Tucker Carlson: “There's no evidence” climate change contributed to wildfires ravaging the West Coast

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published

From the September 10, 2020, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): So, if you live in the western part of the country, you know, if you have a television, you've seen that there are horrible wildfires ravaging the western states, a couple of them. It's been going on for a little while, but it took no time at all for the usual vultures and parasites to swoop in and try to make political advantage out of this. Barack Obama and the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, are now telling you that these fires are a direct result of climate change and according to Barack Obama, Donald Trump is directly responsible for them. He tweeted, "Vote like your life depends on it, because it does." You could die if you don't vote for Joe Biden. In fact, if you don't vote for Joe Biden we're going to see a lot more fires and not just from BLM rioters. The media, of course, went dutifully along with this as they always do. 

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Of course, there's no evidence for that, but lying on television is now the norm, so everyone did it. In fact, we know that a pyrotechnic device of some kind at a gender reveal party appears to have sparked the biggest of the fires, that's now grown to more than 10,000 acres. We also know state regulations preventing deforestation played a role, likely in spreading the blazes. We also know that the state of Oregon apparently sent a number of its firefighting helicopters to Afghanistan, a neocon request, to fight a war that has no purpose that has gone on for nineteen years and that Donald Trump has attacked for trying to end, but whatever. What the Democrats in California want you to know is "No, we've mismanaged the energy grid so badly, we can't leave the lights on, we literally can't be a first world state anymore, but it's not our fault. It's Donald Trump's fault." How long can this lying go on exactly? This blame shifting?

As Jeff Berardelli put it for CBS News: It's not coincidence, it's climate change.

Right on the heels of arguably the West Coast's most intense heat wave in modern history comes the most ferocious flare-up of catastrophic wildfires in recent memory. Meanwhile, just a few hundred miles east, a 60-degree temperature drop over just 18 hours in Wyoming and Colorado was accompanied by an extremely rare late-summer dumping of up to 2 feet of snow.

It's not coincidence, it's climate change.

These kinds of dystopian weather events, happening often at the same time, are exactly what scientists have been warning about for decades. While extreme weather is a part of the natural cycle, the recent uptick in the ferocity and frequency of these extremes, scientists say, is evidence of an acceleration of climate impacts, some of which were underestimated by climate computer models.