Why of course, it must be climate change

It was the perfect ignition point for discussion on the devastating, and oddly titled, Camp Fire that torched the ironically named community of Paradise, Calif.

On Halloween, just days before the Nov. 8 start of the fire that killed scores and leveled much of the community of some 17,000 in the Sierra Nevada foothills, there came another in a long line of scary reports of pending doom from man-made climate change.

Published in the journal “Nature” and widely distributed to the always sycophantic media, the data was lapped up like a thirsty dog with a full water dish.

Refresh me, how many times in the last 30 years has Earth had just 10 years to mend its ways?

The study’s lead author was Laure Resplandy of Princeton University and co-authored by Ralph Keeling, a climate scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Both are considered masters in their climate craft.

But two weeks after the latest version of Pandora’s Box was opened, there came today’s version of, “Uh, Houston, we’ve had a problem,” words spoken during the troubled Apollo 13 space flight.

“Unfortunately, we made mistakes here,” Keeling said of calculations which when redone, offered less certainty than they previously thought in published conclusions.

And remember how that walk-back was so widely circulated across print and broadcast? Nope, neither do I. And another doom and gloom climate report appeared with Thanksgiving leftovers.

The inconvenient truth is not only are there always two sides to stories, but research that can be better verified — no, not guaranteed — in the heated wildfire cause debate.

Take drought for instance. While California has experienced recent dry periods, data from researchers at Earth-Science Reviews who use tree rings — not obviously problematic computer modeling —suggest a significantly wet pattern has existed across the West since 1500.

There are documented droughts of 10 or 20 years over the past 1,000 years. But they are pale to two combined megadroughts of nearly 400 years starting about 850 A.D.

State geography plays a role, too.

California is naturally prone to wildfires because of its Mediterranean-like climate featuring short, rainy winters and hot summers. This was quite evident in 2017 following a winter that brought 300-percent above normal snowpack, yet by Memorial Day weekend, parts of Northern California looked like Spokane in August.

Many with knowledge that took decades to develop like to look at other reasons for fires that have hit Sonoma, Malibu or Redding over the last two seasons.

Oregon State University Ph.D. Bob Zybach did his doctoral thesis on forest management practices. He looked back 500 years and found how forest management in the past half century plays into today’s fires.

“Absolutely, if fuels had been managed reasonably as had been done for 30 or 40 years by the Forest Service, there would have been a lot fewer fires, including the Paradise Fire,” Zybach said in a recent interview.

Removing wood mass and dried dead material on the ground, primarily that found on federal lands, kept underbrush and flash fuels under control, limiting crown fires, Zybach said.

Question the volatility of the seemingly green needles and foliage of a conifer? Have a Firewise assessment conducted on your property and see how the grade falls when a home is ringed with arborvitae.

WUI, government-speak for “wildland urban interface,” sounds like a cute little acronym, but essentially is a fabricated woodpile just waiting for a match.

“Those areas, people always lived there, but now it’s 300,000 or 3 million instead of 300 and they’re (living) in massive amounts of firewood, structures built of flammable materials and that’s what created the problem in Paradise and in Redding earlier,” Zybach said.

California is hardly alone.

Both Oregon and Washington have similar situations. Pick just about any road on forested lands — Turnbull Wildlife Refuge being the rare exception — where thick stands of trees are a recipe for disaster waiting for ignition and wind to drive it.

My house was a mile away from destruction in Spokane’s Upriver fire in July. A horribly managed forest is the tenuous buffer. And many Cheney residents were fearful where the Mullinex Road blaze might roam Oct. 2.

Outgoing California Gov. Jerry Brown has, on more than one occasion during the recent tragic months of the 2018 fire season, channeled his best Al Gore with insistence that the science surrounding climate change is settled and a major cause of disastrous fires in his state.

No Mr. Gore and Gov. Brown, it is far from settled and likely never will be in the ever-evolving realm of Mother Nature.

Paul Delaney can be reached at pdelaney@cheneyfreepress.com.