In the wake of the devastating wildfires that have ravaged the town of Jasper, Alberta, Canada, over the past week, many have been quick to blame climate change for the devastating fires that have ripped through the historic town. But what is the truth about the cause of these fires, and why is it linked to climate change? To get to the bottom of it, Sheila Gunn-Reed speaks with Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science to debunk these theories.
00:00:00.000For government mismanagement, we're digging down into the Jasper wildfires.
00:00:18.520I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gun Show.
00:00:30.000Despite such hardship, it is worth celebrating that we have not reported any injuries or casualties.
00:00:45.480Around 358 structures, or roughly 30% of the town, was lost to the fire.
00:00:51.420But inversely, around 70% of the town was saved.
00:00:55.860Years of preparation, force management, simulated evacuations, and firefighting efforts paid off.
00:01:03.920That's our Environment Minister, Stephen Gilbeau.
00:01:06.800He's actually the minister in charge of Parks Canada, which is the government department in charge of our national parks, including Jasper National Park.
00:01:15.980And as many of you know, Jasper was hit with a devastating wildfire that not only ripped through the park, but through the historic town site, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, destroying 30% of the town, which included mostly the residential area.
00:01:32.800So, a lot of damage to the town, a lot of people homeless, a lot of businesses destroyed.
00:01:47.280Well, I thought it would go to somebody who has done the research on what happened in Jasper, but also what happened in other towns, in our forested areas, like Yellowknife, to get the truth, to cut through the BS, the fear, and the hysteria.
00:02:06.460So, joining me now is Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science.
00:02:10.540You know, anytime a politician says that something is climate change, I try to go to the experts, or at least the person who speaks for the experts, and digest the experts' reports in a way that normal people like you and I can understand.
00:02:29.060So, I went directly to Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science, actually went directly to Friends of Science YouTube page, to see, does Michelle have a video yet, debunking this theory?
00:02:42.560It's, I would suggest, according to the politicians, unquestionable science, that what happened in Jasper was a result of climate change and absolutely nothing else.
00:02:55.300However, smarter people have different opinions, while they still can.
00:03:01.660And so, joining me now is my friend Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science to tell us what the experts have been saying about Jasper for a very long time.
00:03:13.260So, I guess I'll just turn it over to you.
00:03:19.820And I do want to reiterate, I'm not a forestry expert, but I do work with forestry and wildland fire experts.
00:03:28.880So, I get their information, and I try and translate it into something that is play language enough for most of the public to understand.
00:03:38.620So, of course, the thesis is that the Jasper wildfires and that the 2023 wildfires were all caused by climate change, and the climate change was driven by human-induced GHG emissions from big oil.
00:03:54.340So, there's actually, even on the heels of the Jasper tragedy, an open letter of 80 environmental groups blaming big oil for the Jasper wildfire, which is just ludicrous.
00:04:09.420For the longest time, British Columbia and Alberta have been deeply infested by pine beetle, mountain pine beetle, and it gets into the bark of the trees and ultimately just kills the tree.
00:04:22.600So, then you have, well, we now have like 18 million hectares of standing deadwood in British Columbia and Alberta, and it encroached into the park.
00:04:34.780And I understand that some years ago, when it first hit BC, Alberta wanted to, you know, go in and aggressively take out that small patch because they were afraid it would spread.
00:04:47.640But, of course, people like Sipporah Berman, who led the Tar Sands Campaign and also prior to that led the War in the Woods to stop logging in Glycott Sound, you know, they made it almost impossible for anybody to cut down a tree.
00:05:05.080Because to these rabid environmentalists and climate activists, every tree is totally sacred, even if it's dead and life-threatening to your community.
00:06:06.680So, you know, of course, it's difficult when you're a tourist site because the reality is that people come there to see the trees.
00:06:14.640They want to see it in a natural state.
00:06:16.440They don't like it when there's a forest fire burning, if you're doing a controlled burn.
00:06:20.460So, it's an awkward public relations issue.
00:06:22.940So, it seems like it's gotten pushed off to the side quite a bit, you know, in the hope that people will love seeing all these dense conifers.
00:06:32.420But if you watch our video, you'll see that back in the day, and the information comes directly from a Parks Canada report or report for Parks Canada.
00:06:44.940You'll see that back in the day, there was much more mixed vegetation, more deciduous trees, smaller shrubs and such like.
00:06:53.320These were burned off in the early days of Jasper, probably around the 19, 1913, I think it is, when it was called Fitzhugh.
00:07:00.460So, there was a huge fire that just went all the way up and down that mountain parkway, if you like, and that's why all these stands are pretty much the same, because it burned off a lot of that vegetation.
00:07:18.140And since then, we haven't allowed the kind of wildfires that would restore that vegetation.
00:07:25.500So, now it's like all dense conifers, you know, very difficult to even navigate through these kinds of trees.
00:07:33.120Yeah, the forest is all aging at once, thanks to artificial fire suppression instead of controlled burns.
00:07:38.540And there's something so ironic in all of this.
00:07:42.900The other side of this debate says that it is climate change causing the fires, but it really was the lack of global warming that caused the pine beetle to sort of be stopped in its tracks as it marched its way through our forests.
00:08:01.180Because pine beetle suffers winter kill after extended minus 40.
00:08:06.700And so, we got extended minus 40, and that stopped the march of the pine beetle through the forest, but it didn't eliminate the deadfall.
00:08:15.700I went through the timeline, and I know you did a bit of it too.
00:08:19.380So, what we know for sure is in 2017, Conservative MP Jim Aglinski, who was the MP there at the time, and the mayor of Jasper, were warning.
00:08:31.100Then 2018, there's multiple experts coming out and saying it, their words were, it's just a matter of time.
00:08:39.640Then in 2020, we've got Parks Canada officials testifying at the House of Commons, I think it was the Environment Committee, saying that there was a dangerous fuel load level in the park.
00:08:53.520And then in 2022, Parks Canada's own report says that not enough was being done to clear out the fuel load.
00:08:58.340And here we are, two years later, and it would have been inevitable if they had done more, I think, to eliminate the pine beetle.
00:09:08.060But as you point out, the left has made it nearly impossible to cut a tree in this country.
00:09:11.680And, you know, it's also not easy to do a controlled burn, especially in that Jasper area, because we were just talking before we went on air there, Jasper's right in a basin of sort of three valleys.
00:09:26.660The wind changes rather rapidly, and, you know, it can get away on you, and especially when you have all that dead wood all around that fuel load.
00:09:37.760So it isn't easy to do a controlled burn.
00:09:41.720But, you know, there are things that could be done, like logging companies could take all that dead wood out, and there may be a way to turn it into something useful.
00:09:51.400Like, for instance, you could burn it to make electricity.
00:09:54.100I think Grand Prairie has a biomass plant, you know, because it's not necessarily good for other things.
00:10:01.740I don't know, maybe you could make it into kitty litter or wood pellets or something like that.
00:10:07.040But what I'm saying is, like, get it out of there.
00:10:10.400And the mechanical extraction, especially on the off seasons, when A, there's not very many tourists around, and B, the risk of actually lighting a fire because of the sparks or such like that might come from using mechanical tools in that environment, you know, would be less.
00:10:30.960Again, in that area, I'm not an expert, but we do know that we have to get rid of as much of this fuel load as we can.
00:10:39.020Especially when it's near these precious sites.
00:10:44.500Apparently, Banff is also primed for such a tragedy.
00:10:49.400And I will say, I mean, I saw, I think it was a Calgary Aerold report about Banff, and that they had actually closed off one of the streets downtown to make it into a pedestrian mall.
00:11:01.260Now, this is a kind of thing that happened in Paradise in California, where they decided to make their town a bit more quaint.
00:11:10.200It used to have two lanes in and out, so they shut down one of the lanes on each side to make it more pedestrian friendly.
00:11:17.420And unfortunately, when that fire hit, people couldn't get out in their cars.
00:11:23.660You know, you had one or two cars that stalled or burst into flames, and there was no other path.
00:11:29.520So, you know, you really have to take these unthinkable events seriously, because they can happen.
00:11:37.220You know, while you and I are considering practical ways to deal with the forest, environmental NGOs, they've already started banding together.
00:11:49.740As you say, some 80 NGOs and health and civil society groups have issued an open letter to the federal government and provincial leaders in response to the Jasper Park fires.
00:12:02.340You write that their demands are not for more water bombers, not for more firefighters or bucket scoopers.
00:12:09.540They want the Canadian government to cap oil and gas emissions and block financing to fossil fuel producers.
00:12:18.280I mean, first of all, how do you fight a wildfire without heavy equipment, without water bombers, without choppers, without wildland firefighters?
00:12:29.340How do you get them in and out of there safely?
00:12:33.680I mean, congratulations to Jasper and the emergency management people, because they did such a great job of getting everybody out, lickety-split and safely.
00:13:12.340And we have another video, actually, about Yellowknife and how last year, when the wildfire was encroaching on Yellowknife, there was a skeleton crew of volunteers left behind.
00:13:25.700And these guys jerry-rigged all kinds of water cannons and sprinklers to protect the town.
00:13:31.540They cleared something like 40 acres of land in just a few days, you know, really, like, working around the clock.
00:14:34.100They're giving their rig camps to the emergency services so that they can act as fire camps for the firefighters that are being flown in to fight it.
00:14:43.060They are using their rig moving trucks to, they're pulling them off projects where they could be making money and giving them over so that they can move heavy equipment and rig camps in so that the firefighters can stay.
00:14:56.420And what are the environmentalists doing?
00:14:59.140One of the, Robbie Picard always makes a really great point when I talk to him about the fires in Fort McMurray.
00:15:06.040And he said the reason Fort McMurray, nearly 100,000 people, was able to be evacuated so quickly during the first fire with one fatality, and that was a traffic accident on the highway, is the close proximity to oil and gas in that community.
00:15:23.100As in everybody, as in everybody, has safety training.
00:15:28.260Everybody knows to get to a cluster point, to keep calm.
00:15:31.660Everybody is confined, almost everybody is confined space trained, H2S respirator trained.
00:15:39.400Being in proximity to the oil and gas industry makes our community so much safer.
00:15:44.840Right, and I'd say another thing about the ENGOs.
00:15:49.660You know, one of the groups listed on here is Equitair.
00:15:54.400And you'll see this in our Conflations on Conflagrations video that we just put up about half an hour ago.
00:16:02.280So, so Equitair is a charitable status environmental group that was founded by Stephen Gilboa, and it gets 41% of its revenues from government, in addition to being an ENGO.
00:16:22.920So, you know, when you have these 80 groups here all nattering away about big oil and shutting down the industries that actually bring in revenues for Canada,
00:16:35.100maybe these guys should be offering to donate 10% of all the money that they have to these damaged communities like Jasper.
00:16:45.120You know, they already have charitable status.
00:16:49.720They're already taking tax subsidies from every single taxpaying Canadian.
00:16:54.740But whenever there's a crisis, they never seem to step up with their volunteers or their money.
00:17:00.400The same as what happened out in BC when the atmospheric rivers hit and all of the Sumas area was flooded.
00:17:11.260You know, there's lots of big environmental groups out there.
00:17:13.960I didn't see a huge campaign from them to get their volunteers out clearing the road or to put money together for the communities.
00:17:23.120I mean, even the Jasper Food Bank, I just noticed this before I did the video, the Jasper Food Bank had just shut down earlier this summer
00:17:30.440because they were trying to reorganize and they were unable to deal with the demand at the time.
00:17:36.140And it used to be in the basement of the Anglican Church, which is...
00:17:38.960So, you know, this is one of the vital services that needs to be restored.
00:17:45.580So maybe, maybe these 80 groups could put together a food bank drive for Jasper rather than nattering on about climate change.
00:17:55.580Maybe they could do something actually tangible, practical and good for the community.
00:18:03.280Well, you know, the CAPE doctors, the Canadian Association for Physicians for the Environment, are one of the signatories here.
00:18:11.360Well, these guys have been funded by the McConnell Foundation for about half a million dollars to push climate change.
00:18:18.200And they're the ones who are behind the Competition Bureau push to stop fossil fuel advertising because they were claiming that, you know, fossil ads make us sick.
00:18:31.200You can't have modern medicine without fossil fuels.
00:18:35.180You're going to be back on the kitchen table.
00:18:36.860So, you know, they're really, like, misleading the public and they're exploiting this tragedy of Jasper for their own proxy benefits for the green cronies who back them.
00:18:52.160I mean, they will not be around to help the people of Jasper rebuild in the same way that whenever a flood hits, you know, they're not the ones mucking out the basements.
00:19:02.340They're the ones crying to the politicians.
00:19:05.080And we know there are a lot of them involved.
00:19:07.820If they need to block a street or have a celebration for Greta Thunberg down at the legislature, they come out by the thousands sometimes.
00:19:16.680But to help, actually, their fellow man, even if they believe it's climate change, why wouldn't they do something tangible to help people rebuild?
00:20:34.300But, you know, you can't tell me that big oil was not responsible for the safe ratio of VPD running up to July the 1st, but was responsible for the extreme VPD after July the 1st.
00:21:20.860I was just going to say, I'm pretty sure that it was the COP conference in Bonn that did it.
00:21:25.280You know, there's a pre-COP, there's about a thousand conferences, climate conferences that they have every year before the big conference of the parties in late fall.
00:21:35.640So they had a big one in Bonn, and I'm pretty sure that's what tipped it over.
00:21:40.660It could have even been Dr. Joe Vipond of Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment fame going to the last climate change conference.
00:21:58.860Now, I know that Stephen Gilbo, our environment minister and Parks Canada CEO, whose name is Casey right now,
00:22:07.980they make a big deal about Jasper being the first so-called fire smart community decades back.
00:22:15.100But, and being fire smart, as I'm sure you'll explain better than me, is just a series of steps to make, not to fireproof your community.
00:22:24.760I think that's nearly impossible, but to mitigate the speed at which a fire would rip through a community and to move, you know,
00:22:31.020debris away from buildings and combustibles away from buildings.
00:22:34.840But, and that may be true, but you cannot leave a stand of dead trees around the community and then simultaneously claim that you fireproof the community.
00:22:48.060You know, we've been looking at some maps and Google Earth photos prior to the fire, and it appears like there is a median that was full of dead trees, you know, which was on the approach to Jasper.
00:23:21.020You know, obviously those are areas where people would want to see trees, you know, as tourists.
00:23:26.340But if that means your town is going to burn down, you better get rid of those trees and plant some new ones, you know, and plant maybe some deciduous ones because they are a bit more fire resilient.
00:23:38.320It's not what people, you know, if people are looking for the black forest kind of image, it's not what you're going to see, but maybe be safer.
00:23:46.920I think Logan Lake is actually the best example of FireSmart.
00:23:51.780FireSmart is a nationwide set of recommendations.
00:23:57.140They are also split down by provinces because every province is a bit different, you know, different trees and different rules and regulations.
00:24:04.240But in general, it gives people constructive, practical tips for the community, for a homeowner, for a region, you know, how to fireproof your home, how to move debris away from your house, move trees back, how to put sprinklers on your roof.
00:24:23.460I think that's where Logan Lake had real success.
00:24:27.600And they worked very, very hard on it.
00:24:29.600They saved their entire town and they were, like, surrounded by an enormous fire in D.C.
00:24:35.440But that story hardly gets headline news.
00:24:39.100It hardly gets mentioned when there's a wildfire.
00:24:42.460It's always, oh, no, climate change caused this, you know.
00:24:45.460And people may say, well, why are you mocking climate change?
00:24:49.440Okay, let's say it has some elemental impact.
00:25:01.900If we put $40 billion into an EV battery manufacturing plant in Ontario to stop climate change, but $32 million to B.C. for firefighting, don't you see some disparity there?
00:25:17.740Because the problem with the climate change mantra is that all these green crony projects, like wind farms, solar farms, flying cars, direct air carbon capture, carbon capture and storage,
00:25:34.580all these very expensive, not very practical, green crony projects will take all the money when we need it for practical things, like clearing out the forest, like better wildfire equipment, more water bombers, whatever the wildfire community tells us that we actually do need.
00:25:54.920Let's listen to them and put the money there, you know, rather than saying, oh, look at this, climate change is causing all kinds of financial burdens on Canadian society.
00:26:06.200Well, because of wildfires and floods, you know, it's the same with the Toronto floods.
00:26:14.660You can see our Toronto flooding video.
00:26:16.840We've got all the information from Robert Muir, who's a professional engineer working in that area.
00:26:21.700And you can see very clearly that there's no increase in precipitation, but there is an increase in population, and there is an increase in paving over, and there's no significant increase in infrastructure to manage the water flows, both for public sanitation, both for flooding when there's a rain.
00:26:43.260And so, you know, we keep throwing money at the wrong thing, and a lot of it, you know, we're not talking about a few million that have gone to some climate project like tree planting.
00:26:53.680We're talking hundreds of billions of dollars.
00:27:08.840And I use capitalists quite loosely, because I don't know if you can actually be a capitalist if your business revolves around government subsidies.
00:27:19.040Well, you know, like with the McConnell Foundation funding CAPE, the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, you know, it's interesting to note that McConnell has a $10 million investment in a BlackRock renewables fund.
00:27:31.840So, obviously, you know, you can make the connection that, well, hey, if CAPE is denigrating oil and gas, yeah.
00:27:53.500You really are just the little association that could, spreading the truth and trying to alleviate some of the fear and hysteria around climate change.
00:28:12.200But you really do it on a shoestring budget.
00:28:14.260You source actual scientists and engineers, which, as we know, the left, the green left, really doesn't like to do.
00:28:22.700So tell us how people can get involved and help you, you know, stretch their dollar a little bit further to get the truth out there.
00:28:34.620Well, we're not a charity, so we don't issue charitable receipts, but you can become a member.
00:28:40.440It's $40 for one year and $80 for three years.
00:28:44.440And that will also get you our CLI-SI, which is about new climate information, or our extracts, which are snippets about things going on with the IPCC and all the climate conferences, things you probably wouldn't see in the mainstream news.
00:29:02.340So $40 a year or $80 for three years, you can make a donation.
00:29:08.800You can send us an e-transfer to contact at friendsofscience.org.
00:29:14.820And, you know, if you aren't able to do that, you can also just share our materials and share them with whoever you think really needs to see them, not just send it to your social media with no purpose, but you can purposefully send them to people who you think really need to see it.
00:29:36.680And that would be helpful because, you know, we are a very small organization in terms of human resources as well.
00:29:46.220We rely on the public to share it with whoever they think needs to see it.
00:29:49.760Well, and I have to tell you, you put an incredible amount of work into the videos that you make.
00:29:56.820They are in video, almost like a video PowerPoint, where you take these big, purposefully complicated ideas, I think.
00:30:05.360They overcomplicate them so that normal people are just sort of overwhelmed with the jargon.
00:30:10.840You cut right through it, you go to the sources, and you explain it to people in a way that not only can they understand, but they can digest it and take those arguments out into the world to debunk the hysterics around them.
00:30:24.440I cannot recommend your YouTube channel enough.
00:30:27.500Long videos, short videos, there's something there for everybody.
00:30:30.960Michelle, thanks so much for coming on the show.
00:30:32.840And as always, cutting through the BS from the green left in the government, but I don't know if I need to make a distinction between those two groups.
00:30:46.060Well, we've come to the portion of the show wherein I invite your viewer feedback, because without you, there really is no rebel news or no gun show.
00:30:54.620Unlike the mainstream media, I actually care about what you think about the work that we do,
00:30:59.400because if you don't support us or like us, well, we just disappear the way the mainstream media should, but won't,
00:31:06.640because they have all of your money, thanks to Justin Trudeau.
00:31:10.740So I give you my email address right now.
00:32:19.140And we also were, we wanted to show you what the town was like.
00:32:24.440We showed you, you know, the police checkpoints.
00:32:27.140We went on a little adventure trying to put a drone up, not into the national park, because I realized that's illegal, but just to see what we could see.
00:32:34.260We went to the command center, so you could sort of see the firefighters working.
00:33:26.920Now back in 2018, I noticed all the dead trees from the pine beetle infestation and remarked,
00:33:33.200Why not take those trees down and remove the fuel?
00:33:36.760I'm sure logging companies in the area would have considered taking the trees or Parks Canada could have used the wood for their own campgrounds.
00:33:44.300Definitely raises questions as to why they did nothing.
00:34:22.560You know, Mark, if you want to donate to my 100% charitable crowdfund, you can make a donation at helpjasper.ca.
00:34:31.240That will go to a charitable partner working on the ground to help the evacuees.
00:34:36.300None of that money comes to Rebel News.
00:34:38.020It's completely a charitable crowdfund.
00:34:40.480But anybody who's visited Jasper in the last 10 years has seen those dead trees and thought, boy, they should probably do something about those.
00:34:50.280Now, as to whether or not this is deliberate, I truly think it's a consequence of fire suppression in place of controlled burns.
00:35:02.020We seem to be suppressing fire at all costs.
00:35:04.460And that leaves the forest all one age.
00:35:09.200And a forest that's all one age burns all at once instead of allowing controlled burns so that you have a forest that has multiple ages.
00:35:19.120And so a fire doesn't rip through everything.
00:35:22.120They described it as a wall of fire going into Jasper.
00:35:25.860And yeah, if you've been in Jasper, all the trees are the same height.