Those crafty Chinese climate hoaxsters have been at it again. Last week, there were wildfires in Greece that got so bad that people were jumping into the ocean for safety. There are now strong indications that these fires may have been set, but it was those clever Chinese hoaxsters and their climate scam that made the fires as bad as they were. From The Guardian:

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These are widely regarded as the short-term causes of the fires, but experts are also concerned that the conditions experienced in Greece in the last two years are likely to be replicated more often in future, owing to the changing climate. Nikos Charalambides, executive director of Greenpeace Greece, said: “As the death toll rises and the full size of the disaster is still to be recorded, it would be premature to attribute these [fires] to either climate change or the failures of the fire prevention and fire-fighting mechanisms.” However, he said the contributing factors included drought, strong winds and unusually high temperatures, all of which are likely to be aggravated by climate change.

Rachel Kennerley, climate campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said: “The immediate priority must be to tackle the terrible fires, and to support the people whose homes, lives and livelihoods have been put at risk or devastated.” But she said the longer-term impacts must also be taken into account when the immediate danger has passed: “Extreme heatwaves are predicted to become more frequent as climate change takes hold, meaning drier forests and countryside, and a greater risk of fire. Politicians must wake up to the extreme weather battering the planet and take tough and urgent steps to slash the climate-wrecking pollution being pumped into our atmosphere.”

And, by the end of this week, there was an equally terrible wildfire menacing a massive swath of northern California. From the L.A. Times:

The Carr fire has destroyed 65 homes and damaged 55 others, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said Friday, Those numbers are expected to rise. The blaze, driven east by 30 mph winds, hopscotched into subdivisions Thursday night and Friday morning. Officials said hundreds of homes were threatened as winds pushed the fire into the community. It was a chaotic scene across Redding, a city of 90,000 people about 100 miles from the Oregon border, as towering flames whipped along the horizon and evacuation orders expanded by the hour in the middle of the night.

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The fire jumped the Sacramento River, as massive fires will do. And then there was the fire tornado. We are losing entire cities now and our president* and his party see as one of their primary goals the opening of public lands in order to extract more carbon-based fuels. If this makes sense to you, check your mailbox. There should be a check in there from some coal company.

A fire in the village of Kineta, near Athens, on July 24 VALERIE GACHE Getty Images

We have lost cities before to fires caused by environmental negligence. On October 8, 1871, a massive fire engulfed the city of Peshtigo in northern Wisconsin, killing somewhere between 1,500 and 2,500 people. (The story got buried because Chicago burned on the same day, probably from the same winds from the same cold front that helped light up Peshtigo.) As in Greece, people fled to the nearest water, the Peshtigo River, in an attempt to escape the flames. Many of them drowned, or perished from hypothermia in the middle of a fire. (People who sought refuge in a water tank boiled to death there.) There was a fire tornado that sucked up railroad cars. One eyewitness said that it was “snowing fire.” Over 300 victims were buried in a mass grave because there weren’t enough people left alive to identify the dead.

It had been a hot, dry summer in Peshtigo, a logging and lumber-mill town. Local farmers used the slash-and-burn method of clearing the land. The forest itself was thickly carpeted with wood chips and shavings from the logging crews. It did not take much to set this tinderbox ablaze. A lightning strike. A slash-and-burn fire set by a railroad crew. There is even a theory that the Peshtigo and Chicago fires, as well as a couple of others in and around the Great Lakes, were ignited by the impact of a comet. But whatever set off the bomb, human disregard for the environment built it, woodchip by woodchip, small fire by small fire. We never freaking learn.

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