George Will has written another absurd and ignorant column on environmentalism and climate change. He is, as the bunnies say, against doing anything about it. So what did the web page editors use as a picture to flog the column? A picture of some really polluted, hung over city, maybe Beijing where you can taste the smog.
A conservative revival
"Obama’s ideas on climate change will come back to haunt Democrats."
Tamino on Will's claims about U.S. wildfires.
ReplyDeleteHistory will not be kind to George Will.
ReplyDelete-The Wonderer
Will won't have anything to write about that actually falls within his realm of knowledge until pitchers and catchers report to Spring training next month (and even that streches his knowledge).
ReplyDeleteDennis
Well color me stoopid, that is why they call me "Hey Stoopid".
ReplyDeleteGeorge Will's incompetence of viewing all forms of reality of the real world thus:-
"If two wrongs don't make a right, try three." Lawrence J Peter
We were fore told of incompetence of people like George Will, in a book published way back in 1969.
Such is life.
Prior to reading the comments here I had my doubts about Will's statistics and did a few calculations. I see from Lars comment that Tamino has already beaten me to that but here are my results.
ReplyDeleteBetween 1960 and 1969 the average acreage burnt was 4,571,754
Between 1970 and 1979 the average acreage burnt was 3,194,421
Between 1980 and 1989 the average acreage burnt was 2,982,835
Between 1990 and 1999 the average acreage burnt was 3,323,558
Between 2000 and 2009 the average acreage burnt was 6,931,327
Between 2010 and 2012 the average acreage burnt was 7,115,124
The conclusion seems to be that the annual acreage burnt in the 21st Century seems to be double that in the 20th Century.
Cheers, Alastair.
It is in no way straightforward to look at acreage burnt and try to draw straightforward conclusions because for many years in the last half of the 20th century the Forest Service (and others) had a no burn policy which lead to a build up of combustable crap on the ground. If you look at Tamino's graph the effect of this policy can be seen in the dip at mid century. The rapid increase in the last couple of decades can be probably assigned to temperature effects (including the beetles in the western forests which survive the warmer winters better) but there is also a burn off of the crap.
ReplyDelete