A look at the most overused word in in the no-debate climate debate-unprecedented
Portland, Oregon is located where the Willamette River flows into the Columbia River which then flows to the Pacific Ocean. Portland is also at the head of the Willamette Valley, an agriculturally rich area running about half the length of Oregon from north to south. The valley is nestled between the Cascade Range to the east and the much smaller Coastal Range to the west. Because the Columbia River turns north when it reaches Portland before turning west again, it is much further to the coast from Portland if you follow the river than just traveling due west. As a kid, growing up in Portland, we took the shorter route to the coast, over the Coastal Range, the better beaches were there anyway.
Often times we took the trip with my grandparents, it is hard to think of it this way, but it is true, when I was young they were too. On our fairly frequent summer trips to the coast less than a two hour drive, we would have to pass through what is known as the Tillamook Burn. The Burn is on the Coastal Range and is exactly what its name implies, miles upon miles of burned forest, at least it was when I was a child, though it had begun to grow back. Now it is pretty much an historical landmark on the side of the road. Amazing how nature heals even what we see as her most ugly scars.
I always remember my grandparents talking about when the Burn occured, how Portland was darkened by the ash clouds covering the sun. What they described to us is much like the pictures I've seen of Portland this past week. It is believed that as loggers finished their days work a steel cable rubbed against dried bark and sparked and ignited the dry underbrush on fire. Here is a partial description of what happened as the 1933 fire progressed.
Fifty miles away in Portland, residents soon were gawking at the massive mushroom-shaped cloud that hung towering over the valley to the east, two miles high and dozens of miles wide.
Beneath that cloud, hurricane-strength winds howled, driven by the intense heat of hundreds of thousands of acres of burning old-growth firs. Whole burning limbs and treetops soared into the sky and were blown toward the sea, where they rained down on beachside communities and fishing boats.
In all around 270,00 acres burned in the 1933 fire. But that was not all of what is known as the Tillamook Burn. In 1939 another fire burned there again mostly burning the dry firewood from the "33" fire and then other thousands of acres of new forest, about 200,000 acres in all. Then in 1945 again another 190,000 acres burned. The Tillamook Burn earned its name.
Having studied "global warming" for many years, I know that the thirties were the hottest decade in American history, just look a list of state temperature records if you have any doubt. Oregon's record is 117 degF set in 1939. So it is not surprising they would have a tremendous forest fires back then, though the Burn is not Oregon's largest just its most famous. As I have been watching the news I noticed that the climate cultist were making a big deal about the fires out west and the "unprecedented" hurricanes this year. Of course they, as they always do, use these two sets of natural disasters to promote their garbage science. So I decided to see what 1933 was like for forest fires and hurricanes.
First hurricanes. We did not personalize tropical disturbances by naming them back then, but we kept records of them. Thank you Wiki Man.
The 1933 Atlantic hurricane season set a pre-satellite era seasonal record for most tropical storms formed, with 20, surpassing the record set in 1887. The distinction for most active Atlantic hurricane season now belongs to the 2005 season, with 28 storms. The season also produced the highest Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) on record in the Atlantic basin, with a total of 259.
Should that verbiage cause you some confusion, as it did me, 1933 holds the record for the more important ACE, which is used to determine the intensity of a hurricane season, not merely the numbers of storms. As wiki also goes on to point out, which climate cultist seldom do, human advancement and changes in record keeping can paint a distorted picture of the reality of "climate change" metrics. A smokescreen if you will.
Tropical cyclones that did not approach populated areas or shipping lanes, especially if they were relatively weak and of short duration, may have remained undetected. Because technologies such as satellite monitoring were not available until the 1960s, historical data on tropical cyclones from this period are often not reliable. Compensating for the lack of comprehensive observation, one hurricane researcher estimates the season [1933] could have produced 24 tropical cyclones
But what we do know about the 1933 hurricane season is this:
Total storms 20
Hurricanes 11
Major hurricanes (Cat. 3+) 6
Total fatalities 651
Total damage$86.6 million (1933 USD) (1.73 billion USD in 2020 dollars)
Two of those six major hurricanes were category 5 hurricanes, the only time back to back seasons had multiple category 5 seasons, 1932/1933. Although 2020, thus far, has been very active, it has not been that intense. As of midnight 9/15/2020 the ACT rating for the 2020 hurricane season stood at 64.6. Thus far there have only been 7 hurricanes and onlly one major hurricane. We shall see what the rest of the season brings us.
Now comes the hard part.
You will not find this graph from the USDA on any government web site today, it has been purged. The reason may actually be justified, who knows? Here is the reason given by NICF.
The National Interagency Coordination Center at NIFC compiles annual wildland fire statistics for federal and state agencies.This information is provided through Situation Reports, which have been in use for several decades. Prior to 1983, sources of these figures are not known, or cannot be confirmed, and were not derived from the current situation reporting process. As a result the figures prior to 1983 should not be compared to later data.
In short this new agency changed the way they kept the records so anything that came before they do not vouch for. Obviously the USDA Forest Service vouched for them since they were still using them in their literature at least until 2006. More importantly, the figures were not created out of whole cloth since they were reported at the time they happened. Ironically the NICF still use the figures on the above graph in their chart of acreage burnt going back to 1926. The graph and the Forest Service Graph and the NICF's chart show that in 1933 there were 43,180,00 acres of wild land burned in the United States. The most acres burned since the 1983 "change over" is 10,125,148 acres in 2015.
Even if you presume that a change in record keeping or a different classification system for recording fires overstates the past, common sense dictates that forest fires in the past would have been more prevalent and larger in scale, if for no other reason than there were more forests and far less resources to mitigate or contain them.
This does not even begin to tell the story of the Western United States forest fire situation and its history. One of the things I like about the climate change hysteria is that a great deal of money is being spent on science. In order to show that the world is going "up in flames" scientist must first determine a baseline to start. Since most climate change "science" is based on the idea that "in the future" things will get bad they must show that the past was different than their hypothetical future. A tremendous amount of time and money is spent on understanding the past. Unfortunately there are many researchers that will manipulate the past in order to skew it to their desired outcomes, the infamous hockey stick graph being the most well known though not the only example.
Fortunately most scientist are not out to convince and change the world, their quest is for grant money, and they use the ever popular climate change as a way to open the door to the vault. Some rather important and interesting studies are funded and undertaken by using climate change dollars. One that is relative to this discussion is "Long-term perspective on wildfires in the western USA"
This extensive study used not only records but proxies to investigate forest fires in the Western United States going back not just decades but centuries and even millinias. As you would expect they find that periods of drought and heat over these vast time periods are the main catalyst for forest fires. What you might not expect is this conclusion.
Widespread fires occur fairly regularly during the high fire period from 1600–1900 CE, but an increase in small fires is also evident from ca. 1850 through the early 1900s (most visible in central and northern records; Fig. S2). The most salient feature of the fire-scar data is the widespread, abrupt reduction in fires around 1900 CE.
As I said, common sense dictates that forest fires in the past would have been more prevalent and larger in scale, if for no other reason than there were more forests and far less resources to mitigate or contain them. This reasoning goes even deeper than that. There is a term, actually terms used in land and forest management that mean exactly what they seem to imply. The Forest Service explains them:
The natural role of fire has been disrupted in many regions of the western United States due to the influence of human activities, which have the potential to both exclude or promote fire, resulting in a “fire deficit” or “fire surplus”, respectively. Consequently, land managers need to better understand current departures from natural levels of fire activity, especially given the desire to maintain and restore resilient landscapes.
A fire deficit simply means that there has not been enough fires to keep dead trees and foliage from becoming a tinderbox that will eventually cause uncontrollable fires. There is an unnatural lack of fires to maintain a balance. One of the reasons that the Tillamook Burn was so explosive in it's intensity beyond the hot dry conditions at the time, it was the area along the Coastal Range that had seen the least amount of fire activity in the past century.
It can be seen that between 1850 and 1940 much of the coast range was burned but that the Tillamook fire stands out as the first major fire to affect Northern Tillamook County since European settlement.
Given all of this, what did the authors of "Long-term perspective on wildfires in the western USA" conclude from their in depth analysis of centuries of western fires?
Given the size of the current fire deficit and its potential to grow in the future, the unique perspectives provided by each data source will be necessary for projecting the response of fire in the western United States to both ongoing and future climate changes.
Putting aside the "ongoing and future climate changes" which was their sugar daddy, their conclusion is that there exists a fire deficit that will probably grow in the future. A fire deficit which exists at least in part due to the "widespread, abrupt reduction in fires around 1900 CE." This reduction in forest fires has helped create the conditions necessary for greater and more disruptive fires in the present and into the future. This is true regardless of any global warming.
What have we learned? We have learned that despite the hysterics over climate change, the hurricane season was at least as powerful in the 1933 as 2020, certainly far more powerful than we have experienced to date this year. We have also learned that the fires in the West are neither new or greater than in the past. Most of all we have learned that for all the bluster and fear mongering, global warming has not shown itself to be either unprecedented or unusual.
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