Re: Hype doesn’t help wildfire efforts (Gazette, July 19)
Yet again, Tom Fletcher is up to his usual tricks, bending definitions and statistics to lead readers down his “post truth” path.
His column, “Hype doesn’t help wildfire efforts,” belittles Andrew Weaver and others for stating that climate change is a likely cause for some of the devastating wildfires blazing through B.C.’s interior. Fletcher claims we have just come off the “coldest winter in recorded history for much of B.C.,” as some sort of proof that temperatures aren’t rising.
The cold snap we had this last winter was around the 17th coldest for Victoria in the last century, hardly the coldest in recorded history. Between 1908 and 1985, 16 winters had periods of weather lasting over six weeks which were colder than last winter. These occurred from one to 11 years apart, averaging 6.7 years. Last winter was the coldest in 31 years.
Fletcher continually mixes up weather and climate. Weather measures temperature, precipitation, and such, over periods of days, weeks, seasons, or even a few years. Climate, however, is an overall trend over numerous years, typically decades, centuries or millennia.
Just as one house selling for $21 million doesn’t tell us anything about the average sale price of a house, one outlier winter doesn’t alter overall climate trends.
I imagine Fletcher knows this, but it doesn’t fit into his political agenda of bashing environmentalists, protesters, the NDP and Green parties, or anyone who wants to lessen our carbon footprint.
I suspect Fletcher also knows that mountain pine beetle kill forests, which he refers to as a cause for increased acreage loss from these fires, was also likely due to climate change. Overall warmer winters allow the beetles’ eggs to survive in higher numbers, especially within a planted monoculture forest already under stress from climate change conditions.
Arthur Entlich
Metchosin