Links tagged “drought”

A question arising out of California’s recent wave of wind-fanned wildfires, is why are public officials mainly attributing the cause to downed electric transmission lines that comprise less than ten percent of all the causes of such fires?  This only further obscures why there are larger and more lethal wildfires.

The average percent of wildfires by cause in California from 2011 to 2015 is: undetermined (24%), miscellaneous (18%), debris burning (14%), equipment use (8%), downed power lines (8%), vehicle fires (7%), arson (6%), lightning (6%), campfires (3%), playing with fire (1%), smoking (1%), not reported (4%).

Downed electric lines are the fifth highest cause of wildfires at 8 percent.  As the Professional Firefighters Association of California has stated: “there is no single cause of California’s fire risk, and there is no single cure”.

Bjorn Lomborg: 'Sadly, accurate science doesn’t make for good television; predicting the end of times does.'

But even this report revealed: “Drought statistics over the entire contiguous US have declined,” the report finds, reminding us that “the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s remains the benchmark drought and extreme heat event.”

Report also found: On flooding, the assessment accepts the IPCC’s finding, which “did not attribute changes in flooding to anthropogenic [human] influence nor report detectable changes in flooding magnitude, duration or frequency.”

CNN’s headline, screaming that “climate change will shrink [US] economy” by 10 percent, a figure also repeated on The New York Times front page. Actually, the UN’s climate scenarios envision US GDP per capita will more than triple by the end of this century, so this 10 percent reduction would come from an economy 300 percent larger than it is today....So, even a 5 percent reduction in the size of the American economy only follows from picking unlikely worst-case scenarios.

The well-reported idea that warming will shrink the economy by 10 percent disregards huge economic growth, assumes twice the damages of the worst-case temperatures the report itself expects and even then only finds such high costs stemming almost exclusively from easily preventable heat deaths.

Conjecturing that the temperature-mortality relationship in the US would remain constant over a century is ludicrous.