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...and yet you're cherry picking information from the article, the main point being that global warming was a well known phenomena in the 1950's! I just don't

...and yet you're cherry picking information from the article, the main point being that global warming was a well known phenomena in the 1950's! I just don't get it - this is an existential threat, and people are still in denial.

cpncrunch 3y ago
I was actually going by the picture and the very first sentence: "A wildfire tore through Fort McMurray, Alberta, on Saturday, May 7, 2016...Earth’s weather, now, not in the future—and it’s full of fire". I read the article to see what it said about wildfires and climate change, as there has been a lot of invalid hyperbole about that very subject recently (including a recent Guardian opinion piece which incorrectly stated that Canada's wildfires have increased, when the Canadian Wildfire Database actually shows the opposite). Not unexpectedly, this article also misrepresents climate change as increasing wildfires. It's just very irritating all these terrible arguments that are doing so much to justify climate denialism even though they are attempting to do the opposite. Here is the Guardian article I'm referring to which first got my ire up about this subject: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/20/canada-wildfires-big-oil https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/20/canada... and here is the data: https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/ha/nfdb https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/ha/nfdb What the heck do we need to do to get climate change activists to take climate change science seriously?
ttonkytonk 3y ago
@cpncrunch - for some reason it's not letting me respond directly to your comment. The link you have provided seems to show a decrease in total fires but some increase in actual area burned. It's natural for media to exaggerate somewhat. There's been many reports of an increase of the wildfire season in California, though it's not necessarily all driven by global warming.
- cpncrunch 3y ago
  I think HN does that deliberately to slow down arguments. >The link you have provided seems to show a decrease in total fires but some increase in actual area burned. There seem to be two aspects to area burned: many years it is very low, and then every few years there is a very large burn. Those very large burns were bigger in the 80s than in the past 10 years. You could look at the average, but that probably isn't going to show anything useful (which is probably why they haven't put it on the graph). Both the Mercury News article and this Canadian Natural Resources document say that the main reason for the changes is due to human behaviour rather than climate: factors such as chopping down burned trees instead of leaving them, putting out every fire that is found, more people going into the wilderness, etc. If someone is arguing that climate change is causing drier areas which results in more wildfires or larger wildfires, it's a poor argument if the data doesn't actually show that there are more wildfires or larger "big burns" now than in the 80s (or pre-gold rush).
lotsoweiners 3y ago
Unfortunately it is associated with one half of the political spectrum and as such roughly half of people are going to deny it.

cpncrunch 3y ago

I was actually going by the picture and the very first sentence: "A wildfire tore through Fort McMurray, Alberta, on Saturday, May 7, 2016...Earth’s weather, now, not in the future—and it’s full of fire". I read the article to see what it said about wildfires and climate change, as there has been a lot of invalid hyperbole about that very subject recently (including a recent Guardian opinion piece which incorrectly stated that Canada's wildfires have increased, when the Canadian Wildfire Database actually shows the opposite). Not unexpectedly, this article also misrepresents climate change as increasing wildfires. It's just very irritating all these terrible arguments that are doing so much to justify climate denialism even though they are attempting to do the opposite. Here is the Guardian article I'm referring to which first got my ire up about this subject: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/20/canada-wildfires-big-oil https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/20/canada... and here is the data: https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/ha/nfdb https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/ha/nfdb What the heck do we need to do to get climate change activists to take climate change science seriously?

ttonkytonk 3y ago

@cpncrunch - for some reason it's not letting me respond directly to your comment. The link you have provided seems to show a decrease in total fires but some increase in actual area burned. It's natural for media to exaggerate somewhat. There's been many reports of an increase of the wildfire season in California, though it's not necessarily all driven by global warming.

cpncrunch 3y ago
I think HN does that deliberately to slow down arguments. >The link you have provided seems to show a decrease in total fires but some increase in actual area burned. There seem to be two aspects to area burned: many years it is very low, and then every few years there is a very large burn. Those very large burns were bigger in the 80s than in the past 10 years. You could look at the average, but that probably isn't going to show anything useful (which is probably why they haven't put it on the graph). Both the Mercury News article and this Canadian Natural Resources document say that the main reason for the changes is due to human behaviour rather than climate: factors such as chopping down burned trees instead of leaving them, putting out every fire that is found, more people going into the wilderness, etc. If someone is arguing that climate change is causing drier areas which results in more wildfires or larger wildfires, it's a poor argument if the data doesn't actually show that there are more wildfires or larger "big burns" now than in the 80s (or pre-gold rush).

lotsoweiners 3y ago

Unfortunately it is associated with one half of the political spectrum and as such roughly half of people are going to deny it.