Forest fires and climate change
Air quality was terrible on the west coast, this past month, as much of Oregon and California burned. The response, as usual, was tribal. Liberals blamed the fires on global warming. And conservatives blamed antifa arsonists.
Who is correct?
Turns out neither side is!
Okay, it’s easy to disprove the arson theory. There were a handful of arsonists arrested in Oregon and Washington. But most of the big Oregon fires started in August, smoldered for a month, and then started spreading rapidly in September.
I don’t think antifa is planning terror by lighting remote forest fires a month in advance, and then hoping that the weather changes. The group is usually a lot more predictable than that, protesting at the same courthouse, night after night.
The climate change link is harder to evaluate. Conservatives will regularly point to one snowstorm and say that this disproves global warming. That’s obviously wrong: weather varies, climate is the trend in weather. Liberals will sometimes point to a fire or a hurricane and say that this proves we have global warming. It’s the same mistake: one fire is the result of weather, not a…
