Scientific American Commits Journalistic Fraud on Forest Fires

by
Steve MacDonald

Only You can Believe the Lies about Forest fires

According to Wikipedia Scientific American was started in 1845, and is the oldest, continuously published monthly magazine in the United States. Cult followers of Scientism love them some Scientific American. It’s Scientific. It’s American. It has also engaged in fraud.

January 8, 2016 – Global Warming Helped Exacerbate Biggest Year Ever for U.S. Wildfires

More than 10.1 million acres of U.S. forests—private, state and federal—were scorched last year, marking 2015 as the most extensive and expensive fire season on record, according to numbers released Wednesday by the Forest Service.

I have no doubt it was the most expensive (even adjusted for inflation), but most extensive? Sorry, not even close.

The paper of record, The New York Times, reported 21.98 Million acres burned in 1937. I know math is hard for Climate Cultists but we are here to help. The sum of 21.98 Million acres is more than double the 10.1 Million the US Forest Service claims went up in smoke in 2015. If you are still having trouble picturing it, how about a picture of it?

US Forest Service-acres burned in US

See how this almost, sort-of, kind-of, looks like a hockey stick in reverse? I know you’re familiar with the shape so this shouldn’t be that hard for you to work out. The part way up high on the left shows over 50 million acres burned in the US in both 1930 and 1931. Unless you’ve changed the definitions of either ‘US’ or ‘extensive,’ what “the oldest, continuously published monthly magazine in the United States” is reporting as “the most extensive … fire season on record,” is only 20% of what burned annually in the early thirties. From this we may draw the conclusion that what they have done is redefined what the word ‘scientific’ means.

The Forest Service, for its part, may be doing what any good government agency would; make hysterical claims about the tremendous strains placed upon their budget as an excuse to demand more money.

The agency was forced to “borrow” three times from non-firefighting funds to pay for fire suppression. The agency reported spending more than $2.6 billion, or 52 percent of its budget, on firefighting efforts in 2015 (Greenwire, Jan. 7).

What government agency doesn’t need more money? After all, it gets increasingly difficult for Smokey the Bear to cordon off national parks and monuments from taxpayers and war veterans (in the event of a government shutdown) if you’ve spent all your money on fighting forest fires.

Or perhaps, like NASA, they have their eye on a Muslim Outreach Budget. You need plenty of dollars if you want to adequately cover what forested parts of the fruited plain remain after 2015’s “record setting burn” with brown signs (crowded with friendly white letter in several different languages) indicating the direction of Mecca. That and foot baths, can’t forget those.

Perhaps they need the money to fund a US Forest Service Civil Rights division? In 2011 a US Forest Service officer encountered a Hispanic couple in Olympic National Forest in Washington. They did not speak English so the Forest Service officer contacted a nearby agency with someone who did. When the Border Patrol agent arrived the Hispanic couple fled. The woman was located but the man drowned after jumping in a river to evade capture.

A Federal judge did not fine them for failing to have thirty to thirty-four-inch-high railings or adequate flotation devices available to fleeing illegal aliens along America’s rivers, but they did declare that the Forest Service violated the woman’s civil rights when it asked the Border Patrol for a translator, “saying it was “humiliating” to Hispanics and an illicit backdoor way to capture more illegal immigrants.” 

If the Border Patrol doesn’t need to spend money capturing illegal aliens perhaps they can send that money to the US Forest Service to replace the non-fire-fighting funds pilfered to pay for the most expensive forest-fire season on record.

We should note that “on record” was redefined, during the second Bush Administration, when a good amount of historical data was purged. Unfortunately for them, and Scientific American, you can’t purge every article or report published using that data, all of which is readily available using that thing Climate Cult Cleric Al Gore claims to have created called “The Internet.”

Stories about civil rights violations or the hiding of the Forest-Fire-decline are not the sort of things you’d typically find in the oldest, continuously published monthly magazine in the United States, but they do have something in common with “Global Warming Helped Exacerbate Biggest Year Ever for U.S. Wildfires.” None of them are interested in any actual science.

Most of the acres burned in 2015 were in Alaska, which wasn’t even a state, or included in the data reported in the 1930’s. For the math-challenged folk at the US Forest Service and Scientific American this means that an apples-to-apples comparison would place this year’s contiguous acreage burn at around 4.7 million. That’s a paltry 21% of the acreage lost in 1937 and 9% of forest lost to fires from the early 1930’s, not even close to being the biggest year of anything with regard to forests and fires unless we’re talking about the institutionalized fraud and scientific malpractice.

To complete the challenge to their veracity, the levels of CO2, the primary driver of global warming preached by the Climate Cult, of which Scientific American and the US Forest Service are card-carrying members, were significantly lower in the early 1930’s than they are today. So, the US Forest service may not be fluent in Spanish but they are fluent in fraud and Scientific American has no problem repeating that deception without fear of a Federal judge declaring that they have humiliated you or that your civil rights have been violated.

The Cult continues its indoctrination and America’s oldest, continuously published monthly “scientific” magazine is on it.

 

Real Climate Science

Author

  • Steve MacDonald

    Steve is a long-time New Hampshire resident, blogger, and a member of the Board of directors of The 603 Alliance. He is the owner of Grok Media LLC and the Managing Editor of GraniteGrok.com, a former board member of the Republican Liberty Caucus of New Hampshire, and a past contributor to the Franklin Center for Public Policy.

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