10-8-25 - 9am - Wild Fires and Climate Change

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Joke's on you, Michael. You can't ban me. I've got
sovereign immunity.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
See what I did there, I threw out a legal.

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Term and now voila, you can't stop me.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Yeah, you do have sovereign Well, you have sovereign immunity
for your official duties. Beyond that, you do not have
sovereign immunity, mister military jag officer, things, emails, everything, Put
an email yesterday? What time this email come in? He
came in at eight o five yesterday morning from Excel Energy.

(00:34):
Subject it's fire prevention week, isn't Excel Energy the one
that just a few weeks ago paid hundreds of millions
of dollars in claims for Uh yeah, but they still
say they didn't do it. Oh that's right, never mind.
But what they paid up, we didn't do it, but
we're gonna pay was it three hundred million, six hundred
million whatever? The figure was more money than you or

(00:56):
I have put together exactly. Well, until we get our bonuses,
then it'll be Christas is coming up. Yeah, it'll be close.
That King super skift card. Wait a minute, that was
a decade ago. A decade ago, October five through eleven,
is Fire Prevention Week, And they tell me that fire
preparedness and safety is a responsibility shared by everyone, Yeah,

(01:17):
including you, And we're committed to helping you stay safe, informed,
and prepared. And we thought this would be a good
time to point out fire Prevention Week since we just
paid out hundreds of millions of dollars for starting a wildfire.
They partnered with the Red Cross. Boy, you talk about
doing stupid things start a fire, and then you partner

(01:39):
with the Red Cross. Holy cow, don't you get me
started on the Red Cross. If you listen to me
for any length of time, you know how I feel
about them. They right. We formed a strategic partnership with
the American Red Cross to enhance emergency preparedness and response
across Colorado. Working together, we'll educate Colorado communities on fire
safety and wildfire hairedness. Learn more about how you and

(02:02):
all Coloradings can take advantage of this partnership to help
protect your family and your home home fire safety. Of course,
there's a link there, but I ain't going to click it.
And then there are a couple of sub texts. Preparing
for wildfires. You know, know your wildfire risk level? Learn
more about what they're doing to prevent wildfires. Yeo, upgrading
the grid, fixing your power lines. And then it breaks

(02:26):
down into things you know people will surely you got
this too. Well. I got me to thinking, what about wildfires?
What's the truth about it? So as we approach the well,
I guess we really are kind of in full wildfire
season is starting to kind of wind down across much

(02:48):
of North America, though, as history shows, devastating fires can
strike even in the winter. Just thinking about State California
Palisades fire, think about, well, see the Paradise fire wasn't
in the I think it was in the fall. But
it's a seasonal lull, and the seasonal lull that we're

(03:10):
entering into is kind of a good time to reflect
on the narrative surrounding wildfires, especially amid a noticeable shift
in focus from their frequency and severity to now we
want to focus on their costs, the costs of wildfires. Now,
you'll notice that one thing that I don't have in

(03:31):
my notes as we go through it is what about
the cost of mitigation? For example, how about cleaning up
the forests, how about getting rid of all the dead wood?
Now at the end, disclosed location. We're going through a
program right now. It's a federally funded program that is

(03:54):
what they should be doing. It's called the Firewise program.
And the Firewise program is where the Feds come in,
they hire contractors, and the contractors come in and they
there's a designated area where, for example, where we had
a wildfire, what four or five years ago, maybe longer now,
but we had a wildfire that almost destroyed it came

(04:15):
very close to destroying the undisclosed location. But I felt
fairly comfortable because we've got a protected area around the
undisclosed location. And I do things that a lot of
people don't do because I don't want people looking and go, oh, look,
the former FEMA director had all his his entire wood
pile piled up against his house. And so we keep

(04:38):
a brush clear area around the undisclosed location. That's what
we need to be doing everywhere. But now they're just
focusing on the economic costs. They're shifting a little bit
away from frequency and severity, not entirely, but a little bit.
For example, a recent New York Times headline costly and

(05:01):
deadly wildfires really are on the rise. New research fines
now that kind of highlights the pivot. They're costly and
they're deadly. Well by less, don't forget they're also on
the rise. That story is claiming cats catastrophic wildfires have

(05:22):
surged more than four times fourfold from nineteen eighty to
twenty twenty three because of climate driven fire weather. It's
the first time now I've heard of fire season. You've
got dry seasons, you've got fire fuels, wildland fire. I've

(05:45):
never heard the fire weather phrase. Believe it to the
New York Times to add to you know, to our
vernacular new phrase. The headlinees I said, says costly and
deadly wildfires really are on the rise. New research finds.
The subhead is the past decade in particular has seen

(06:05):
an uptick in devastating blazes linked to climate change, according
to the study. It cites a new paper that argues
that disastrous wildfire spiked from twenty fifteen through twenty twenty three,
with forty three percent of the two hundred most damaging

(06:28):
events occurring in the last decade alone, and that that
is tied causally to intensifying climate extremes. It's in Nature
Communications and the article is titled a Fire Deficit persists
across the verse North American forces despite recent increases in

(06:51):
the area burned. This was published back on Well It
was received in July. It was peer reviewed and then
accepted on January fourth teenth, published on February ten. This
emphasis on costs as opposed to severity and everything else
mirrors the tactics used in the discussion about billion dollar disasters,

(07:16):
where increased damages are spotlighted, because the metrics like burn area,
are intensity don't exactly line up with the alarmist predictions
that are coming out of the Church of the Climate activists.
The IPCC has long projected in reports up to number
AR six that climate change would amplify wildfire frequency and severity.

(07:43):
But guess what happens When you do an observational look
at the data, you get an entirely different story. Globally,
burned area has plummeted over recent decades, not over recent years,
over recent decades, so that contradicts the claims of a
fire fueled apocalypse. It's about to come upon us because

(08:05):
for years now we've been told the climate change was
already making fires more frequent, more severe, and that that
wasn't occurring just in the United states, it was occurring worldwide,
but when you look at the global satellite record, it
shows a huge decline men maybe big, big, huge, I
don't care pick either word. In the area burned since

(08:28):
the early two thousands, even in grassland and savannah areas,
while forests and crop lands they stayed relatively flat and low.
And when you go to our World and data, there
is a grass area burned by wildfires by land cover
and type over the world. And you look at shrub

(08:50):
lands and grasslands. This is going back to two thousand
and two. A couple of spikes in the say, twenty
eleven period, but the trend line is from two hundred
and fifty million heck acres down to slightly one hundred
and fifty savannahs. It's a trend line downward, but it's

(09:11):
not as dramatic as it is for shrub lands and grasslands.
Interesting when you look at, for US, the number of
acres that have been burned area burned by wildfires by
land by cover type, our World and data from two
thousand and two to twenty twenty two, it is always

(09:36):
below fifty million. It never spikes upwards. It doesn't really
change at all, does it vary a little bit year
by year. Of course, naturally you'd expect some variation. It's
not going to be a flat line, but there's no
If it's a trend line, the trend line is flat lined.
The trend line is not upward, it's not downward. It's

(09:58):
just flat. And the same as true for crop lands
less than fifty million. So the narrative shifts. You gotta
shift the narrative with the data. If frequency and severity
aren't going to cooperate globally, then let's focus on the dollars.
That is, indeed, the same trick used in the billion
dollar disaster narrative that we hear all the time. Track

(10:21):
exposure and price inflation and call it climate change. What
do the observations actually show. Here's some awkward facts that
those who believe that, oh my gosh, we're all going
to burn to death, you're gonna have to grapple with this.

(10:42):
A quiet United States back in let do twenty twenty
three a very quiet US in terms of wildfire, even
as Canada, spite the burned area in the United States
was far below the ten year average, but Canada had
a record year. Now, what can you extrapolate from that.

(11:06):
I think that's evidence that fuel ignition and management dominate.
It's not a carbon dioxide signal that conveniently respects the
forty ninth parallel. Oh, carbon CO two. Oh, we're approaching
the forty ninth parallel. We're crossing the border. No, we
don't have our visa, we don't have our passport. Let's

(11:28):
stay above and let's just burn Canada. Let's go, let's
don't go into the US. And that's how absurd these
numbers are. Second point I make is force management and
fuel age. When you look at radio carbon work on
the KMP complex, it shows fuels that are feeding the

(11:49):
big California fires often average forty years old. That's decades
of accumulation of fuel, the very fuel that's needed for
those fires to spread. There's a I forget whether it's
Hulu or Netflix. Matthew mcconne, he's in it, and it's

(12:10):
a really good depiction of the Paradise Fire in California.
I'd encourage you to go watch it. I don't do
movie reviews, but I didn't encourage you to watch it,
primarily because as I was watching this, having experienced those
kinds of wildfires myself. For example, the Cedar fire in
again in California, but down near San Diego area, and

(12:34):
some in Montana. I remember watching those fires burn and
being with the smoke jumpers and actually being scared to
death because of how fast they move, how hot. It
was really frightening. So I'm watching this movie it's called
Lost Bus, Lost Bus, and I'm watching and I'm thinking,
how the hell it can't all be CGI, And if

(12:55):
it is all CGI, it's amazingly really good because the
fire look and at least although you don't feel it,
having experienced you feel it. And so I'm thinking to myself,
this really looks real and feels real. So while the
movie's playing, of course, I get on the laptop and
start digging around. And what they did is they filmed

(13:16):
the movie in Riodoso, but for the fire scenes, they
found an abandoned like warehouse yard or something in Santa
Fe and they brought in propane tanks and then they
like a Christmas tree lot. They would then surround the
propane tanks with these trees they're on stands, and then

(13:39):
they would light things up and then they'd use fans
and they would blow the burning fuel from tree to tree,
and of course then it would jump, and then they
would take that those actual that filming and then superimpose
that with CGI into the film so that you could
see the bus and the kids on the bus moving
and through the fire. It was an amazing movie in

(14:01):
that regard. But go back to forest management, because this
is really with the problem in California. When you make
an observation, you find that you have fuel that has
been ignored for forty years, four decades, four decades of
accumulation of fuel. No suppression, not a new physics of
CO two, but just the accumulation of fuel, because oh,

(14:26):
we just want everything to be natural. Well, those days
are gone. You can't just let the forest now. I
suppose in remote areas of Canada you can. But in
urban areas like California, even when you live in a
rural area like Paradise, no, you can't just allow them

(14:47):
to just go natural. You actually need to engage in
forest management. Then there's a whole issue of policy implantations.
Chili's Worse Fire maps were Chili's Worse fires map onto
highly flammable eucalyptus pine plantations and land juice change. So

(15:08):
that's the cause, not greenhouse gases. Then you got the
lockdown logic. Provinces in Canada used twenty twenty five fires
to justify sweeping access bands. Remember that it was up
in the Nova Scotia. I think it was Nova Scotia
where they just literally shut down any movement whatsoever. You

(15:30):
couldnot even go hike. You could even even if it
was a paved road through a national forest, you couldn't
even drive through there. So it was just a lockdown.
So Canada so far this year using lockdowns sounds familiar,
doesn't it, even though their national data shows big year

(15:54):
to year swings and no steady Coeal two driven March.
So the hulk on set to CO two being the
driver of climate change and causing these fires. When you
look at the actual observation, it's not true. And all
of that lines up with the historical record in the
North American forest. Modern burn rates are generally lower and

(16:16):
less variable than they were in the seventeen hundred to
nineteen hundreds baseline. Now there are regional differences that track
with weather patterns and with management activities, not a single
global drivers. As the people in the Church of the
Climate activists want you to believe that it's climate change. No,
the baseline, the modern burn rates are lower and less

(16:43):
variable than the baselines that we have from the seventeen
hundred to nineteen hundreds. When what did we do then? Nothing?
Did we fight force fires to some degree, yes, but
basically in the wild West they burn. It's not climbed.
So why is the media selling bills costs and not

(17:07):
akers birds? Why are they doing that?

Speaker 1 (17:14):
Corn and fair face?

Speaker 2 (17:15):
Morning ding dong. Yeah, I agree with the other guy.

Speaker 1 (17:19):
Goobers are us and the Antifa people that you so
ungraciously called a goober are actually dung piles.

Speaker 2 (17:36):
Have a good day. I stand duly correct. It's not
gonna happen to game. Excuse me, back to wildfires. So
the headlines are screaming all this urgency. As I said
the New York Times, costly and dundy wildfires really are
on the rise. The UK Guardian wildfires are getting deadly

(17:57):
or and costing more. Experts warn their becoming unstoppable. It's
the inferno coming to get you, CNN. Of course, then
n's got to get in out on it. How a
warming climate is setting the stage for fast spreading, destructive wildfires.
So the climate scientists another phrase, I got a problem

(18:17):
with climate scientists. Amplify this. Michael Mann, the professor from
University of Pennsylvania that bought me on x because he
didn't want to debate climate change. Michael Mann claims that
climate change is increasing the frequency in the severity of
North American fires. He said in the email that climate

(18:37):
change is the primary reason for the increasingly widespread, damaging,
and deadly North American wildfires reported by Yahoo News. Yet we've, interestingly,
we've got three well I would consider to be pivotal
studies between twenty twenty two and twenty twenty five that
directly counter those claims, showing wildfire activity remains within the

(19:01):
historical variability and challenges the IPCC's medium to high confidence
assertions in their reports that anthropogenic warming is increasing burn
area and increasing burn intensity, in particular in regions like
North American forests. It's always us. Why is it always us?

(19:21):
They never report like, you know, wildfires in China or
wildfires in Russian In you know, Russia is a heavily
forested country. What about them? Nobody everite bitches about them?
So start with covering and diverging burn rates in North
America forests from the Little Ice Age to the presence.

(19:42):
This is the International Journal of Wildland Fire, using tree
Cohort records from sixteen different sites that span the period
from seventeen hundred to nineteen ninety. You've benchmarked that against
nineteen eighty to twenty twenty days. It reveals declining burn

(20:03):
rates in the early to mid nineteen hundreds, primarily due
to suppression, but with modern rates that are lower and
less variable. Eastern sites show convergence to low rates. Northwestern

(20:26):
sites diverge slightly upward, but still within historical bounds. All
of that directly undercuts the IPC's emphasis on climate driven increases,
attributing trends more to land use changes. So think about that.
Then fast forward to this year again, Nature Communications quote

(20:50):
a fire deficit persists across diverse North American forests despite
recent increases in the area, burn leverages less than eighteen
hundred fire scar sites. So despite uptakes since the nineteen eighties,
contemporary fires nineteen eighty four to twenty twenty two burned

(21:13):
only a certain percentage of the expected historical rates, which
are obviously pre eighteen eighty pre nineteen hundred, you know
what it is, twenty three percent. We're twenty three percent
of what the burned area is compared to the historical
data twenty three percent. Now, obviously we're getting better at

(21:35):
fighting fires, but we're actually getting worse in terms of
forest management. So when you do a comparison of the
distributions of fire occurrences in the pre eighteen eighties, the
pre nineteen hundred period, and the contemporary according to these
studies nineteen eighty four to twenty twenty two, for all

(21:56):
North America Tree Ring Fire Scar Network sites, that's where
they actually go study the rings and the scar the
burn scars. The site analysis is amazing. When you start
back to the beginning when the numbers are high, you
get into twenty fifteen, will in twenty twenty only nineteen

(22:21):
percent of sites burned in sixteen eighty five had any
burn in twenty twenty two you get to twenty one,
twenty twenty one, twenty one percent of sites burned compared
to seventeen twenty nine. Gets even less than as you
go into twenty twenty five. Record years like twenty twenty

(22:44):
affected only six percent of the sites, far below the
peak of twenty nine percent of the sites from seventeen
forty eight non fire years are now more common, pointing
to suppressions legacy, not CO two dominance. This persists across
every force type and that contradicts every projection of the

(23:05):
IPC of escalating severity from warming. Now complementing this, you
can go to a the Canadian Journal of Force Research
quote contextualizing recent increases in the Canadian wildfire activity decadal
burning rates. Decadal burn rates still within historical variability of

(23:27):
the past two centuries, and they go on to reconstruct
the period eighteen hundred to twenty twenty three burn rates
across five different zones. So while twenty twenty three's burn
was the highest in nineteen seventy two, you look out
over a wider time span between twenty fourteen and twenty

(23:47):
twenty three, the decades stayed within the variability in all
the four zones from the eighteen hundreds. It exceeds it
slightly in only one western area. In Layman's terms, what
does that mean? This frames twenty twenty three as exceptional,
but not unprecedented, driven by factors like fuel loads rather

(24:11):
than climate. So whether we're talking about wildfires, floods, hurricanes.
We're gonna talk about hurricanes closure. We get to the
end of the hurricane season, you suddenly begin to realize
we really are being sold a line of bull crap.
All of these studies counter the climate linked escalation papers

(24:34):
that are out there about cost focused alarm and they
do so by providing a multi century context of all
these wildfires. Disasters may cost more because of what the
disasters are exposed to, all of the building, all of
the urbanization, the population growth, the widespread construction of infrastructure.

(24:59):
But even with all of that, the activity is not
surging beyond the norms that we have going back to
the seventeen hundreds. Globally, the emergency data data shows no
wildfire up up trend amid other disasters either, whether it's drought,

(25:22):
extreme temperature, flood, storm, wildfires, none of them particularly. Let's
just take the time frame since we started really hearing
about the panic of climate change the year two thousand.
I know you could go back to nineteen seventy three,
nineteen seventies, but two thousand when it really became alarmist

(25:43):
and became a religion. You look at whether it's wildfire, storms, flood,
extreme temperatures, drought. All of those are all within the norms.
So if it's all within the norms, you've got to
make a shift. And so what do they do. They
decided to make a shift. And the shift goes from

(26:03):
the number of incidents to the cost of each incident.
And we know that the cost of any particular incident
may be higher depending of course, on where it occurs.
If it occurs up in the Indian Peace Wilderness, that
cost is not going to be necessarily higher than one
that occurs, say, where the Marshall fire occurred. Because when

(26:24):
the Marshall fire occurred, what happened. Entire town wiped out, Paradise,
entire town wiped out, palisades, entire towns wiped out. So yeah, oh, look, guys,
if we focus on the cost because of fires in
urban areas and then somehow just sneakly link that to

(26:45):
climate change, we can keep the fear going when indeed
the fear is completely unjustified.

Speaker 1 (26:53):
Michael, I'm sick of hearing at these government employees and
the air traffic cont coils are working without pay.

Speaker 2 (26:59):
Did they get paid last Friday? Is this Friday their payday?

Speaker 1 (27:02):
Has anybody missed a paycheck?

Speaker 2 (27:04):
Yet No, and I don't hold me to this, but
I think it's this Friday that they need to open
up so that they can process the checks to be
paid next week, the fifteenth. I think the fifteenth. I
think that's my that's my I think that's what the

(27:27):
deal is. That's why they're pushing harder and harder, because no,
they've not gone without a paycheck yet, and which is
the point that Dragon made several days ago that he
and I have been working without a paycheck since we
got our deposit back on October first, and won't get
another one until next week. So and then there is

(27:51):
a statute that says that they will be reimbursed. Omb
has come out and said, yeah, we're not sure we're
going to follow that or not. So they're putting the
pressure on the Democrats big time. Back in two thousand,
talking about wildfires, so back in seven, the IPC said

(28:12):
or warned that the fire season would lengthen and the
fire risk would increase, and they used the Mediterranean as
a hotspot, but for North America, all of Mexico, Canada,
and the United States. They went further, citing a model
that a model that projected a somewhere between seventy four

(28:35):
and one hundred and eighteen percent increase in the burned
area in Canada by the year twenty one hundred because
of warming summers. Well, then that was an O seven.
Then in twenty fourteen they decided, oh, maybe we need
to update that, and they said wildfire activity had had
increased in the western US and in Canada, including longer

(28:58):
fire season and more area burned. But importantly, the technical
summary from the update in twenty fourteen to seven years
after seven framed the climate change contribution as being quote
of only medium or minor confidence relative to land use

(29:20):
in fire management. In other words, they're saying, Okay, we
saw some increase, but now we're not sure what we
can attribute that to. Oh well, I thought you were dead.
Said that it was climate change. So those reports primed
people who followed this stuff to expect steady worsening everywhere.

(29:45):
But the global satellite record since the early two thousand show,
as I said earlier, declining areas burned, especially in grasslands
and savannahs, while forcing crop land that burn has stayed
almost flatlined. Losses have risen as more people and higher
value homes move into the wildland urban interface. That's where

(30:07):
the houses in the infrastructure meet the flammable vegetation. There
was a landmark synthesis found that about fifteen percent of
the area burned in the West since twenty twenty five
years ago was inside the wildland urban interface. So of
course the costs are going to go up. The more

(30:28):
you build homes going up into Genesee, the more you
build homes going up into the front range, and you
do have a wildfire. Huh you build a million dollar
home where you used to have a one hundred thousand
dollars cabin. Yeah, the costs are now higher. How stupid
do they think we are. I'll tell you how stupid

(30:50):
they think we are. Wildfire is not a climate story.
It's a fuel story. It's an ignition story, it's a
wind and weather windows story, and it's an exposure story.
Stack up the observations and the pattering is is pretty boring.
In fact, it's pretty clear and boring. The global area
burned is downward. The context keeps recent spikes within the

(31:16):
natural variability going back to the seventeen hundreds. The places
that explode are the places that have heavy fuel, meaning
lousy forest management, bad sighting, building your house in a
highly flammable area, and preventable ignitions, not cleaning stuff up.
Greenhouse gases are not the master switch here. Forest management is.

(31:42):
So if you want fewer disasters, we need cleanar fores, floors,
safer utilities, smarter planting in the wildland urban interface. Blaming
climate delays the fixes that would actually solve the problem.
If you think that the dollar amount is a problem,
I do think the dollar man is a problem. You
don't think my insurance costs have gone up because of

(32:04):
where the indisplosed. Location is located. Absolutely, which is why
I work to convince the insurance coming to year after year.
Look what I've done to make it safer. We're still
racking up my premiums.