Climate change has become simply a convenient buzzword to cover for corruption and incompetence.

By Romegas

Nowadays, the mainstream media is so compromised, that one simply has to look elsewhere to acquire some semblance of a properly informed opinion. From the war in Ukraine to topics such as climate change and immigration, most outlets have been reduced to nothing other than propaganda arms maintaining and promoting an ideological narrative.

A clear example of this has been the widespread alarmist reporting by the likes of the BBC and the Guardian about the current heatwave in southern Europe and the wildfires that have consumed certain areas, particularly, in Greece.

Rarely has the cherry-picking of data and lack of interest in providing any contextual information that would put things in their right perspective been so evident.

Dr. Richard North is coauthor of a number of important books such as “Scared to Death: From BSE to Coronavirus: Why Scares are Costing Us the Earth”. He is also one of the best researchers you can hope to read online, and his blog called Turbulent Times, is a daily must-read for those interested in a serious understanding of British politics, EU history and politics, or the dynamics of scares including that of Climate Change.

Here we reproduce his latest article on the Wildfires in Greece and how the whole business of Climate is increasingly being used to disguise corruption and incompetence.

Climate change: Greek tales

Dr. Richard North

In loving detail, the BBC has reported that Corfu has become the latest Greek island to issue an evacuation order, the latest of the islands after Rhodes to be grappling with wildfires.

Dramatic pictures accompany graphic descriptions of flames “engulfing”, with the scale of the coverage in part justified by the national interest as outbreaks have affected the northern part of the island “which is popular with British tourists”.

And to give some sense of the scale of the developing drama, we are told of Rhodes that some 19,000 people have been evacuated from the island, with “many forced to flee their hotels as the flames continued to spread from the centre of the Greek island”.

Being the BBC, of course, there is no attempt at setting a context, so we are not told that typical tourist arrivals for the month of July runs just short of half-a-million, while the August 2022 figure stood at 508,475.

Of more concern to the BBC narrative is that Greece as a whole has been grappling with “searing heat”, with temperatures allegedly exceeding 40ºC across the country, and fires have blazed for nearly a week in some areas.

Like its sister-in-crime, the Guardian, which is all too keen to establish a link between the “climate crisis”, the BBC too is not overly keen to confine itself merely to reporting the news. It feels compelled to tell us:

Emergency services have also been dealing with fires on the island of Evia, east of Athens and Aigio, southwest of Athens. Homes have already been lost to the wildfires on Rhodes and other areas. Climate change increases the risk of the hot, dry weather that is likely to fuel wildfires. The world has already warmed by about 1.1ºC since the industrial era began and temperatures will keep rising unless governments around the world make steep cuts to carbon emissions. Spain and Italy are among the Mediterranean countries which have also experienced intense heat this week, while parts of the US are also seeing records broken.

As always, they just can’t help themselves, enough for multi-role pundit Ross Clarke to observe in The Spectator that reports of looming Armageddon might have been a tad over-cooked.

Clarke reports on data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), which covers the EU, which inconveniently show that the wildfire season for the year to date has been rather average – with an early burst of fires in the spring followed by less activity since then.

Elsewhere, several reports point to arson, with many of the fires that have engulfed Rhodes suspected of being caused deliberately.

Meanwhile, as Europe sizzles, Britain is experiencing what may turn out to be its rainiest July in a decade, victim of the same meridional flow Jetstream phenomenon which is giving rise to high temperatures across Mediterranean regions.

And yet, while we are being led down the path of associating wildfires with climate change – not least because of the obvious graphic potential, we have been here many times before.

In 2021, I noted that to assert that forest fires are solely a function of climate change – and that the deaths arising are thus attributable – was disingenuous to the point of dishonesty.

For instance, although there have been 3,200 fire related deaths in the US since 2000, i.e., in 21 years, many of those are entirely due to that rapid population growth along the forest fringes. There are, quite simply, more people in harm’s way.

But, just as significantly, if one looks at official US fire statistics, one sees that the average death rate from all fires is over 3,000 each year, and rising. Of those, 72 percent occur in residential premises. As aside, in 2019, there were recorded 31,400 accidental deaths in homes and communities in 2019.

If ever there was an example of cherry-picking data, therefore, this is it. Despite “climate change” even at the most generous assessment is causing only a fraction of the deaths attributed to other causes.

Greece, of course, is no stranger to headlines about wildfires. In 2007, I commented on the rash of serious wildfires in country – then, the worst in living memory, only to be eclipsed by another surge of outbreaks in 2009.

Before the ash had even settled on the 2009 incidents, there were those complaining that Greece had learned few lessons from the 2007 fires.

After the events of the 2007 summer, the EU had produced multiple reports evaluating the causes, including this one, making some interesting points about lack of preparedness, inadequate forest management and inappropriate development.

Then, a more comprehensive report, covering the events of 2007 and 2009, was even more coruscating.

Author, Gavriil Xanthopoulos, of the National Agricultural Research Foundation in Athens, noted that the term “climate change” had become a buzzword in many press articles and appeared as a convenient explanation to many of those carrying responsibilities for the fire management policies in the country.

However, Xanthopoulos identified what he called some more important factors. On top of his list was the fuel accumulation as a result of abandonment of mountainous and rural areas in the last decades, reduced use of forest biomass for animal feed and energy production, and a steep decline in active forest management due to the weakening of the Forest Service after it had lost responsibility for forest firefighting in 1998.

He also cited the development of wildland-urban (WUI) and rural-urban interface areas in the last decades, with poor planning and little preparation for fire. His complaints included: “Reduced capability and interest of the citizens to help with preparation of their fields (fuel reduction) and with fire control, as a result of increasing average age, especially in the villages, loss of fire knowledge and reflexes for firefighting, and a more “urban mentality” cultivated to a large extend by the mass media.

Added to that list was “poor firefighting”, with the fire service having developed a doctrine that suited its urban firefighting mentality. This was summarised as “quick and massive aerial initial attack to control fire spread and then securing the fire perimeter with the ground forces”.

In easy fire seasons, Xanthopoulos observed that results were very good. But ground crews became become relatively relaxed and reluctant to spend extra effort (e.g., leaving the roads, climbing uphill, creating long hose-lays, etc.) to minimise the chance of a fire escaping initial attack.

The second apparent weakness was that the fire service worked very little with indirect attack. The use of fire as a firefighting tool was not in its official procedures. Under such conditions, there were few options other than allowing the fire to burn until it got to areas with fewer fuels or until the weather conditions changed.

In more recent times, we had in 2018 the Independent report that a new raft of fires tearing through Greece were “not an act of God, but a direct result of corruption”.

Some developers, the paper said, have taken advantage of forest fires, which removed barrier to building homes in inaccessible areas, on land they often did not own.

Despite being an EU member state and a developed economy, Greece – the paper added – “exhibits many of the institutional deficiencies and cultural traits found in less developed nations. A large, centrally controlled state can be a source of secure employment (as in Greece) yet is often grossly inefficient”.

Part of the problem was “a lot of unused land classed as agricultural or forest”. Greece had a complex, antiquated and incomplete legal land title system, where efforts to create a land registry (or cadastre) had been ongoing since the early 2000s and are still not even close to completion.

Add in the pervasive corruption of land registry offices, forestry commissions and relevant state administration, and what you get is an opportunity for real estate development. All you had to do was “clear up a bit of brushland or cut down a section of forest, put down the foundation for a building, connect utilities by bribing local officials, and then wait for the amnesty for illegal buildings that tends to come around periodically, usually close to a general election”.

Institutional memories, though, are incredibly short, especially when it is politically convenient to play the “climate” card, thereby absolving all those who played an active part in allowing the crisis to develop from any responsibility.

As long as the gullible media, naïve politicians and green activists are around to divert attention from the real issues, there is plenty of scope for alarmist headlines, and little room for sensible analysis.

***

We can witness the same dynamics here, one only needs to take a walk in Mizieb to witness firsthand the total lack of proactive management at hand with dry undergrowth left accumulating and serving as a growing fuel stock for when it eventually catches fire – either naturally or due to the illegal campers, failing to extinguish their makeshift fires appropriately. It is a miracle that the whole area has not been incinerated in this ‘’unprecedented heatwave’’ or perhaps proof that wildfires are not solely the cause of elevated temperatures.

Just like Greece, we witness ever more agricultural land being abandoned to its fate in the hope that it will eventually be employed for ‘’recreation’’ or ‘’real estate’’.

No doubt, when the inevitable happens, the media and the authorities will likewise use the excuse of climate change to cover up for corruption and incompetence just as they did for our overloaded electrical distribution cables.