The Fires This Time

This article appeared in the American Spectator on October 29, 2007.

Blame California's mega-fires on global warming. Or at least that's what Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said last week in the Hill.

Global warming affords endless opportunities to test glib hypotheses by politicians who have no training whatsoever in fields of which they claim pontifical knowledge. And Reid's statement is easy to test.

By the end of each and every summer, Southern California is drier than the world's best martini. A couple weeks ago, I took a drive up San Gabriel Canyon, an arroyo typical of the mountains surrounding the Los Angeles basin. The steep hillsides were studded with crackling-dry vegetation, and it was obvious that the area was sitting on the precipice of a massive fire season.

California's big wildfires are, ironically, caused by excessive winter rains. Normally, the region that's been ablaze averages about a foot from December through March. Owing to the fact that just about every day after the rainy season is warm and sunny, it's only a matter of a month or two before the surface dries out to the point that there's not enough water to support additional plant growth. The more it rains in the winter, the more vegetation grows, and the more there is to burn in the summer, which is invariably hot and dry.


Some of the very wet years are caused by El Nino, a reversal of winds over the Pacific Ocean that has been going on every few years ever since there was a Pacific Ocean. People like Senator Reid (and Vice President Gore) will cite computer models predicting that El Ninos should become stronger or more frequent with global warming, but there are an awful lot of other models showing that they won't change or that they might even lessen in frequency. The Nobel Prize-winning United Nations Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change says "There is no consistent indication of discernible future changes in ENSO [an acronym for El Nino] amplitude and frequency."

When things get very wet, there's plenty more time for the soil to remain moist, producing a much longer growing season in the hills where suburbs and very expensive homes are proliferating. The problem is that these rooms-with-a-view are also houses-with-a-risk; i.e., they're in the path of wildfires. Rain adds fuel to the fire, by bulking up the vegetation mass.





Now that the paradise of the Los Angeles Basin is home to so many more people, whenever we have a very wet year (2005 being the last big one), it's only a matter of time before thousands of homes get torched.

But don't blame this on global warming. There's no trend whatsoever in the frequency of heavy-rainfall years that would promote wildfires. And our officials should especially avoid making untested statements on global warming to papers like the Hill, which other Senators and Congressmen accept as gospel.

Patrick J. Michaels
