Experts throw cold
water on Dem claims that Hawaii wildfires caused by climate change
'Blaming this on weather and climate is misleading,' a top
environmental expert in Hawaii said
By Thomas
Catenacci | Fox News
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Maui wildfires devastate popular
tourist town of Lahaina
Fox News correspondent Dan Springer has the latest on the deadly Hawaii fires on
'America Reports.'
Environmental
experts are pushing back on claims that the devastating wildfires in Hawaii were
caused by global warming, instead pointing to poor state land management
practices.
Over the last
several days, wildfires have spread across western Maui, razing much of the
historic town of Lahaina and claiming the lives of more than three dozen people,
according to state officials. As first responders continue to battle the
devastating fires, some Democratic lawmakers have been quick to blame the event
on climate change and global warming.
"Heartbreaking fires in Hawaii! Scientists are clear that climate
chaos wreaking havoc on ecosystems everywhere is the new norm," Sen. Jeff
Merkley, D-Ore., said in a post on X. "We need to take action immediately or
else it will get even worse."
"The wildfires raging across Hawaii are a devastating view of our
planet as we fail to adequately address the climate crisis," Sen. Dick Durbin,
D-Ill., added in a post of his own. "I stand ready to support in any way to make
sure Hawaii has the resources to ensure the safety and wellbeing of impacted
communities."
And Rep. Ro
Khanna, D-Calif., who spearheaded a recent congressional investigation into
Big Oil, called on President Biden to declare a "climate emergency"
in response to the fires.
However, several experts pointed instead to years of poor forest
and brush management, in addition to declining agriculture, in Hawaii as the
primary cause for the devastating fires this week.
"Blaming this on weather and climate is misleading," said Clay
Trauernicht, a University of Hawaii at Manoa professor and environmental
management expert. "Hawai'i's fire problem is due to the vast areas of
unmanaged, nonnative grasslands from decades of declining agriculture."
"These savannas now cover about a million acres across the main
Hawaiian Islands, mostly the legacy of land clearing for plantation agriculture
and ranching in the late 1800s/early 1900s," he continued. "The transformation
to savanna makes the landscape way more sensitive to bad 'fire weather' — hot,
dry, windy conditions. It also means we get huge buildups of fuels during rainy
periods."
He added that wildfire risk in Hawaii could be mitigated with
"adequate support, planning, and resources for fuel reduction projects,
agricultural land use, and restoration and reforestation around communities and
the foot of our forests."
In 2019, Trauernicht submitted a letter to a local Maui
newspaper, arguing that the island was at serious risk of continued forest fires
without proper management. He stated that heavy rainfall causes more vegetation,
which is then not tended to and poses fire risk.
"Maui is now firmly in the post-plantation era, and the West Maui
fires are only the most recent example of what eventually happens when large,
tropical grasslands go untended," he wrote. "But the fuels — all that grass — is
the one thing that we can directly change to reduce fire risk."
Peter Vitousek, a professor of earth sciences at Stanford
University in Palo Alto, California, told USA Today in an interview that drier
grasses have spread across Maui.
"There is no doubt that fire-prone grasses have invaded drier
Hawaiian ecosystems and brought larger, more intense fires," Vitousek said.
According to the Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization, a
nonprofit that works with communities to mitigate fire risk, a larger percentage
of Hawaii burns on an annual basis than any other state. The group notes that
the vast majority of the state's fires are caused by dry brush or human
activity.
"Over 98% of wildfires are human caused," the group states on its
website. "Human ignitions coupled with an increasing amount of nonnative,
fire-prone grasses and shrubs and a warming, drying climate have greatly
increased the wildfire problem."
The hall of historic Waiola Church in Lahaina is pictured engulfed
in flames in Maui, Hawaii, on Tuesday. (Matthew Thayer/The Maui News via AP)
Another expert, Jim Steele, the former dean of the College of
Science and Engineering at San Francisco State University, said in a post on X
that Hawaii has abandoned pineapple and sugar cane fields, which has caused
invasive grasses that burn quickly to grow.
"Alarmists are the true deniers avoiding the well established
science of wildfires," he said.
The warnings
from experts come amid an ongoing push from federal
lawmakers to provide more resources to federal and state forest
services.
DEMOCRATS BLAMING CLIMATE CHANGE
FOR HURRICANE IAN AT ODDS WITH SCIENCE, EXPERTS SAY
In April, a
bipartisan coalition led by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and Natural
Resources Committee Chairman Bruce Westerman, R-Ark., introduced the Save Our
Sequoias Act to accelerate scientific forest management practices that
prioritize wildfire risk reduction in an effort to protect the giant sequoia
tree in California.
"Dealing with some of the climate factors that influence drought
and other contributions to wildfire is a long-term step," Jonathan Wood, the
vice president of law and policy of the Property and Environment Research Center
(PERC), told Fox News Digital in an interview.
"But if we want to reduce fires tomorrow, if we want to protect
communities this year, next year and over the next five years — the only way to
act that quickly is to manage our forests for the climate and other risks they
currently face," Wood added.
Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., has championed the
Save Our Sequoias Act to support proactive forest management strategies. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
According to
Wood, who has researched forest management practices in the nation for years,
the U.S. Forest Service has a backlog of about 80 million acres of land needing
restoration and forest management, while the Bureau of Land Management has
another 50 million acres that require management. That land, he said, is filled
with dead, dying and diseased trees, which provide fuel for fires.
Wood said that state and federal efforts should be focused on
cleaning dead brush, which can cause small ground fires to escalate into
high-intensity canopy fires.
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"We have tens of millions of acres of lands managed by the
federal government that are overstocked and are tinderboxes that are ready to
burn severely once that ignition happens," Nick Smith, a spokesperson for the
American Forest Resource Council, added in an interview with Fox News Digital.
"Just assigning it to climate change and attaching that to an agenda of doing nothing will certainly result in more severe wildfires and more carbon emissions," he continued. "Governments at all levels really need to be aggressive in implementing efforts to reduce fuels and overstocked forests, especially in the western United States."