A thick smoke cov­ers West Coast cities, but even thick­er is the smoke­screen being erect­ed by deniers to con­ceal or cast doubt on cli­mate dam­age as the under­ly­ing cause of fires that are the “new nor­mal” of life in the West.

View south to Chehalem Moun­tain fire on Sep­tem­ber 9th, 2020. (That’s the “small” smoke plume in the mid­dle ground). All the rest of the smoke is com­ing from the River­side and San­ti­am fires, which have burned 350,00 acres in less than forty-eight hours. Pho­to: Sheila Sund, repro­duced under a Cre­ative Com­mons license.

Top to bot­tom, the polit­i­cal right is fix­at­ed on “dead trees” and “poor for­est man­age­ment” as the cause of it all. When Cal­i­for­nia offi­cials tried to enlight­en him on Mon­day, Don­ald Trump intoned: “It’ll start get­ting cool­er: You just watch.”

“I don’t think sci­ence knows, actually.”

The right wing’s mound of sound, Rush Lim­baugh, rushed in with the obser­va­tion: “Cal­i­for­nia and Wash­ing­ton and Ore­gon politi­cians who have not allowed all these dead trees to be cleared out of there. These forests are noth­ing but kindling.”

“It isn’t about cli­mate change: It’s about poor for­est man­age­ment,” claims radio talk jock Jason Rantz, who is try­ing to pin blame on Gov­er­nor Jay Inslee.

Fox’s Tuck­er Carl­son blamed the pub­lic fig­ures who have warned of the warm­ing of the Earth, declar­ing: “In the hands of Demo­c­ra­t­ic politi­cians, cli­mate change is like sys­tem­at­ic racism in the skies. You can’t see it, but rest assured, it’s every­where and it’s dead­ly. And like sys­tem­at­ic racism, it is your fault.”

The rapid impo­si­tion of a pro­pa­gan­da line, by right wing media in Amer­i­ca, rivals “coor­di­na­tion” of news dur­ing the Sovi­et era, or pro­pa­gan­da min­istry instruc­tions from Berlin in the 1930s. It is, how­ev­er, a self-imposition.

The pun­dits know what to say, and what they bet­ter say.

So drilled and con­di­tioned is the Trump “base” that any devi­a­tion from the par­ty line will pro­duce a viewer/listener backlash.

Don­ald Trump has, after all, dis­missed glob­al warm­ing as “a hoax”. Scape­goats have been iden­ti­fied. The still-liv­able parts of Amer­i­ca have asked for it.

An Army Nation­al Guard UH-60M Black Hawk heli­copter waits on the tar­mac in heavy smoke at the Auro­ra State Air­port, near Auro­ra, Ore­gon on Sep­tem­ber 9th, 2020. Flight crews from the Ore­gon Army Nation­al Guard’s Gulf Com­pa­ny, 1st Bat­tal­ion, 189th Avi­a­tion Reg­i­ment based out of Salem, Ore. were called in to sup­port state and local offi­cials as unprece­dent­ed fire con­di­tions forced evac­u­a­tions across the state. Guard heli­copters have dropped more than 22,000 gal­lons of water on Ore­gon’s wild­land fires since mid-August. (Nation­al Guard pho­to by Major Leslie Reed, Ore­gon Mil­i­tary Depart­ment Pub­lic Affairs).

The right wing doesn’t even know what is burning.

As Gov­er­nor Inslee wrote to Trump on Monday:

“Your com­ments betray igno­rance of the very sources and loca­tions of these wild­fires They don’t just hap­pen in the forests: the fire that burned eighty per­cent of the build­ings in Malden, Wash­ing­ton, was a grass and brush fire. These fires could not be pre­vent­ed by thin­ning tim­ber because there is no tim­ber to thin.”

The “dead trees” ref­er­enced by Lim­baugh are like­ly to have been killed as one con­se­quence of cli­mate damage.

Warmer win­ters have allowed the pine bark bee­tle to repro­duce not once, but twice. The bee­tles have killed trees in British Colum­bia from the Pacif­ic to the Con­ti­nen­tal Divide. Big wild­fires broke out two years ago in areas of heavy bee­tle kill in north­west B.C. Fire claimed part of the vil­lage of Tele­graph Creek.

Fly over Yel­low­stone Nation­al Park some­time, or high-ele­va­tion forests else­where in the West. White bark pine trees are rapid­ly dying, a kill to which the bee­tle con­tributes. Descend­ing from Wash­ing­ton Pass on the North Cas­cades High­way, you will spot oth­er forests weak­ened by insects.

Todd Myers of the Wash­ing­ton Pol­i­cy Cen­ter is a big advo­cate of “for­est man­age­ment.” He wrote last week that “blam­ing cli­mate change is pol­i­tics, not science.”

“The sci­ence is quite clear that tim­ber har­vests – includ­ing com­mer­cial tim­ber har­vests – are nec­es­sary to reduce the num­ber of fire-prone, unhealthy forests.”

In fact, tim­ber “har­vests” are respon­si­ble for lots of these fire-prone, unhealthy forests. A bud­dy and I drove back roads of the Okanogan-Wenatchee Nation­al For­est a few years back.

What we saw: Big, fire resis­tant Pon­derosa pines had been “har­vest­ed.” Grow­ing up in their place, thick, fire prone stands of lodge­pole pine.”

Trump has gone off on a rant about how for­est under­brush hasn’t been cleared and raked, con­struct­ing a trumped-up con­ver­sa­tion with the pres­i­dent of Finland.

If so, he should be doing the raking.

On Mon­day, Cal­i­for­nia Gov­er­nor Gavin New­som point­ed out to the occu­pant of the White House that just three per­cent of the Gold­en State’s forests are man­aged by the state. The vast major­i­ty of Cal­i­for­nia forests are under fed­er­al management.

U.S. For­est Ser­vice budges have con­sis­tent­ly been drained to fight the ris­ing num­ber of fires, from the Con­ti­nen­tal Divide in Mon­tana to the moun­tains behind San Diego. The agency has been left with inad­e­quate resources to man­age its domain. (Our own Unit­ed States Sen­a­tor Maria Cantwell, D‑Washington, has fought to shield for­est man­age­ment budgets.)

We get back, how­ev­er to basic con­se­quences of cli­mate damage.

The cri­sis caused by our addic­tion to fos­sil fuels has extend­ed the fire sea­son through­out the West. Cal­i­for­nia hard­ly gets any breather anymore.

Sci­en­tists in Mon­tana have tracked ear­li­er melt­ing of the snowpack.

Pro­longed, ear­ly heat, a few years back, caused drought con­di­tions in very-wet Forks and a fire to break out in the rain­for­est of the Queets River.

In his let­ter to Trump, Inslee quotes Ste­fan Doerr, chief edi­tor of the Inter­na­tion­al Jour­nal of Wild­land Fires: “If we have high­er tem­per­a­tures, we have a greater prob­a­bil­i­ty of fire start­ing, fire spread­ing and fire intensifying.”

When fires hit his province’s north­ern reach­es, British Colum­bia Pre­mier John Hor­gan described fire sum­mers as “the new normal.”

These may become the good old days.

Ore­gon State Police stag­ing in Phoenix for the Alme­da Fire on Sep­tem­ber 8th, 2020. (Pho­to: Ore­gon Depart­ment of Trans­porta­tion, repro­duced under a Cre­ative Com­mons license)

The nation­al Cli­mate Assess­ment con­clud­ed “the annu­al area burned in the west­ern Unit­ed States could increase two to six times from the present” if trends con­tin­ue, due to human caused warm­ing of the Earth.

Evi­dence?

The largest-ever fires in Cal­i­for­nia, big­ger than the fire that destroyed Par­adise and the con­fla­gra­tion that invad­ed the Napa Val­ley wine country.

Or, to quote Inslee: “It took five days for 2020 to become our state’s sec­ond worst fire sea­son on record with more than 600,000 acres burned, eclipsed only by the 1.1 mil­lion acres burned in 2015.”

The pun­dits of the right occu­py cocoons of wealth and priv­i­lege, far away from the nat­ur­al cat­a­stro­phes about which they opine.

“You can’t see it,” says Tuck­er Carlson.

Wrong!

Carl­son ought to vis­it Clacka­mas Coun­ty in Ore­gon, where a rapid­ly mov­ing fire invad­ed an exur­ban area near Portland.

He ought to vis­it Olympic Nation­al Park, where the big, vig­or­ous Ander­son Glac­i­er has dis­ap­peared in the past twen­ty-five years.

Or study U.S. Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey pho­tos of rapid melt­ing of the South Cas­cade Glac­i­er, which the Unit­ed States Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey has stud­ied since 1950.

Carl­son should take a plane flight from Van­cou­ver up to Ter­race, and see vast stands of dying, orange-col­ored forests, or gray dead forests – the con­se­quence of bee­tle kill.

He could sit down with folks at Tay­lor Shell­fish and learn about ocean acid­i­fi­ca­tion, and the threat it pos­es to a $300 mil­lion Wash­ing­ton industry.

Or, he could fly out here, gaze out at Mount Rainier, and then descend into a blan­ket of smoke. And breathe our air. It is worse than Beijing’s.

The mis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paign is mali­cious. The smoke­screen must not obscure a human-caused threat to our lives. Cli­mate must be on vot­ers’ minds this fall.