Cuckoo Nutbeam Jerry Brown's link between climate change and wildfires is unsupported, fire experts say

[When Nuts Fall]

Proof liberal democrats are science ignorant again.

The ash of the Rocky fire was still hot when Gov. Jerry Brown
strode to a bank of television cameras beside a blackened ridge
and, flanked by firefighters, delivered a battle cry against
climate change.

The wilderness fire was "a real wake-up call" to reduce the
carbon pollution "that is in many respects driving all of this,"
he said.

"The fires are changing.... The way this fire performed, it's
not the way it usually has been. Going in lots of directions,
moving fast, even without hot winds."

"It's a new normal," he said in August. "California is burning."

Brown had political reasons for his declaration.

He had just challenged Republican presidential candidates to
state their agendas on global warming. He was embroiled in a
fight with the oil industry over legislation to slash gasoline
use in California. And he is seeking to make a mark on
international negotiations on climate change that culminate in
Paris in December.

But scientists who study climate change and fire behavior say
their work does not show a link between this year's wildfires
and global warming, or support Brown's assertion that fires are
now unpredictable and unprecedented. There is not enough
evidence, they say.

University of Colorado climate change specialist Roger Pielke
said Brown is engaging in "noble-cause corruption."

Pielke said it is easier to make a political case for change
using immediate and local threats, rather than those on a global
scale, especially given the subtleties of climate change
research, which features probabilities subject to wide margins
of error and contradiction by other findings.

"That is the nature of politics," Pielke said, "but sometimes
the science really has to matter."

Other experts say there is, in fact, a more immediate threat: a
landscape altered by a century of fire suppression, timber
cutting and development.

Public attention should be focused on understanding fire risk,
controlling development and making existing homes safer with
fire-rated roofs and ember-resistant vents, said Richard Halsey,
who founded the Chaparral Institute in San Diego.

Otherwise, he said, "the houses will keep burning down and
people will keep dying."

"I don't believe the climate change discussion is helpful,"
Halsey said.

Brown does not contend that climate change alone is making
California's fires worse, said Nancy Vogel, spokeswoman for the
governor's Natural Resources Agency. But she said addressing
fires in the same breath as global warming "broadens the
discussion and encourages us to think about the future."

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Brown's senior environmental advisor, Cliff Rechtschaffen, has
said the governor believes climate change is not regarded with
sufficient urgency and should be addressed "on a World War III
footing."

At a U.N.-sponsored panel on air pollution last month, Brown
again linked wildfires and global warming.

"In California, our forest fires are more frequent, [of] greater
magnitude and display completely unique characteristics," the
governor said. "We're already being affected by climate change."

But climate scientists' computer models show only that global
warming will bring consistently hotter weather in future
decades. Their predictions that warming will bring more forest
fires — mostly in the Rockies and at other higher elevations,
while fires may actually decrease in Southern California — also
are for future decades.

Even in a warmer world, they say, land management policies will
have the greatest effect on the prevalence and intensity of fire.

A study published in August by a Columbia University team led by
climatologist Park Williams concluded that global warming has
indeed shown itself in California, by increasing evaporation
that has aggravated the current drought. But Williams said his
research, the first to tease out the degree to which global
warming is affecting California weather, did not show climate
change to be a major cause of the drought.

Even climate ecologists who describe a strong tie between fire
frequency and weather say they cannot attribute that connection
to phenomena beyond normal, multi-decade variations seen
throughout California history.

"There is insufficient data," said U.S. Forest Service ecologist
Matt Jolly. His work shows that over the last 30 years,
California has had an average of 18 additional days per year
that are conducive to fire.

In addition, predictions of the impact that global warming will
have on future fires in California vary.

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A team of researchers at UC Irvine recently reported that in 25
years, climate change will increase the size of fires driven by
Santa Ana winds in Southern California. But their models varied
on how much increase to expect: from 12% to 140%.

Predictions from a UC Merced expert include a possible decrease
of such fires as dry conditions slow vegetation growth.

Today's forest fires are indeed larger than those of the past,
said National Park Service climate change scientist Patrick
Gonzalez. At a symposium sponsored by Brown's administration,
Gonzalez presented research attributing that trend to policies
of fighting the fires, which create thick underlayers of growth,
rather than allowing them to burn.

"We are living right now with a legacy of unnatural fire
suppression of approximately a century," Gonzalez told attendees.

The Rocky fire, which began in late July in Lake County, spread
quickly through mature chaparral in the Cache Creek Wilderness,
creating tall plumes that sucked in air from all directions.

California fire records analyzed by The Times show a dozen
similar fires from 2000 to 2014 that each moved quickly,
spreading at more than 1,000 acres an hour. A few were driven by
the notorious Santa Ana winds, but most were similar to the
Rocky fire and three other fast-moving Northern California fires
that followed it.

Fire behavior specialist Jeff Shelton, who provided daily
forecasts for the Rocky fire and, later, the Jerusalem fire,
said he could not attribute their behavior to climate change. He
cited the summer's dry weather, an abundance of fuel created by
a lack of previous fires, and steep slopes that allowed the
fires to spread quickly.

Ecologists said their behavior was typical of natural chaparral
fires, which burn infrequently but intensely.

A regional staff member in Brown's emergency operations office
called the fires "unprecedented," a description then used by the
administration for other conflagrations.

But those burns were classic plume-dominated convection fires,
fed largely by an abundance of combustible material, fire
scientists said.

"They are more and more common because we have more and more
fuels," said Joaquin Ramirez of Technosylva, an international
fire modeling company based in San Diego.

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A month after Brown's visit to Cowboy Camp, a team of federal
wildland managers and a chaparral researcher met at the spot and
climbed to the ridge where the Rocky fire had made a 20,000-acre
run in one afternoon and night.

Charred burls in the lower lands already had spurted bright
green growth. Water would soon spring from dry creek beds, like
a Biblical miracle, as the acquifer rose without vegetation to
suck it down.

Bureau of Land Management fire manager Jeff Tunnell surveyed the
mosaic of black stubble against untouched silvery green stands
of manzanita and chamise, oak and pine. A fire had been due.

"One hundred years of fire suppression is building fuel beds,"
Tunnell said. "Almost any year can produce a fire like this one."