Turkey Wildfires
By Paul Homewood
h/t Stuart Hamish
More perspective on the Turkish wildfires:
https://effis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/apps/effis.statistics.portal/seasonal-trend/NOTEU/TR
According to the latest European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), the area burnt is now up to 177,000 ha, but the fires now seem to have stabilised. This clearly is way above the recent average.
Back in 2007, a study by the Forestry Faculty of one of Turkey’s universities showed that forest fire acreage in Turkey was much greater in the past, although the number of fires had risen.
https://gfmc.online/iffn/country/country.html
The worst year was 1945, when a similar area burnt as this summer so far.
The study also explains why the area burned is, but number of fires up:
Put simply, a lot of work has gone into fire suppression since the 1960s. Just as is the case in California, this has led to a massive build up of fuel, just waiting for a spark. According to EFFIS, the fire area so far this year is about eight times the average, whereas the number of fires is only triple, meaning that the fires are bigger on average.
As for the “spark”, we must remember that fires don’t start on their own. According to the Turkish study, human caused fires account for 93% of all fires:
There have been suggestions that the Turkish government have been badly caught out this year, in particular not having enough planes to deal with the fires.
What is clear is that, if the policy remains to suppress every fire that comes along, Turkey must get much better at forest management. That means clearing undergrowth, creating fire breaks and so on. If they don’t, nature will take its course.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
An obvious starting point is such a massive leap is a glaring anomaly.
It strongly suggests outside influences other than mere ‘weather’, as such a huge leap cannot be explained by normal, seasonal events.
My bet is on the most obvious; low recent forest fire burn rates compared to this years high season indicate a misleadingly high increase.
A dubious BBC ‘data’ graph designed to mislead, or arson.
By what mechanism has ‘climate change’ caused such a massive leap? That in itself would be a massive leap! Plainly outside influences are involved.
The fact is of course that in very many parts of the world which have substantial forested areas and hot dry summers wildfires are normal particularly in July and August and I discovered a report online commissioned by the Greek government to investigate increasing numbers of these events.
It was a lengthy document but it’s conclusion was that building new roads which allowed more incursion into forests,increased tourism and people building summer homes in these areas were the principal reasons for the increase and that human carelessness was the major cause.
Nowhere in this report was it suggested that climate change was in anyway responsible and I do wonder how many people who have read the lurid press reporting of what Greeks themselves call the wildfire season believed that these outbreaks were something entirely unprecedented.
Following on from Cheshire Red’s comment above, I would like to stress that it is weather, not climate change that creates increased risk of wildfires. Linking wildfires to a warming climate is absurd as it is dry conditions that exacerbate the burn – an extra degree of heat is surely immaterial, or am I missing something?
Dry conditions are typical in the Mediterranean in summer, or indeed in California and Australia, and wild fires occur every year: linking their incidence to “climate change” is just a public relations scare.
Here in Britain there were much publicised moor fires in the dry summer of 2018 (Saddleworth Moor etc), but I remember as a young boy watching fire three miles form our house spreading through woods and moorland on the St Ives Estate above Bingley during a long, cold, dry spell in winter 1959. Cold and dry encourages fire as much as hot and dry; it just happens that in Greece, Turkey, southern France etc that dry summer is the fire season, the winter being wetter.
It’s worse than that – the “extra” heat is an average, often caused by higher minimums. As far as I am aware, there is no correlation between wildfires and daily maximum record temperatures?
Dry stuff burns. Once it’s dry enough to burn it doesn’t need to get dryer
How many times?
https://www.ikhrw.com/en/article/environmental-terrorism-and-arson-attacks-on-forests-by-the-pkk/
Copy of letter to Daily Express:
Singing in the rain? Children groomed to fear the atmosphere
Primary school children ‘have discovered our rain may contain pollutants’ as pupils from 650 schools participated in The Great British Water Project, ‘designed to teach them about pollution’. Apparently, UK rain ‘should be slightly acidic but carbon dioxide dissolves in it and makes it alkaline’, and over 13 per cent found alkaline in the rainwater (‘Kids find pollutants in rain’, Daily Express, August 12, 2021). https://www.express.co.uk/ourpaper/view/2021-08-12 https://www.yumpu.com/news/en/issue/105412-daily-express-2021-08-12 https://hansonbox.org/water/
However, ‘over 83 per cent’ of the schools ‘recorded rain within a “normal” range’, and the Project was not even sure that the 13 per cent had discovered pollution: its ‘report described their findings as a “great surprise”’, adding that ‘“alkali recordings”’ might ‘“well be evidence of pollutants.”’ So now, as well as becoming depressed about ‘climate change’, small children are being prompted to become completely paranoid about the Earth’s atmosphere.
In an age when the air has never been cleaner, conveniently for the climate zealots, children have no memory of the filthy air we used to breathe in the days before legislation was passed to clean up the atmospheric effects of burning coal in every fireplace before the widespread introduction of central heating.
Conveniently, too, environmental campaigners like Sir David Attenborough can blur the line between ‘climate change’ and pollution, as he did in his Netflix documentary *A Life On Our Planet*, focussing ‘on the 93-year-old naturalist’s experiences and views learnt over a lifetime of studying the natural world’, during which time Sir David ‘has visited every continent on the globe, warning about the threats of pollution and climate change’ and warning (for the umpteenth time) that it was ‘our last chance to save the planet.’ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/19/david-attenborough-says-humanity-last-moment-save-planet-new/
Perhaps the most appalling aspect of this long-running scare campaign is that high-profile environmentalists like Attenborough, Chris Packham and Dame Jane Goodall are not only trying to prevent the births of children, https://populationmatters.org/our-patrons
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/11/improve-contraception-access-to-tackle-wildlife-crisis-urges-campaign?utm_source=SPUC+News+List&utm_campaign=10dd1310d2-news190520_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_826f492851-10dd1310d2-148123137&mc_cid=10dd1310d2&mc_eid=c2228029a3
but are trying to scare the living daylights out the children that do manage to be born – including little Prince George. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/royal-family/2020/10/08/prince-george-sad-extinction-had-turn-attenborough-says-william/ How, for instance, do we expect children to process Sir David’s claim that humanity is a ‘plague’ on the Planet? https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/earthnews/9815862/Humans-are-plague-on-Earth-Attenborough.html
The Earth will not die, but in the campaign to ‘save’ it, many people will. One thing is certain: the human guinea pigs in this experiment will make an awful lot of work for the mental health therapists of the future. This environmental experiment, even more dangerously, is an experiment on children. There will be no more ‘singing in the rain’ for them, only cowering indoors as they are groomed to fear the very air they breathe.
&&&
On Fri, 13 Aug 2021 at 10:41, NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT wrote:
> Paul Homewood posted: “By Paul Homewood h/t Stuart Hamish More > perspective on the Turkish wildfires: > https://effis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/apps/effis.statistics.portal/seasonal-trend/NOTEU/TR > According to the latest European Forest Fire Info” >
Sir David talks Attenbollocks.
And we have a PM who is trying to BUILD UP the population with 6 children and one on the way. So far….
Just another little (and very annoying) example of “do as I say, not do as I do”
It’s the CO2 dissolved in the rain, that makes it acidic!
I thought that!
In June1960 I was a newly enlisted trainee soldier stationed at Catterick waiting for enough recruits to make up a training squad and for two weeks we were on fire duty putting out underground peat fires around Osmotherly and near to Sutton Bank. They were scary in that these fires would pop up around you without warning. These fires are mainly caused by careless people discarding shiny debris or cigarette stubs. They spread so fast because little attempt is made to clear brash and fallen trees that is tinder dry.
Wouldn’t surprise me if it was found some fires were started by brainwashed global warming activists trying to prove we are melting the planet. Dangerous idiots.
You are just so cynical to suggest such a thing….
Cynic: an idealist’s term for a realist.
Al Davies
It would greatly surprise me if many fires weren’t started by malicious GangGreen loonies.
After all, we all remember the absurd eco-trumpeting and bellowing that led to the ridiculous bans on plastic drinking straws and hygienic wrappings
If they weren’t arsoning about, they would presumably be campaigning for matches and ciggy lighters to be banned. Although they might have twigged that this might protect forests but would also make it harder to smoke their wackky baccy.
As the data suggest, forest fires in Turkey are nothing new. Back in the earlier 80’s my wife and I lived in Turkey for several years. Each summer my wife would travel along the western and southern coasts. She would come back and tell me about the fires, particularly in southern Anatolia. Of course, in those days Turkey was rarely mentioned in the news back here. There were few tourists as well. No surprise that the western media now think this is something new.
Fires in Turkey increase with ground insolation (cloudlessness), via high UV Index, same as in the USA, Australia, Europe, when the UV Index exceeds 10 generally over many days in a row:
Back in the late sixties, I worked as a chemist in the GLC Scientific Branch. One of my tasks was to do air pollution monitoring using rain guages, ‘air bubblers’ and ‘lead candles’. The main pollutant we were measuring was sulphur dioxide that was being generated by the various power stations located along the Thames. One site,in particular, we had was on St Pauls because it was downwind of Bankside power station and the authoritues were concerned with the erosion of the stone faces by the sulphur dioxide.We found that the sulpur dioxide reduced the pH of rain to about 3, however, there was one site in Ockendon in Essex where the pH was alkaline because of the fumes from the cement works from across the Thames neutralisesd the sulphur dioxide.
The levels of sulphur dioxide were high enough on hot days to take your breath away when getting off the train at Waterloo after my commutee from the Kent coast.
So when I read and hear about ‘dangerous’ air pollution these days I wonder how they would have coped with the ‘smog’ of 1952 and less serious one in 1956 that resulted in the Clean Air Act the result of which I was doing this monitoring.
The government’s own data shows that levels of various “pollutants” in the air in the UK are now around 25-30% of what they were in 1970. Put another way, pollution was 3-4 imes worse in 1970.
Yet there’s no evidence this dramatic reduction has saved the hundreds of thousands of lives a year it should have done
Same in Israel…
Same in Greece and N Macedonia…
Wow – arson, as the cause, is many times less than out in California. Surmising the reason for that might be if you get caught in Turkey setting a fire, they take a wind blown red hot chunk of ember, put in in a small red hot container and strap their testicles over it,
If you get caught in CA doing that, they blame one’s deranged mental status on man-made climate change and send them to therapy.