Wildfires, also commonly called forest fires or bushfires, are unplanned and uncontrolled fires burning in a vegetated landscape, such as a forest or grasslands. Many wildfires are sparked by human activity, such as campfires, or natural causes, like lightning. Dry conditions and prolonged droughts, which are becoming more frequent with climate change, exacerbate the risks of wildfires. Droughts, high winds, and other extreme weather are also making wildfires more common and more powerful, with larger blazes that burn for longer and expand across more land.
From 1998 to 2017, over 2,400 human deaths were attributed to both wildfires and volcanoes. Even when people can evacuate an affected area, they may lose their homes or businesses to the fires. Wildfires can also kill wildlife in the habitats that catch fire. Further, wildfires feed back into a loop, worsening climate change by releasing more carbon dioxide and fine particulate matter into the air.
…
Climate change brings increasing temperatures and drier conditions that can fuel wildfires around the world. Researchers expect significant increases in wildfire risks in the U.S., South America, central Asia, southern Europe, southern Africa and Australia from 2070 to 2100. [Don’t we already have that?]
Even in the UK, typically considered a colder locale, experts are telling citizens to expect more wildfires in the near future as extreme heatwaves grip the nation.
The expected increase in wildfires will bring with it more emissions and more forest loss, according to a recent study. As fire seasons become longer and more severe, forest loss due to wildfires is steadily increasing, with the highest losses occurring in boreal forests, which span Canada, China, Finland, Japan, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the U.S.
Wildfires are worsening in many countries globally, including the U.S., and are expected to become more of an issue in places they weren’t previously, like in the UK. Australia is particularly vulnerable to increasing blazes, as are regions of boreal forests.
As a part of nature, wildfires do play an essential part in promoting biodiversity, but only when they occur at a natural rate. Human activity and climate change are spurring more intense and more frequent fires that contribute more emissions, feeding into a loop that worsens climate change.
Air pollutants from wildfires worsen air quality, putting the health of wildlife and humans at risk and costing countries billions of dollars per year to contain the blazes and pay for damages. Wildfires can also kill off vulnerable wildlife, as is the case for endangered koalas in Australia that recently lost tens of thousands from the already low population, and injure and/or displace thousands more animals.
Ultimately, the goal is not to end wildfires. They are an essential part of many ecosystems, but the fact that they are getting bigger and are happening more frequently does more harm than good. Thankfully, it’s not too late to minimize the number of wildfires.
We can reduce the number of human-made wildfires by staying aware of ongoing weather conditions. When conditions are dry, hot, and windy, avoid any activities that could create a spark or spread smoke and flames. Even driving your car or mowing the lawn can start a fire, so be mindful during high fire risk conditions.
Human-caused or not, wildfires can be destructive. If you live in an area prone to fires, make sure you have a safety plan in place, with supplies ready to go if you need to evacuate or are left without power for long periods of time.
Wildfires are another part of our world, and they are only expected to worsen as the world grows hotter. While we can mitigate personal risks, working collectively with governments and corporations to slow climate change is the best way to minimize wildfire risks worldwide.
Charles David Keeling with Keeling Curve graphs. Credit: Keeling Papers, Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego.
Documents shed light on the earliest-known instance of climate science funded by the fossil fuel industry, adding to growing understanding of Big Oil’s knowledge of climate change.
In 1955 in the wilds of Big Sur, a young Caltech researcher named Charles David Keeling gathered carbon dioxide samples among Northern California’s towering redwoods. Crawling out of his sleeping bag several times a night on research trips conducted over the course of 18 months, from January 1955 to June 1956, Keeling measured background levels of carbon dioxide across the western United States — at Big Sur, but also at desert and high mountain stations, in forests and grassland, above the city of Los Angeles, and over the waters of the Pacific Ocean.
Keeling’s findings would lead him to conduct a separate series of experiments from the top of the Hawaiian volcano Mauna Loa resulting in the famous Keeling Curve — a visual depiction of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) caused by the burning of fossil fuels. His work underpins our understanding of manmade climate change.
…
By December 1954, the Air Pollution Foundation had approved an allocation of $13,814 (approximately $158,000 in today’s money) to fund Keeling’s earliest CO2 investigations.
These never-before-seen documents from the Caltech Archives and the U.S. National Archives, along with material from the Charles David Keeling papers at the University of California, San Diego, and local Los Angeles newspapers from the 1950s, establish the Air Pollution Foundation’s sponsorship of Keeling’s research at Caltech as the earliest-known instance of climate science funded by the fossil fuel industry. It’s possible it was also the first time that the oil industry was directly informed about CO2-induced climate change — five years before physicist Edward Tellerwarned the API of the disruptive consequences of burning fossil fuels.
Fossil Fuel Fingerprints
Carbon atoms contain a combination of the isotopes carbon-12 (C12), carbon-13 (C13), and carbon-14 (C14). Carbon atoms from fossil fuels, however, contain relatively little C13 and almost no C14, which is radioactive and decays over time.
In the 1940s and early 1950s, a carbon isotope scientific revolution was underway in the United States. Scientists had learned that they could measure the different ratios of carbon isotopes in materials to accurately determine the age of ancient objects: carbon dating. By analyzing the isotopic fingerprint of carbon atoms in tree rings, scientists could also identify whether the carbon dioxide absorbed by trees through photosynthesis had been produced naturally or as a result of burning fossil fuels. And, by measuring the isotopic ratios in tree rings of various ages, researchers could also estimate how far CO2 concentrations had risen since the Industrial Revolution as a result of burning fossil fuels.
In a proposal sent to the Air Pollution Foundation in November 1954, Keeling’s research director Epstein wrote, “It is clear that several factors contribute to the variations in the isotopic composition of carbon in trees.” Among these factors, Epstein explained, were the various ecological conditions under which the tree grew, including the isotopic composition of the carbon in the atmosphere. “Since 1840, the carbon-isotope ratio (C12/C13) has increased in the trees so far investigated,” he continued — an increase which could be explained by a change in the carbon-isotope ratio in atmospheric carbon dioxide “resulting from the burning of the C12-enriched coal and petroleum.”
Samuel Epstein’s Proposal to the Southern California Air Pollution Foundation for the Study of Carbon Isotopes in the Atmosphere, 1954. Read the entire document on DocumentCloud.
Epstein’s research proposal for the Air Pollution Foundation left no doubt about the potential significance of this research. Approximately sixty years before the Paris Agreement, he described the “concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere” as a matter “of well recognized importance to our civilization” and explained that the possible consequences of“a changing concentration of the CO2 in the atmosphere with reference to climate” may “ultimately prove of considerable significance to civilization.”
Samuel Epstein’s Proposal to the Southern California Air Pollution Foundation for the Study of Carbon Isotopes in the Atmosphere, 1954. Read the entire document in DocumentCloud.
Confident in the accuracy of his measurements, Keeling communicated his findings to an employee of the U.S. Weather Bureau and, in the summer of 1956, its director of meteorological research, Harry Wexler, invited him to Washington, D.C., to present his data. Impressed, Wexler suggested that the young researcher continue his investigations by measuring CO2 at the newly built observatory on the Hawaiian volcano Mauna Loa. Keeling secured federal sponsorship for this work and measured atmospheric CO2 on Mauna Loa, observing a rising trend of CO2 increasing year on year from approximately 313 ppm in 1957 to 320 ppm in 1967. Caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels, the depiction of this trend would come to be known as the Keeling Curve — a key piece of evidence that climate change is human caused.
“Climate Crisis” only identifies the symptoms of oil and gas dependence. As time runs out, we need a term that focuses on what — and who — is to blame.
This article by Capital & Main is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.
There’s always a lag between a rupture of the status quo and settling on a word for it. The planet is heating at a life-threatening pace. And yet the two words we use to describe this rupture — “climate” and “change” — are beginning to seem too stiff and one-dimensional for conveying the violence to life-sustaining ecosystems that threaten the world as we have known it.
As delegates from 196 countries attempt, for the 28th time, to reach a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gases, it is time for a new language. The violence of the atmospheric shifts, their deeply uneven impacts and the implications of mass extinctions that are expected at current emission levels, add up to much more than “climate change.” The 28th United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP28) in the United Arab Emirates is being held in a region much of which could, according to current climate modeling, be uninhabitable by mid-century. It is time to more sharply focus the attention on those responsible for the violence of the changes underway.
Linguistic theory holds that words enable us to imagine a thing; it’s the words that come first. First there was the “greenhouse effect” — a phenomenon identified as early as 1856 by a largely unheralded woman scientist, Eunice Foote, who reported at the time that glass jars filled with air laced with carbon dioxide heated up much quicker than air without it. More than a century later, at a 1988 congressional hearing, James Hansen, then director of NASA’s Institute for Space Studies, would testify about the links between rising temperatures on Earth and rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere, and point the finger at those responsible: humans. The term “global warming” stuck. Over the 170 years since Foote’s discovery, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has leapt from 290 parts per million to more than 400 ppm today.
By the early 21st century, the effects of all that extra CO2 began to be widely felt. Scientists came to recognize that “warming” sets off a cascade of changes — from shifts in rainfall patterns to volatile swings between rain and drought, and heat and cold, as well as major disruptions to the flow of ocean currents. “Climate change” seemed to encompass more possibilities for derangements of the global ecosystem. And that term is rapidly being outrun by the speed of the changes.
“Climate emergency” was chosen as the Oxford English Dictionary’s “Word of the Year’’ in 2019. That was two years after the Guardianled the world’s newspapers in adopting the term “climate crisis,” to be used interchangeably with “emergency.” The Guardian was far ahead of the curve in evoking the urgency of reporting on the scale of disruptions triggered by greenhouse gases. That tonal change drove home the point that this was not merely a phenomenon to be described, but a tectonic shift demanding ongoing reporting. Nothing, however, can stay ahead of the curve for long; soon enough the curve curves. It’s time for journalists, and everyone else, to consider some additional words and subordinate clauses that evoke the violence of the changes in the present, and identify those accountable for the upending of the status quo now underway in full throttle.
We are living in the climate warp. Yet it is admittedly difficult to clarify in a word or a phrase the vast scope of impacts, which range from the epic to the highly specific. Climate-induced drought was one of the triggers to the Syrian civil war and also fuels the current battle between California and its neighbors over access to the Colorado River. It is helping drive the decimation of farmer livelihoods that is leading to the crush of new immigrants on America’s and Europe’s borders. It contributed to the record-breaking heat that caused the untimely death of a Taylor Swift fan in Rio de Janeiro. Such conflicts and record-breakers are happening hourly somewhere in the world.
“Climate change” describes only the result of fossil fuel-based greenhouse gases. A term like “fossil fueled-destruction” would name the cause as well as the effect.
There are two tools now available to journalists to more clearly show who can be held accountable for the devastating impacts of the changing climate. Major advances in the attribution sciences provide ever-more sensitive understanding of how the overheated atmosphere is disrupting conditions here on Earth. And, critically, ever more precise research into the history of greenhouse gas emissions establishes who can be held accountable.
During this last season of record-breaking summer and fall temperatures, one meteorologist suggested naming the heat waves after those responsible, as in, the “Amoco heatwave,” or the “Exxon hurricane” or the “Chevron drought.” While droughts have been in California’s backbeat for as long as there are historical records, Chevron’s global emissions of some 725 million tons of greenhouse gases including CO2 in 2022 directly contribute to their increasing breadth and duration, as they do to increasing water scarcity pressures in other parts of the world. (The company’s “offsets” of those emissions were found recently to be “mostly junk.”)
We know who is responsible for the overwhelming share of greenhouse gas emissions, and thus for the massive chaos being wrought. They are not hidden behind tax shelters or front companies. They are polluting in plain sight. A new language might incorporate that knowledge: At least one of the 90 companies responsible for practically all greenhouse gas emissions since 1850 is operating a refinery near you, or distributing its greenhouse gas emitting products at a gas station, seaport or airport in the neighborhood.
Cognitive Dissonance Ahead
We consumers also bear some responsibility; we’ve been driving around in those gas-powered cars since James Hansen delivered the news 25 years ago. But we’ve also been driving through a fog of disinformation. The fossil fuel industry hid for decades what it knew about the impacts of its products. Those “deceptions,” California alleges in a historic lawsuit against the top five oil companies in the state, “caused a delayed societal response to global warming. And their misconduct has resulted in tremendous costs to people, property, and natural resources, which continue to unfold each day.”
A recent study of the four largest U.S. and European oil companies (ExxonMobil and Chevron, BP and Shell) in the science journal PLOS One found a widening gap between what they say they are doing in response to the climate crisis and what they continue to do to cause it. The study concludes with a classic of scientific understatement: “[T]he magnitude of investments and actions does not match the discourse.” In the climate lexicon, it is hard to beat the term “greenwashing,” which is no doubt on abundant display in Dubai. But that study and countless others like it are a warning shot for journalists and the public to cast a wary eye on fossil fuel companies’ claim that they are working towards the “energy transition” away from the old dinosaur bones they’ve been mining that are polluting the world.
While COP28 in Dubai is awash in fossil fuel lobbyists, it has also established the world’s first “loss and damage” fund, and will likely be coming up with some actual money to assist the 90% of the world’s population that did not produce the greenhouse gas emissions but are suffering their consequences. A new word may also soon enter the popular lexicon, if it’s not there already: “incremental.” Which may not be revolutionary, but also has real impacts. Every incremental reduction in greenhouse gases, or incremental increase in funding, could mean the difference between a coastal community being inundated or not, of another year saved from a 10th of a degree Celsius increase, of another year spent on a sub-Saharan grassland before it turns to desert. Such increments are the new climate currency.
And for those of us in the fortunate climes, it means more fall seasons that feel like spring, more 65 Fahrenheit winters that should no longer be termed “unseasonably warm.” The writer Stevie Chedid calls it “warning weather.” A disquieting warning in the humid warming air.
Members of This Is Rigged covered the Sainsbury’s branch in Glasgow’s Buchanan Street with red paintPhoto: This is Rigged / Twitter
CLIMATE and social justice activists in Scotland have highlighted their opposition to food poverty by staging a series of stunts.
Members of This Is Rigged covered the Sainsbury’s branch in Glasgow’s Buchanan Street with red paint today as they demanded an end to “profiteering” by supermarkets.
The day before, the group entered Edinburgh Castle and smashed the glass case housing the Stone of Destiny, which had recently been returned to Scotland following the coronation of Charles Windsor.
Near the end of a year of high-profile interventions pressing for decisive action on climate change and a fair net-zero transition for workers, the group’s latest stunts are focused on the cost-of-greed crisis, which they argue is indivisible from the climate crisis.
The group warned that it would escalate actions in support of its demands that the Scottish government provide “food hubs” in every community and that supermarkets reverse their 24 per cent increase in baby food prices over the last two years.
‘Climate change is the idiot socialist get-out-of-jail-free card,’ Peterson recently tweeted. Image: Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC.
Fringe climate crisis deniers who claim that the earth is “cooling” and greenhouse emissions are good for “biological productivity” are getting exposed to millions more people than they normally would on YouTube thanks to conservative influencer Jordan Peterson.
That’s according to viewership data newly reviewed by DeSmog, which reveals a massive visibility boost for public figures who’ve been active in the climate denial movement for years but whose ideas — such as the claim that plants are growing much better due to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — are now rarely taken seriously by most legacy media outlets.
They include climate crisis deniers like Judith Curry, Steven Koonin, Richard Lindzen, Alex Epstein and Bjorn Lomborg. Despite having either a modest YouTube presence or none at all, these figures have collectively garnered nearly five million views after being interviewed on Peterson’s channel, which has 7.31 million subscribers. The New York Times, by comparison, has 4.33 million YouTube subscribers.
This is especially worrying to climate scientists and disinformation experts because Peterson for years has been actively courting alienated males in their 20s and younger. Traditionally, people who are “doubtful” or “dismissive” of climate change have tended to skew older. Peterson is now planting doubt via his podcast and social media posts about the severity and urgency of global warming in the minds of younger generations.
“‘Climate change,’” he tweeted in June, is “the idiot socialist get-out-of-jail-free card.”
And he is now in the process of putting real political power behind the climate crisis denial movement. In late October and early November, a new group Peterson founded called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) will hold in London, England, its first ever meetings. It has on its advisory board Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who during GOP debates in August said that “the climate change agenda is a hoax.”
ARC advisor Ramaswamy: ‘the climate change agenda is a hoax.’ Image: Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC.
Advisors to the group include Lomborg, a Danish political scientist who earlier this year argued on Peterson’s podcast that “climate change is a real problem, but it’s not this catastrophic end of the world.” Lomborg didn’t respond to questions from DeSmog. Other advisors are Texas Republican congressmember Dan Crenshaw; Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee; former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott; and dozens of conservative policymakers, financiers, activists and journalists from the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia.
The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship is being supported by founders and leaders of the Legatum Group, a Dubai-based investment firm behind The Legatum Institute, a pro-Brexit think tank in London with close ties to the U.K. Conservative Party. The Legatum Group is a leading investor in the rightwing British television network GB News. Read DeSmog’s in-depth report on ARC’s U.K. links here.
Experts argue this makes Peterson a key organizer at the global level for efforts to oppose and delay action on climate change. “I would say that Jordan Peterson has become a central cog in the denial machine,” Michael Mann, director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, told DeSmog.
“It’s concerning that he’s poisoning the minds of so many influenceable people with his pseudo-intellectual and pseudoscientific drivel, drivel that is being weaponized in the right-wing assault on science and reason,” Mann added, referring to Peterson’s frequent downplaying of climate risks, including the conservative influencer’s insistence that rising levels of carbon dioxide are good for the planet.
Spreading Denial, Making Money
Peterson’s influence depends to a significant degree on his gigantic YouTube following, which is larger than that of the liberal-leaning news network MSNBC. It also surpasses the following of The Daily Wire, a digital conservative outlet co-founded by Ben Shapiro that has a partnership with Peterson, which last year claimed a yearly revenue of $100 million.
Google, which owns YouTube, announced a policy in October 2021 prohibiting advertisements on content that “contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.” Elaborating on the policy in an email to DeSmog, a Google spokesperson wrote that “Debate or discussion of climate change topics is allowed, but when content crosses the line to climate change denial, we stop showing ads on those videos.”
Yet a Peterson interview from this year entitled “The Great Climate Con,” during which he framed rising greenhouse gas emissions as a positive for making the planet “green in the driest areas,” was accompanied by ads for Birch Gold and Masterworks. Climate scientists say that is a misleading argument because it doesn’t take into account the massively negative effects that intensified droughts, wildfires and heatwaves due to global warming have on plants and ecosystems.
“Debate or discussion of climate change topics is allowed, but when content crosses the line to climate change denial, we stop showing ads on those videos.”— Google spokesperson
“We’ve reviewed the videos,” the Google spokesperson wrote, “and did not take action on them.”
“What’s the point of having policies if you’re not going to enforce them?” Claire Atkin, co-founder of the anti-disinformation watchdog group Check My Ads, told DeSmog. “YouTube and its ecosystem of marketing tools allow Jordan Peterson to not only spread [misleading statements], but to make money off them.”
Peterson didn’t respond to questions from DeSmog about his current income nor his recent shift towards promoting climate crisis denial online.
‘Twisted Symbiotic Relationship’
One example of Peterson’s amplifying effect is his interview with Judith Curry, a former Georgia Institute of Technology climatologist who now does consulting work for clients including petroleum companies and natural gas traders. In testimony to Congress in 2015 she claimed incorrectly that recent data “calls into question the conclusion that humans are the dominant cause of recent climate change.”
While appearing on Peterson’s podcast earlier this year she argued that due to “natural variability” the planet could grow cooler over the next three decades rather than warmer, a position with no credible scientific basis, especially considering that July was the hottest month in recorded human history. Posted to YouTube, where Curry has no official channel, the interview garnered more than 960,000 views. She didn’t respond to questions from DeSmog.
Conservative author and fossil fuel activist Alex Epstein had a modest YouTube following of 15.2 thousand subscribers when he was interviewed by Peterson. “It’s out!” he tweeted after the video was posted. It now has over 1.04 million views, a significant boost considering that the vast majority of videos on his page have under 500 views.
“I think Jordan Peterson has become more interested in humanistic thinking about fossil fuels,” Epstein wrote in an email to DeSmog. “He has become even more convinced, thanks to my work and others, that the popular movement to rapidly eliminate fossil fuel use is based on invalid thinking methods, false assumptions, and anti-human values.”
During his interview with Peterson, Epstein claimed that “It’s kind of obvious if you have a warmer world with more CO2, it’s a more tropical world with more life. It’s a more green world in the life sense of green. And yet the green movement hates it.”
Peterson has echoed that statement frequently in his podcast, despite actual scientists saying that greening caused by rising greenhouse gases shouldn’t be celebrated. He claimed during his interview with Steven Koonin, author of a book on climate change science called Unsettled, that “since the year 2000 the world has greened by 15 percent … why the hell isn’t that good news?” That interview has since been viewed more than 1.1 million times. Koonin didn’t respond to a media request.
“Peterson—who doesn’t appear to know much at all about the science or politics of global warming—has become an influential promoter of illogical ideas,” Benjamin Franta, a senior research fellow in climate litigation at the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme, told DeSmog.
During an interview in 2022 on Joe Rogan’s podcast, for instance, Peterson argued that the climate is too complex a system to be modeled accurately, “and that’s a huge problem when you’re trying to model over 100 years because the errors compound just like interest.” “He sounds intelligent, but he’s completely wrong,” one climate scientist told the Guardian.
Though Peterson is among the most visible promoters of climate crisis denial, he’s also part of a wider digital network. Researchers with Climate Action Against Disinformation and the Center for Countering Digital Hate earlier this year found 200 videos on YouTube promoting delay or skepticism around measures to address the climate emergency, garnering nearly 74 million views altogether.
“[There’s] a twisted symbiotic relationship between these platforms and climate denial content,” Erika Seiber, a climate disinformation spokesperson at the nonprofit Friends of the Earth who is part of the disinfo coalition, told DeSmog. “YouTube runs ads on the content, incentivizing the creation of yet more misleading content, which allows deniers like Peterson to flourish and for their networks to grow.”
Enabled by Google and YouTube, climate crisis denial could be having real-world influence, disinformation experts say. A poll this summer suggested that 72 percent of U.S. Republican supporters think that the economy should be prioritized over addressing climate change, a 13 point increase from 2018, even as cities sweltered under record heat waves. Conservatives are opposing coastal wind turbines under the pretense of protecting whales. Republican Congressmembers in June passed bills protecting gas stoves in people’s homes.
“You can see how climate denial content from Peterson and others has informed policy discussions,” Seiber said. “It’s incredibly concerning.”
