In November, the United States issued its Fifth Assessment on Climate Change. You may have missed it. It’s a “congressionally approved interagency effort” issued every five years. I’m not exactly sure why we need a series of U.S.-based assessments on climate change when we have the periodic reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change….
Tag: wildfire
‘I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published’
This is an extraordinary and daring admission by a scientist who successfully published in the prominent journal Nature by narrowing his view of the truth. That is, he focused only on climate change when studying the causes of wildfires. And even then, he used techniques that showed the impact more dramatically than others would. Patrick…
Monday Links: $20 to Address Climate Change?
PERC: Slow Environmental Reviews Hold Back Wildfire Prevention
Parts of the West are engulfed by wildfire every year, mostly on U.S. Forest Service land. The Forest Service has two techniques to prevent wildfires: mechanical treatments (usually thinning the forest) and prescribed burns (setting controlled fires to clear brush and shrubs). But environmental reviews are causing drastic delays before the process can even start….
Forest Service Halts Prescribed Burns. More Fire Danger Will Follow
The U.S. Forest Service has halted prescribed burns (fires deliberately started to reduce trees and brush that could fuel dangerous wildfires) for 90 days—that is, for most of the summer. The reason is that a prescribed burn in April led to the Hermits Peak Fire in New Mexico—which, by joining with the Calf Canyon fire—became…
Bureaucratic Delays Will Hinder Biden’s New Forest Restoration Plan
The Biden administration has issued a ten-year plan to manage the national forests to prevent future wildfires. It will include “the use of prescribed fire and thinning to reduce hazardous fuels,” says PERC’s Shawn Regan, writing in City Journal. “It’s a step in the right direction,” says Regan. However, the billions of dollars proposed by the…