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All IPCC definitions taken from Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Working Group I Contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Annex I, Glossary, pp. 941-954. Cambridge University Press.

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The many ways climate change worsens California wildfires

Daniel Mocsny at 10:42 AM on 16 November, 2018

Art Vandelay @2 -

Climate change is making fires worse in many areas but the actual incidence of ignitions is also increasing, and >90% of ignitions are human caused, either deliberately or accidentally. Fighting climate change might prevent the situation from getting far worse in the future but it's already a serious problem in need of fast acting solutions. We can't change the climate but we can significantly reduce the root cause of the problem.

The global warming potential of a unit of greenhouse gas takes centuries and millennia to play out. Therefore most of the climate change we experience now is due to greenhouse gases emitted decades ago. Since we are now emitting greenhouse gases at a much higher rate than when we were emitting the greenhouse gases that are burning California now, we are currently locking in much worse climate change for the future.

Even worse, any action taken by any individual, organization, or nation-state to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will have no or almost no detectable effect on the local consequences of climate change the individual or organization is already experiencing. Even if California could eliminate its entire carbon footprint, humanity's global carbon footprint would only decline by about 2%, an amount below the resolution of measuring climate change impacts. Thus self-interest can play no role in fighting climate change - fighting climate change is always and only a charitable act undertaken by moral people for moral reasons. Putting up solar panels in California does almost nothing to stop wildfires in California - it is but one of billions of actions by people everywhere necessary to stop climate change.

Climate change messaging that tries to frame the problem in terms of self-interest is logically contradictory. It's like trying to tell people they are better off if they do not steal, when in reality theft is highly profitable to the thief provided he gets away with it. Since there is no system of justice to punish carbon polluters at any level from the individual to the nation-state, committing theft by burning fossil fuels and dumping the costs on everyone else remains the perfect crime. Carbon taxes might be a start, but they'll never be implemented at a high enough level by the thieves themselves to make life as uncomfortable for the carbon polluters as it is and will be for their victims.

But back to your stopgap strategy of reducing artificial ignitions.

First, the problem is difficult: people like to smoke, burn things, throw glass bottles along roadsides to act as burning-lenses, consume centrally generated electricity, and be malicious. How can we protect massive areas of parched land from every jackass who wants to commit arson? Have governments figured out how to stop malicious hackers from spreading computer viruses?

Second, you haven't justified your implied counterfactual assumption that natural sources of ignition wouldn't start more fires if human-caused ignitions weren't burning the fuel first. Perhaps if enough fuel is present, it will burn sooner or later. The longer it doesn't burn, the more fuel accumulates, thus making the eventual burn all the worse.

The root causes of wildfires are fuel availabity and the weather conditions that allow fuel to burn. Proximal causes include every source of ignition. But given enough fuel and enough time with the wealther conditions for fire, even a low rate of natural ignitions should eventually burn everything that can burn. Is there evidence from the fossil record that during past natural periods of warming and/or drying when fire risks were increasing, the potential for fire went unrealized because there weren't humans around to light matches or build defective power lines?

Skeptical Science hacked, private user details publicly posted online

TOP at 08:07 AM on 28 March, 2012

@yocta
The general tone here has been that this was some kind of attack on SkS for ideological reasons and yet it has previously been pointed out that the attack came from Russian hackers who would likely be more motivated by money, ego or status. Your acronym leaves out one letter, "S" for stepping stone. The real value to a group of hackers (having had my site hacked once) is to facilitate further cyber-shenanigans. A list of email addresses allows a hacker to attack those computers, installing bots that allow further attacks on other sites. SkS list has to be a real treat since the base is so large and diverse and so many are associated with educational facilities.

At least it hasn't made it to wikileaks yet.

The Latest Denialist Plea for Climate Change Inaction

funglestrumpet at 06:40 AM on 1 February, 2012

Further to David Lewis @ 19

Thanks in large part to their own actions, climate change is probably going to take a long time to reach a point in public opinion where these 16 'experts' and their comrades in arms can be brought to book. In the meantime there is the danger that vital evidence will be lost if bank details are automatically destroyed when some statutory time period elapses before that moment.

With that in mind, are there any mechanisms in the various home countries involved that will ensure that any payments received by the denialati from the fossil fuel industry are not lost before they can be presented in evidence? Perhaps it is something the IPCC could consider exploring via the U.N. thus possibly making it apply globally.

I suspect that a good few of the denialati treat climate change as just another politcal game and are not mature enough to realise the potentially serious consequences of their actions, not only to the world's population, but to their own personal freedom.

I am sure that SKS computer material is well backed-up. I sure hope so, because it will be an excellent source of evidence should criminal proceedings result at some future date and I am sure it will be in the cross-hairs of denialati hackers.

Christy Crock #2: Jumping to Conclusions?

Ian Love at 15:01 PM on 11 April, 2011

re Alexandre#3 I have the same problem, and have had in a few other SkS pages. I am running Firefox 4 and 3.6 (on different computers) but it isn't that. Surely it is because the images have not been imported into SkS but are linked through to imageshack, which has this peculiar practice of not letting you see images unless your site domain is registered. It is very annoying! Presumably it could be solved by the editor importing the images into SkS rather than linking through to imageshack - perhaps a nuisance, but hopefully not difficult?

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