet another issue we need not concern ourselves about and why the rise in carbon dioxide emissions from our burning of fossil fuels may have saved life on Earth!