By Jim Steele

Just one day after the tragic Lahaina fire, Michael Mann fearmongered a tweet, “What we’re seeing in #Maui is a “compound”climate catastrophe.” So the far-left socialist news organization, DemocracyNow, eagerly interviewed Michael Mann to hype that a climate crisis drove the fire’s devastation.

Mann obliged, suggesting the high winds, which are not uncommon in Lahaina, “interacted with epic drought, higher pressure, hotter temperatures, less rainfall,” But the so-called expert was demonstrably lying.

Lahaina’s temperature was normal and there was no epic drought. Mann failed to mention Maui experiences seasonal droughts most years, as its warm climate alternates between a wet season and a dry season. Maui’s 2023 wet season totals were mostly 90 to 120% of average.

Maui’s dry season lasts April–October, creating high fire risk each summer. However, by May 2023, there was no drought anywhere on Maui. http://Drought.gov wrote, “due to late wet season rainfall, significant wildfire risk is expected to develop later than the normal late-July to early-August time frame.”

As the US Drought Monitor data shows by August 8th (highlighted by blue rectangles) there were no areas in Maui experiencing extreme or exceptional drought, never mind Mann’s dishonest claim of an epic drought.

Yet Mann persisted in his climate crisis fearmongering stating, “Huge amount of fuel in form of dry materials impacted by climate change and the crisis.” Again Mann failed to inform anyone that the fire’s fuel was mostly dead invasive grasses and shrubs on abandoned plantations.

Fire weather experts (Mann is not one) categorize dead grasses and shrubs as 1-hour and 10-hour fuels, meaning they become highly flammable in less than a day of dry weather, weather that always occurs between April and October dry season. Furthermore, located on the leeward slopes, Lahaina is naturally one of the driest areas in Maui.

Mann knows damn well a single day of dry weather tells you diddly squat about a changing climate. Yet Mann and DemocracyNow hid all the important weather facts to manipulate you with a false narrative that a climate crisis causes more fires, concluding “Defining crisis of our time is the climate crisis.”