Todd Myers defends wildfire comments against former Gov. Inslee after Spike called them ‘asinine’

During Monday’s “Jake and Spike Show,” KIRO hosts Jake Skorheim and Spike O’Neill debated the exchange between former Governor Jay Inslee and Todd Myers, vice president for research at the Washington Policy Center, about the cause of the increase in wildfires locally and nationally.

“Millions of Americans are now breathing the consequences of the climate change that is fundamentally changing North American forests,” Inslee, who has long linked the surge in wildfires and smoke in the Pacific Northwest to climate change, wrote on X while sharing a New York Times article.

Todd Myers refuted Inslee’s statement, writing: “Canadian forest fires, as experienced by Mark Twain in 1895: ‘When Twain traveled to Petoskey, Michigan, their train plowed through thick smoke on all sides, blown downwind by forest fires,’ and ‘Atmospheric conditions didn’t help matters in British Columbia. Although Vancouver was encircled by beautiful scenery’ … ‘The smoke is so dense … that you can’t see a cathedral at 800 yards.'”

After Spike called Myers’ comment “asinine,” Myers felt he needed to defend his claim on the show itself.

“The point that I was making with that quote about 1895 is not that forest climate change can’t have an impact on forest fires, but that smoke, it’s in and of itself, is not evidence of forest fire, or is not evidence of climate change, rather, or not evidence of the impact of climate change,” Myers said on “The Jake and Spike Show.” “Of course, hotter temperatures create more circumstances for forest fires. There’s no doubt about that, and we have seen increased temperatures. But when you look at what the causes of forest fires are, climate change is significantly down on the list of things that are causing it, both in Canada and in Western Washington.”

Before becoming vice president at the Washington Policy Center, Myers was a part of the executive team at the Washington State Department of Natural Resources (DNR).

“I just think Governor Inslee is very glib about blaming everything on climate change and saying, ‘Well, there’s smoke; it must be climate change,'” Myers added. “That’s simply not the case.”

Is the US facing the worst period of wildfires?

“You mentioned forest health being a much higher ranking factor toward wildfire than climate change, but isn’t forest health also determined by or impacted by climate change?” Spike asked. “I mean, drier proliferation of pests in the forest because of drier, hotter climates, right? More drought, more dried-out vegetation. All those are climate change, and I think they directly affect elements that exist.”

“I’m not sure that the most extreme forest fires in history have been in recent years,” Myers replied. “In the United States and in North America, early in the 1900s, we actually had many more acres burned then than now.”

According to the National Interagency Fire Center, the most acres burned from wildfires in the U.S. occurred in 2015 and 2020, when wildfires scorched more than 10 million acres. But modern recordkeeping of this data only dates back to 1960.

“When you say climate change creates forest health problems, that’s sort of true, but a much larger impact is that we have taken fire out of these forests, and that forests grow very dense and together, and there are so many trees that they are weakened and they’re not able to fight off pest infestations by sapping them out,” Myers said. “They don’t have the energy, and so what happens then is what used to be a pest infestation that forests could deal with now takes over in weakened trees, not because of climate change, but because we have too many trees left.”

Myers did add that it is hard to convey all the above information and explanation of his logic into 280 characters on X.

“You can back me up on this, Mr. Myers, but every time Jay Inslee posts about climate change, no matter what fire he’s posting about, he’s not looking at what caused the fire,” Jake said. “Many of them are human-started. He’s just saying, ‘This is climate change.'”

Watch the full discussion in the video above.

Listen to “The Jake and Spike Show” weekdays from noon to 3 p.m. on KIRO Newsradio 97.3