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Is “global warming” to blame for the multiple wildfires that are right now raging across California, destroying homes, businesses, and hundreds of thousands of acres of native forest land? Absolutely, according to California Governor Jerry Brown, who recently blamed the intense heat coming from the blazes on “climate change.”
The latest reports indicate that there are currently some 20 active fires burning across the Golden State, some small, and some very large, most of which are barely contained. One of the larger ones, the Carr Fire, which has already burned more than 115,000 acres – and is now ranked as the sixth most destructive wildfire in California’s history – was apparently started by a non-criminal vehicle fire.
At the moment, the Carr Fire, which more than 4,100 firefighters are said to be battling, is among the largest, most intense, and most threatening wildfires currently ravaging the northern part of the state, with “steep terrain, erratic winds, and previously unburned fuels … contributing to spot fire potential.” And just to reiterate one more time, this fire was started by a car fire, which of course has nothing to do with global warming or climate change.
But this isn’t the opinion of Governor Brown, who during a recent press conference blamed human activity for making things warmer, which he says is a direct cause of fires. Even though most of what’s burning in these fires is trees and brush, Brown is convinced that human ingenuity resulting in climate change is what’s fueling these infernos.
“We’re fighting nature with the amount of material we’re putting in the environment, and that material traps heat, and the heat fosters fires, and the fires keep burning,” Brown is quoted as saying. “Since civilization emerged 10,000 years ago, we haven’t had this kind of heat condition, and it’s going to continue getting worse and that’s the way it is.”
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Brown is apparently unaware of the fact that fires are hot and tend to warm the air around them – and that they have nothing to do with his climate change conspiracy theory. But he sees his beliefs as fact, and warns that things are only going to get worse unless more steps are taken to “shift the weather back to where it historically was.”
“Some people don’t want to accept that, some just outright deny it,” Brown stated, referring to people who don’t necessarily buy his take on why fire is hot.
“I don’t say it with any great joy here – we’re in for a very rough ride. It’s going to get expensive. It’s going to get dangerous, and we have to apply all our creativity to make the best of what is going to be an increasingly bad situation, not just for California, but for people all over America and all over the world.”
So what’s the solution, in Brown’s view? To add more money to California’s already bloated budget specifically for dealing with global warming-fueled fires that he says are sure to happen in the future. This will presumably mean higher taxes for Californians, who will be told that their mere existence is causing these fires, hence why they need to pay up.
“So far, this fire activity is a small part of our very large budget, but it is growing and it will continue to grow as we adapt to the changing weather,” Brown argues.
Brown offered up a similarly bogus narrative late last year, blaming wildfires in Ventura County on man-made global warming while declaring such fires to be a “kind of new normal.”
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