News/Commentary

Experts shut down eco-zealots blaming climate change for Hawaii fire: ‘Misleading’

August 12, 2023 | | Print Article

Leftists say climate change is to blame for the devastating wildfires in Hawaii, but the actual experts and scientists staunchly disagree.

“Blaming this on weather and climate is misleading. Hawaii’s fire problem is due to the vast areas of unmanaged, nonnative grasslands from decades of declining agriculture,” one such expert, University of Hawaii at Manoa professor Clay Trauernicht, said to Fox News this week.

“These savannas now cover about a million acres across the main Hawaiian Islands, mostly the legacy of land clearing for plantation agriculture and ranching in the late 1800s/early 1900s. The transformation to savanna makes the landscape way more sensitive to bad ‘fire weather’ — hot, dry, windy conditions. It also means we get huge buildups of fuels during rainy periods,” he added.

He further noted that the risk of additional wildfires in Hawaii could be reduced with “adequate support, planning, and resources for fuel reduction projects, agricultural land use, and restoration and reforestation around communities and the foot of our forests.”

Trauernicht tried to warn the Democrat state about potential fires in a “letter to the editor” written four years ago, but evidently nobody listened to him at the time.

“Maui is now firmly in the post-plantation era, and the West Maui fires are only the most recent example of what eventually happens when large, tropical grasslands go untended. But the fuels — all that grass — is the one thing that we can directly change to reduce fire risk,” he wrote in the letter.

“Fuel breaks can be expanded to slow fires and provide access for firefighters. Livestock are incredible tools to keep fire risk down. We can plant other things — active agricultural lands don’t burn (or they burn when we want them to) and restoring forest cover and riparian vegetation can limit the potential for fires to spread,” he added.

Trauernicht isn’t alone in his analysis. There’s also Peter Vitousek, a professor of Earth sciences at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

In an interview earlier in the week with USA Today, he said, “There is no doubt that fire-prone grasses have invaded drier Hawaiian ecosystems and brought larger, more intense fires.”

And then there’s the Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization, a non-profit that readily acknowledges that most of Hawaii’s wildfires are caused by either dry brush or human activity.

“Over 98% of wildfires are human caused. Human ignitions coupled with an increasing amount of nonnative, fire-prone grasses and shrubs and a warming, drying climate have greatly increased the wildfire problem,” the non-profit’s website reportedly states.

The next expert is Jim Steele, the former dean of the College of Science and Engineering at San Francisco State University.

In a Twitter/X post published Thursday, he slammed far-left scientist Bill McGuire for blaming the wildfires on climate change.

“Alarmists are the true deniers avoiding the well established science of wildfires. As Hawaii has abandoned many pineapple and sugar cane fields, invasive grasses took over. Fire experts classify grasses as one-hour fuels, meaning in less than half a day of dry weather those grasses become highly flammable. Seasonal changes like dry or wet winters or summers just have no effect on Hawaiis fires,” he wrote.

“But the media’s dishonest ignorant climatedope doomsdayers, now want you to believe climate change happens in just a few ours. Unbelievablly stupid! Once a fire reaches just one building in a crowded neighborhood it generates enough heat to burn the next building and then whole neighborhood,” he added.

Look:

Unfortunately, Democrats refuse to listen to the actual experts. And so in response to the wildfires in Hawaii, they’ve been screeching relentlessly about climate change, all while making mention of none of the facts outlined above.

Observe:

Vivek Saxena
Latest posts by Vivek Saxena (see all)

Comment

We have no tolerance for comments containing violence, racism, profanity, vulgarity, doxing, or discourteous behavior. If a comment is spam, instead of replying to it please click the ∨ icon below and to the right of that comment. Thank you for partnering with us to maintain fruitful conversation.

Latest Articles