The Reason They Fear Fire As A Violation Of Nature Is Because They’re So Alienated From It

Misattributing fires to climate change is a sign of apocalyptic environmentalism

After a dramatic video of a fire on the surface of the water in the Gulf of Mexico went viral last week, many journalists, scientists, and elected officials referred to it as more evidence of catastrophic climate change. “The ocean is literally on fire,” tweeted California Governor Gavin Newsom, “but yeah, sure. We can't afford climate action.” 

But the fire had nothing to do with warmer temperatures of either the air or water. It resulted from a pipeline rupture, a fairly common accident in transporting natural gas. It also had no discernible impact on the environment. The fire went out less than six hours after workers shut off the pipeline’s interconnection valves. As such, it paled in significance to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill, which killed 11 people and spilled oil, not gas, for a month. 

In other words, the Gulf of Mexico fire was yet another misattribution of a disaster to climate change, like we have seen with forest fires, floods, and hurricanes. In truth, fires have declined by one-quarter globally since 1998, according to NASA, and the primary cause of California’s high-intensity fires is forest mismanagement, not warmer temperatures. Meanwhile, flood and hurricane deaths and costs have declined dramatically over the last few decades as nations have built flood control systems, better housing, and hurricane warning systems.

To be fair, many of the people who shared the video pointed to the unintended consequences of oil and gas production, not climate change, and its apparent lack of regulation. In 2019, a pipeline leaking fuel exploded in Mexico, killing 20 people. More than a decade has passed since the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill and yet the U.S. government agency in charge of overseeing 9,000 miles of oil and gas pipelines in the Gulf of Mexico still lacks “robust oversight,” according to a recently-released report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

But the oil and gas industry has grown dramatically cleaner and safer, as have fracking and off-shore drilling. There are still accidents, leaks, and explosions. But the number of serious pipeline incidents per unit of production has declined by more than half over the last decade. And we are so much better at responding that despite spilling 10 times more oil than the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska, the Deepwater Horizon accident killed just 2 percent the number of birds. 

Meanwhile, rising natural gas production, both through fracking and off-shore drilling, is the main reason that both US carbon emissions declined by 22 percent since the year 2000, and Europe’s emissions declined by a similar percentage since 1990.

In truth, the public’s misattribution of fires on water and in forests stems not simply from ignorance of how the oil and gas and forestry industries work but also ignorance of how nature itself works. The public sees forests and water burning and assumes that what’s happening is both unnatural and bad. That assumption reveals a religious worldview, not a scientific one. And it is driven by a deep alienation from, not a connection to, the natural world.   

Liar, Liar, Forests on Fire

In December last year, The New York Times published a long article which strongly implied that climate change-driven fires were burning up so many of California’s ancient redwoods, sequoias, and Joshua trees that they risked going extinct. 

“THEY’RE AMONG THE WORLD’S OLDEST LIVING THINGS,” screamed The Times’ digital headline, in all-caps. “THE CLIMATE CRISIS IS KILLING THEM.” 

Lest readers doubt that climate change might be making redwoods extinct, The New York Times emphasized that blackened trees meant they were dead. “The blackened wreckage sends a clear message,” claimed The Times. “These trees are in the fight of their lives.”

But anyone who has hiked in one of California’s redwood forests knows from reading the signs at the trailhead that the ancient forests need fire to germinate seeds and burn up woody debris on the forest floor. Park Rangers and visitors centers teach that the blackened bark on old-growth redwood trees is a sign of forest health.

I pointed that out in a widely-read column for Forbes, and on Twitter, four months earlier, but it had no impact on The New York Times. Faced with facts that challenged its framing, the Times doubled down on pseudoscience. “In a relative instant,” it claimed, “countless ancient redwoods, hundreds of giant sequoias and more than one million Joshua trees perished.”

And what evidence did The Times provide for its extraordinary claim that “countless ancient redwoods... perished”? None whatsoever. The article instead just relied upon quotations from scientists and the speculations of the author, John Branch.

“Do we know how many ancient redwoods were killed by the fire?” I asked Joanne Kerbavaz, who Branch quotes as an expert, a few days after the Times ran the article. 

“It’s true that some of those old growth probably were killed,” she said, “in that the fire served to undermine the structural support and some of them toppled over.”

“You know for a fact and have seen them?” I asked. “How many?”

“We don’t know,” she admitted. 

“Is countless the right word?” I asked. 

“What I’m excited by is the opportunity to tease out more specific effects,” she said. “We have remote sensing to map the height of the vegetation that might allow us to more particularly define for all trees what’s not normal.”

I pressed her. “But couldn’t the fire have been good for the ancient redwoods?”

“In some of the old growth groves we expect the fire effect was more beneficial than detrimental,” she finally admitted. “We have a high expectation that almost all of the old growth survived.”

As such, the use of the word “countless” by The New York Times is inaccurate, according to the scientist who it relied upon to make its false claim. The Times should issue a correction.

What about Joshua Trees and Sequoias? One of them, the so-called Joshua Tree, isn’t even a tree. It’s a kind of yucca. And its habitat requires fire.

Earlier this year the U.S. National Parks Service felt the need to debunk the alarmism  “As devastating as it may appear, fire is a natural process,” it wrote, “and Joshua Tree National Park has seen centuries of lightning-caused fires.”

Was the fire caused by climate change? “The fires that burned the Joshua Trees are driven by lighting,” said Jon Keeley, one of California’s most published forest scientists, “and I don’t think there’s any evidence that climate change is causing more lighting.”

Fires have increased in the Mojave Desert, but because of invasive grasses that create fuel for more frequent and hotter fires, not because of warmer temperatures. “I’d say we had a huge growth of exotic grasses and that drove the fires,” said Keeley.

In other words, the fires in the Mojave are hotter and more intense for the same reason that many of California’s mountain forest fires are: the build-up of fuel in the form of biomass. “Many of these invasive plants are fast-growing annuals that fill in the areas between shrubs,” wrote the Parks Service. “When they dry out in the heat of summer, these non-natives serve as a fuel source that allows fires to spread.”

What about the sequoias? “I don’t think you have to resort to anthropogenic climate change to explain the fires in the sequoias,” said Keeley, who studies the forest. “The climatologists want to tell you that it’s all climate change but it’s not by any stretch of the imagination.”

The real issue was the 2012 – 2015 drought, said Keeley, and there’s no evidence that climate change is making California’s droughts more frequent. “It’s way more likely that past management activities and the 2012 and 2015 drought were bigger factors than the heat wave.”

I asked Keeley what he thought of The New York Times piece. “It’s what most people would describe as sensationalism,” he said. But Keeley saved his harshest words for alarmist climate scientists. “The climatologists follow the ‘law of the instrument.’ If all you have is a hammer, nails are all you study.”

Fracking The Facts About Fire

In spring 2010, a documentary filmmaker released the trailer to his new film, “Gasland,” about the natural gas boom in the United States. The background music, similar to what we hear in trailers for horror-fantasy movies, grows in volume and speed. We hear people say that hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, of shale, an underground rock formation, is poisoning their water and causing neurological diseases and brain lesions. It shows documents describing lung disease and cancer.

Three-quarters into the trailer, we hear an ominous chorus typical of what you might expect to hear when dragons take flight. A man stands by his sink with a hand-written sign above it reading, Do Not Drink This Water. We then see a congressman with a southern accent saying, with frustration in his voice, “What we’re doing is searching for a problem that does not exist!”

The trailer then cuts back to the man at the sink. He is holding a lit cigarette lighter near the faucet’s tap, which he turns on, igniting huge flames that force him to jump backward.

The New York Times and other national media picked up on the story and depicted fracking for natural gas as a significant threat to America’s natural environment, helping spawn a grassroots movement to end the practice. “Gasland” was nominated for an Academy Award.

But the film’s depiction of the flammable water was deceptive. In 2008 and 2009, the man from the film and two other Colorado residents filed formal complaints to Colorado’s main oil and gas regulator took water samples from the three homes and  found that the gas from the man’s faucet and one other home was 100 percent “biogenic,” or natural, and something people have safely dealt with for decades. 

It was created not by frackers but by Mother Nature. The third home had a mixture of biogenic and thermogenic methane; the owner and operator reached a settlement in the case.

People have documented water catching on fire in entirely natural circumstances for millenia. There are reports of water on fire dating back to the ancient Greeks, Indians, and Persians. 

In 1889, a driller burned his beard after lighting water from a well he drilled in Colfax, Louisiana. There’s a historical marker at the site of the well, which was featured in Ripley’s Believe It or Not. We now know that they were naturally occurring methane seeps.

An Irish documentary filmmaker named Phelim McAleer called out Gasland’s director, Josh Fox, for his mischaracterization of fracking at a 2011 Gasland screening.

McAleer: There’s a [flaming water] report from 1976 . . .

Fox: Well, I don’t care about the report from 1976. There were reports from 1936 that people say they can light their water on fire in New York State.

McAleer: I’m curious why you didn’t include relevant reports from 1976 or from 1936 in the documentary? Most people watching your film would think that lighting your water started with fracking. You have said yourself people lit their water long before fracking started. Isn’t that correct?

Fox: Yes, but it’s not relevant.

The Irish filmmaker posted the exchange on YouTube. Fox alleged copyright infringement. At first YouTube obeyed Fox’s demand and removed the video, before eventually restoring it.

And yet time and again, journalists and activists hyped fire as “bad” and “out of control” and caused by climate change. After fires in Australia killed koalas, New Yorker journalist Bill McKibben tweeted that the species was “functionally extinct,” a false claim. 

During fires in Brazil in 2019, journalists falsely claimed that the Amazon was the lungs of the world and a net source of oxygen. That both could not be true  — lungs absorb oxygen and emit carbon dioxide — did not seem to bother the environmental journalists who in other contexts are quick to denounce their political enemies as “science deniers.”

The Fires Inside

As I noted last week, a big part of the reason that politicians like Newsom blame California’s forest fires on climate change is to deflect attention away from his role in creating them. By blaming climate change, Newsom redirected attention away from his role in mismanaging the forests, the main cause of the state’s high-intensity fires.

But in the case of the fire in the Gulf of Mexico, the strong reaction to the fire was more instinctual and less partisan than mainstream news coverage was of California’s fires last summer. Nobody had ever seen a disk of fire like the one on the Gulf. And the news media was already alarmist before opportunistic politicians like Newsom started using climate change as cover for his policy failures.

A major reason is because the people who write for publications like the New York Times, the New Yorker, and New York Magazine are so disconnected from the natural world. They, their parents, and most everyone they know grew up in cities and worked for generations in office buildings, not on farms, in forests, or on oil rigs.

“I’m not an environmentalist,” confessed Wallace-Wells in his 2019 book, The Uninhabitable Earth, “and don’t even think of myself as a nature person. I’ve lived my whole life in cities... I’ve never gone camping, not willingly anyway…” 

And where climate scientists tend to spend their days writing computer programs indoors, far from anything we might call “nature,” forest scientists tend to be out in nature, studying the real world impacts of events on trees and ecosystems, not extrapolating from a limited number of assumptions. “The climatologists don’t study fire,” said forest scientist Keeley. “They study climate, and make inferences for what that means for fire.”

The passion that motivates activist journalists, politicians, and activist scientists to declare every fire a sign of the apocalypse is obviously religious, not scientific. “Looking from the vantage of today,” New York’sWallace-Wells wrote in 2019, “we see that world and can think of it basically as a hell.”

There is nothing necessarily wrong with religions and often a great deal right about them. They have long provided people with the meaning and purpose they need, particularly in order to survive life’s many challenges.

The trouble with the new environmental religion is that it has become increasingly pseudoscientific and Malthusian. It insists every anomalous fire is confirmation that the end is near unless we sacrifice. Recall Gov. Newsom’s tweet attacked those who oppose proposed climate actions for their high cost. But humans have reduced emissions and increased our resiliency through economic growth, not degrowth. 

The build-up of wood fuel in California’s forests is, on the one hand, a result of our failure to deal with the problem, but it is also a sign of our wealth. The transition away from wood as a material has meant that many forests are no longer being logged, which allowed the accumulation of biomass. Similarly, the expansion of the natural gas industry has allowed for the decline of coal mining, which is far more devastating environmentally than oil and gas drilling.

Perhaps the worst aspect of apocalyptic environmentalism is how it trains young people to respond to anomalous fires and disasters with fear and anger. Where they should feel curious and inquisitive about such events, they are instead taught to assume that such events are signs of the end, including their end. 

The problem with anger, the late British philosopher Roger Scruton argued, is when it “loses the specificity of its target and becomes directed to society as a whole.” Climate alarmism promotes such inchoate anger. Climate alarmism has become what Scruton called “an existential posture” adopted not “to negotiate within existing structures, but to gain total power, so as to abolish the structures themselves. . . . That posture is, in my view, the core of a serious social disorder.” 

Young people learning about climate change for the first time might understandably believe, upon listening to alarmists, that climate change is the result of deliberate, malevolent actions. In reality, it is the opposite. Emissions are a by-product of energy consumption, which has been necessary for people to lift themselves, their families, and their societies out of poverty, and achieve human dignity.

While many political leaders, activists, and scientists derive psychological, financial, and political benefits from such alarmism, the rising levels of anxiety and depression in Western societies suggest that many more people are harmed by it. Apocalyptic environmentalists may think their alarmism will improve the environment and make them happy, but it won’t. In that sense, they aren’t just alienated from nature. They are also alienated from themselves.