At least 40 people have died, and more than 3,500 homes and other buildings have been destroyed by the wildfires sweeping through Northern California. While the cause of the blazes which began October 8 remains unsettled, those desirous of more governmental control over the private economy are using the tragic fires to advance a globalist agenda.
They admit that wildfires have always been a problem in California, with natural causes having nothing to do with the Industrial Revolution and human activity. While Smokey the Bear has often said, “Only you can prevent wildfires,” the truth is that they are going to happen from time, caused by non-human activity, such as lightning strikes.
But the climate-change alarmists use wildfires and other natural phenomena, such as tropical storms, as examples of why strict controls need to be enforced, to lower the emissions of “greenhouse gases.”
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Daniel Swain’s recent remarks to Democracy Now! are illustrative. Allowing that California’s natural Mediterranean-type climate with its “long, dry summers,” make wildfires more likely, Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA, insisted that human-caused global warming is making the situation worse. “The changes in climate that we’re experiencing are largely due to the human emission of greenhouse gases. And we expect warming to continue for as long as we continue to emit greenhouse gases.”
Swain argued that this presents both a “challenge and an opportunity.” According to Swain, we can “choose to reduce and eventually eliminate our greenhouse gas emissions,” which “will avert much of the warming, much of the increased risk of extreme events like wildfires that otherwise would have occurred.”
The choices Swain is alluding to, of course, is increased governmental control over the private economy, and not just at the national level, but internationally. In other words, the offered solution to global climate change, by those who blame modern human activity (such as driving an automobile), include increased global controls over that human activity.
Writing in CFact recently, Bonner Cohen also blamed human activity, but not activities of human beings that are part of being free. He placed the blame on government. “The region is also dotted with huge national forests, which for decades were governed by disastrous fire-suppression policies. In forests, wildfires, usually caused by lightning, can be nature’s way of removing undergrowth before it has a chance to build up to dangerous levels. When these relatively small fires are suppressed, forests can become veritable tinder boxes.” Cohen and others have advocated for the removal of underbrush before it provides the kindling that causes smaller fires to become wildfires.
Despite some dead and diseased trees being removed from national forests, Cohen said “many of the lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service are still at risk of igniting a conflagration.”
Another governmental policy blamed by Cohen are “restrictive zoning laws in cities like San Francisco and San Jose.” Cohen argued that these elitist government policies “have put home prices out of reach for people of upper-middle, middle, and lower income” status. “Unable to afford homes in high-end urban areas, many people are forced to live in distant suburbs, which puts them closer to areas where fires are likely to break out,” Cohen added.
The Sentinel, in its October 17 edition, directly challenged the “global warming caused by human activity” thesis, noting that the “hottest summers in American history” occurred in 1934-36. “Ocean spots were to blame, not carbon dioxide,” it claimed. “This weather helped cause massive dust storms that travelled as far as New York, Boston and beyond.”
The mainstream media, which tends to accept the anthropogenic (human-caused) climate-change thesis without any questions, report every weather event that supposedly proves the thesis, while ignoring those that do not. As The Sentinel pointed out, “In 2007,” Kansas City reached June 5, “without a 90-degree day. For the next ten days, the media chose not to notice as record fell after record. On June 15, again without any notice, the high temperature topped out at 90 degrees, a new ‘late’ record by ten full days.”
Fred Singer, a distinguished astrophysicist, took a hard, scientific look at the evidence of climate-change in his book Hot Talk, Cold Science. In the book, Dr. Singer cited the inaccuracies in the climate data, noting the limitations of computer “models.” He also examined the effect of solar variability on climate, along with the effects of oceans currents.
Singer bluntly concludes that the global-warming alarmist scenarios have no scientific basis, and that the “solutions” offered (such as “carbon taxes”) would severely damage the global economy, reducing the standard of living in industrialized nations.
Clearly, many of those who believe in the theory of human-caused global warming are sincere. This is not surprising, considering the heavy-handed promotion of the theory by the media, the entertainment industry, and academia. But acceptance of the theory, along with the so-called solutions to mitigate global warming, would lead to more government control over our personal lives.
And that government control would not only be enforced by our state governments and the U.S. government, but also world government structures. This fits the agenda of the globalists who favor stronger world government, and reduced national sovereignty perfectly.
Wildfires, like those in California, are tragic enough, without the surrender of our freedom.
