If you listen to the political left, it won’t take long to get the message that climate change is ruining our world – and all these natural disasters are proof. So why, then, don’t all environmental experts agree with that?
Take the recent wildfires in Maui that have destroyed whole towns and claimed nearly 100 lives so far, for example.
If you haven’t heard, the fires, like the ones up north in Canada and spreading across California, have so far been uncontrollable, taking on what seems to be life all their own and obliterating everything in their path.
Naturally, leftists everywhere have immediately labeled the disaster as another cause of global warming – as if the Earth being a mere degree warmer than 100 years ago causes things to spontaneously combust and burn down whole forests and towns.
The Maui fires are already one of the deadliest wildfires in modern U.S. history. How did it happen in a state defined by its lush vegetation? The explanation is straightforward: As the planet heats up, no place is protected from disasters. https://t.co/4yY82dLdB1
— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 11, 2023
The scene in Lahaina, Maui this morning is absolutely devastating.
The entire town is being destroyed by an intense wildfire, forcing residents to sheek shelter in the ocean.
Make no mistake, climate change is making scenes like this more frequent. pic.twitter.com/dttFnAwEeJ
— Edgar McGregor (@edgarrmcgregor) August 9, 2023
But as one environmental expert explains, climate change has nothing to do with the fires that have so recently ravaged the island of Maui.
In fact, professor and environmental management expert at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Clay Trauernicht, says blaming the “weather and climate is misleading.” He’s actually been trying to raise the alarm about similar and predicted fires for years now.
As he wrote in a thread of tweets on Wednesday, the fires have been inevitable for a while now, and it’s due mostly to “vast areas of unmanaged, nonnative grasslands from decades of declining agriculture.”
He explains that grasslands or “savannas” have been spreading throughout the islands for nearly a century due to the vast clearing of land for ranching and agriculture by plantations in the late 1800s/early 1900s. Now, without that agriculture, the fields have turned into unmanaged grasslands that are “sensitive to bad ‘fire weather’ – hot, dry, windy conditions.”
Even the rainy periods on the islands don’t do it any favors by producing more and more grass (fire fuel) to grow.
Trauernicht has been trying to get the government in the state to do something about that. But clearly, they haven’t. And so now, wildfires like crazy.
So much for that climate change theory…
