CV NEWS FEED // While Hawaii’s governor and other Democrats are pinning the state’s deadly wildfires on “climate change,” environmental experts are saying there is no connection. 

As The Daily Signal reported Friday, Heartland Institute Senior Fellow Anthony Watts, who has been a meteorologist for 45 years, 

said many factors are at play in the Maui fires that aren’t related to a climate crisis. 

Hawaii is one of the most fire-prone states because of its topography, Watts said in a phone interview. Trade winds drop moisture on the east side of the island of Maui, he said, and when air passes over the mountains and down the other side, it dries out and heats up.

Watts noted that fields on Maui used to be rich with sugar cane plantations before Mauians stopped processing the crop and the last such operation closed in 2016. Unattended sugar cane fields were overtaken by dry, easily flammable grass first introduced by settlers in the 1900s.

“So what happened is that we’ve got a combination of native vegetation, which is very flammable and dry, [and] high winds going from east to west,” Watts said.

University of Hawaii at Manoa professor and fire ecology specialist Clay Trauernicht agreed. “Blaming this on weather and climate is misleading. Hawai’i’s fire problem is due to the vast areas of unmanaged, nonnative grasslands from decades of declining agriculture.”

According to FOX News, the ecologist foresaw many of the conditions several years ago, which led to the ongoing tragic fires:

In 2019, Trauernicht submitted a letter to a local Maui newspaper, arguing that the island was at serious risk of continued forest fires without proper management. He stated that heavy rainfall causes more vegetation, which is then not tended to and poses fire risk.

Professor Peter Vitousek of Stanford reiterated the findings of Watts and Trauernicht. “There is no doubt that fire-prone grasses have invaded drier Hawaiian ecosystems and brought larger, more intense fires.”

Another Bay Area academic, Jim Steele, who served as the Dean of San Francisco State University’s College of Science and Engineering, pointed out that

as Hawaii has abandoned many pineapple and sugar cane fields, invasive grasses took over. Fire experts classify grasses as one-hour fuels, meaning in less than half a day of dry weather those grasses become highly flammable.

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“Alarmists are the true deniers avoiding the well established science of wildfires,” wrote Steele on X (formerly known as Twitter).

The Signal also quoted Heritage Foundation Senior Research Fellow Jack Spencer. Concurring with the other experts’ conclusions, he said:

​​Hawaii has been setting itself up for more intense fires for some time. For fires to burn, they need fuel, and Hawaii has plenty of it. As it turns out, the decline in agriculture in the state has allowed invasive grasses to take hold in places that were formerly managed for agriculture.

Watts added, “There was nothing anyone could have done about it once the fire started. It was just a perfect storm of coincidental factors, as opposed to climate change.”

He also suggested that left-leaning mainstream media sources, such as The Associated Press, are always incentivized to push “climate change” alarmism in spite of the facts. 

Again from the Signal:

With mounting evidence that the Maui wildfires aren’t caused by climate change, why do legacy media outlets such as The Associated Press advance this narrative? 

“They’re paid to do so,” Watts said, noting that The Associated Press in early 2022 announced receiving a grant of over $1 million “to hire writers specifically to talk about climate change.”

“And to fulfill that mission, he added, “I have seen this again and again and again in The Associated Press.”

Science writer Steve Miloy, known for his popular blog JunkScience, voiced his opinion that Green “should resign” as governor of Hawaii for “shifting blame for his failure to protect Maui residents” onto climate change.

Miloy serves on the board of the Heartland Institute, where Watts is a senior fellow.

Finally, journalist and radio show host John Ziegler took to X Friday, replying to left-wing actress Mia Farrow, who appeared to promote the claim that the tragic wildfires were due to “climate change.”

“Hawaii has often had wildfires, usually caused by volcanoes/lightning,” he pointed out. “We still don’t know what sparked this one but the death toll is because it unfortunately hit in a very condensed population center.”

“Not everything is political!”

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