The New York Times Is Clueless When It Comes to Climate and the #ParkFire
13 hours ago Anthony Watts 20 Comments
The Park fire Pyrocumulus cloud, seen from Highway 149 looking north, at 3:38PM on July 26, 2024. Photo by Anthony Watts.
The New York Times (NYT), in a July 30th story titled “How Did the Park Fire Get So Big, So Fast?” claims that “[h]eat has been breaking records all summer, and Dr. Williams said records will probably continue to fall over the next several years as the burning of fossil fuels continues to add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.”
This is false. The article itself provides no data or citations to support this claim but rather relies on opinions from so-called climate experts who have no hands-on connection to the fire whatsoever.
Having spent 35 years in Chico, CA, the Park fire is one of three recent wildfires with which I have personal hands-on and boots on the ground experience. The other two were the Camp Fire in 2018, and the Dixie fire in 2021. All these fires affected me personally and the people around me.
Yet somehow NYT and their bevy of so-called experts think they can divine the cause and conditions that drove these fires from their offices from afar. In each case, NYT has blamed climate change as either a driver or contributor to these three fires without so much as a shred of proof. In fact, NYT contradicts their own claims in their article in the table of the top ten fires in California by acreage burned:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/08/01/the-new-york-times-is-clueless-when-it-comes-to-climate-and-the-parkfire/
