August 30, 2023
We can all agree that the wildfire in Maui was terrible. What we can’t agree on is the cause: Leftists say “climate change.” People rooted in facts say it was a combination of natural disasters and gross mismanagement driven by green zealotry.
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The Maui wildfire, stoked by howling winds, was a raging inferno of 1,000-degree heat that raced along, creating a hellscape at lightning speed before devouring the tourist town of Lahaina. Due to heavy winds that morning, some local schools were closed, leaving children at home while their parents went to work. Currently, the death toll stands at 114, but over 1,000 people are still missing, an unknown number of whom are children.
The government’s appearance on the scene was not propitious. When FEMA teams finally arrived, they checked in at three five-star hotels, the Fairmont Kea Lani, Four Seasons, and the Grand Wailea Astoria, where the prices at all three resorts start at $1,000 per night. Compare that to the one-time payment of $700 that Biden offered to the victims. FEMA justified this by saying, “Due to the lack of available lodging, FEMA negotiated government rates, at the lowest possible cost, for staff temporarily staying in the available hotels.”
Fox News’s Jesse Watters refuted this, noting that when his team checked at a nearby Days Inn, rooms were available, including some with an ocean-front view for a nightly $250. He also said that Expedia had listings for even less.
Image: Maui fire. YouTube screen grab.
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How devastating was the carnage? Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich poignantly describes how children were burned to ashes in their homes:
I saw one report that firefighters are having a very hard time psychologically going from house to house because the scenes of these little children, the scenes families gathered in the bathtub and in the shower trying to find one last place where there was water.
According to a recent report, residents fleeing the inferno in their cars encountered a gridlock caused by “Hawaiian Electric trucks that were replacing telephone poles along the road to Highway 30.” Tragically some were incinerated in their cars. One resident explained that a police car deliberately blocked an escape route.
Looking at the disaster, Democrats immediately cried “climate change.” Appearing on Face The Nation, Hawaii’s governor Josh Green wasted no time dealing the climate change card from the bottom of the deck, declaring, “Well, let’s be real world. Climate change is here. We are in the midst of it with a hotter planet and fiercer storms. The consequence of global warming and storm change is changing things.” When asked, “Did climate change amplify the cost of human error?” he answered, “Yes, it did.”
Other politicians echoed this theme. Washington’s governor Jay Inslee announced, “This is not your grandmother’s climate change. This is a new beast.” Illinois’s Senator Dick Durbin tweeted that “The wildfires raging across Hawaii are a devastating view of our planet as we fail to adequately address the climate crisis.” Oregon’s Senator Jeff Merkley had his own tweet: “Heartbreaking fires in Hawaii! Scientists are clear that climate chaos wreaking havoc on ecosystems everywhere is the new norm. And California’s Rep. Ro Khanna tweeted that “Again, it’s time for POTUS to declare a climate emergency.” Each of them knows that, if the government completely controls carbon emissions, the government completely controls everything.
The problem for the climate alarmists is that the data show that there were factors of much greater significance than “climate change.”
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First, fire hydrants reportedly ran dry while Lahaina was engulfed in flames, apparently due to a five-hour gap between a request to divert water from streams to the Maui Fire Department, with the gap resulting because of concern about adverse effects for a local farmer.
Second, winds normal to the island may have fanned the flames. The Washington Post, of course, blamed climate change. It described the winds, but it did so in an article entitled “Climate Change Came for Maui. The rest of us are next.” However, Jim Steele, writing at WattsUpWithThat, sees it differently, attributing the winds to local topography:
Being the furthest Hawaiian island to the north, Maui is affected by stronger northern trade winds that intensify as the normal high-pressure system strengthens each summer. Maui’s topography further intensifies those winds through the mountain valleys. Strong downslope wind events reaching 80 to 100 mph every 8-12 years have “demolished buildings, overturned large power transmission line towers, and uprooted trees.” Once or twice a year strong but more moderate winds occur. During the fire, 30 to 40 mph winds with gusts up yo 67 mph fanned the flames. These winds got a special name, the Lahaina Winds. While strong winds exacerbated the fire, they primarily were local winds resulting from local land features which have nothing to do with climate change.
Clifford Mass a professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington, agreed with Steele that the powerful winds were confined to a relatively small area, with local windows “likely destroy[ing] power lines, creating a spark that ignited the grass… And climate change had nothing to do with this.”
Powerlines fell over from 80 mph wind gusts before the devastating fire raged through the historic town of Lahaina, Maui. pic.twitter.com/slzspLvz1P
— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) August 13, 2023
Winds from Hurricane Dora (also blamed on climate change) were irrelevant. As Cliff Mass stated, “It wasn’t Hurricane Dora, a relatively small tropical storm that passed 700 miles to the south of Hawaii.” Dr. Philippe Papin, from the National Hurricane Center, expressed a similar opinion:
Plenty of media talking #Hurricane #Dora influence on #MauiFires, so worth a deep dive 🧵 quantifying overall TC impact by removing vortex. 🌀
Result ➡️ Dora played a *very* minor role, slightly enhancing low-level flow over Maui at fire initiation time. pic.twitter.com/r9ErnfKOr6
— Philippe Papin (@pppapin) August 10, 2023
Of course, you’d never know that “climate change” winds were irrelevant if you listened to podcasts like Democracy Now! featuring the likes of Michael Mann. The whole interview was premised on the thesis that climate change drove hurricanes that, in turn, drove the fire. “Climate change is also linked to stronger hurricanes.”
In fact, there is no connection between alleged anthropogenic climate change and strong hurricanes, an assertion based on flawed data.
In 2005 Dr. Judith Curry, while Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, was one of the authors of an article in Science, a peer-reviewed, purporting to show that “global warming” caused more frequent and powerful cyclones. After publication, Curry learned that the data used in the article was inaccurate. She eventually acknowledged that the study’s conclusion was wrong.
Third, Hawaii is not experiencing a major drought. NOAA does show that Hawaii has had a drought problem. However, it’s not caused by “climate change.” Instead, it’s just a normal cyclical phenomenon. Moreover, in May, NOAA announced that the drought had been over as of mid-February 2023 and, by May, “Maui County [rainfall] totals mostly 90 to 120% of average.
Fourth, per an expert from the University of Hawaii, the region where the fire occurred had highly flammable invasive grasses. The state has known about these invasive grasses—which cover about 25% of the state—since at least 2018. A Phys.org article explained that “invasive grass species that have spread massively over the archipelago for decades, serving as the perfect fuel.” Indeed, says the article, this is a problem across the Western U.S.
Over in the mainland United States, “the deserts of the West and the conifer forests, and then the shrub lands in the coastal zone, invasive grasses are here to stay, they’re now part of the ecosystem,” said [Carla] D’Antonio [a professor of ecology at the University of California, Santa Barbara]
[snip]
Most of the major fires of the Mojave and Great Basin have been fueled by invasive grasses…
In other words, poor land management immensely contributed to the Maui fire’s intensity and duration.
If you’re looking for blame, there’s plenty to go around, including the fact that Hawaiian Electric was aware of the highly dangerous tinderbox conditions:
Zero carbon extremism diverted the island’s main electrical producer, Hawaiian Electric, from insulating wires, clearing areas around vulnerable transmission sites and taking other precautions to prevent wildfires it knew were likely to occur.
Hawaiian Electric repeatedly asked for funds, only to be turned down just as often.
And so the piffle piddles on.
“Professing to be wise, they became fools.”
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