President Joe Biden made a surprise trip to FEMA headquarters in Washington D.C. Thursday afternoon. During his stop, Biden pinned the latest hurricane in Florida and fires in Maui on climate change while demanding "a hell of a lot more" money.
BIDEN: "There are still some deniers out there in terms of whether or not climate change had anything to do with any of this, and we're gonna need a whole hell of a lot more money..." pic.twitter.com/GTB1aI4x42
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) August 31, 2023
And while climate change "experts" continue to tie the issue to the Maui fires, where hundreds were killed as a result of local government incompetence and refusal to release water in the name of equity, they are admitting there's more to the story.
An unknown spark quickly set parts of the island ablaze on Aug. 8, sending flames fueled by a combination of strong trade winds and a landscape parched by drought conditions through the historic Lahaina district and people's homes.
On Sunday, Hawaii Gov. Joshua Green likened the level of devastation that occurred as a consequence of climate change.
"That level of destruction, and a fire hurricane, something new to us in this age of global warming, was the ultimate reason that so many people perished," Green said.
Not only do "fire hurricanes" not exist, but climate change can't be blamed for the number of people who died in the wildfires.
Globally, climate change "nudged" the conditions that contribute to making wildfires more severe, but it is unclear how much of a role that played in the Maui fire event, Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told ABC News.
Moreover, wildfires have the "lowest confidence" among natural disasters that researchers attribute to climate change, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
"We should not look to the Maui wildfires as a poster child of the link to climate change," Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said Friday in a YouTube stream.
At the end of his remarks to FEMA, Biden got confused about where he was supposed to go. He will visit Florida Saturday to survey recent damage from Hurricane Idalia. He recently visited Maui for just five hours while in between his Delaware beach vacation and staying at billionaire Tom Steyer's mansion on Lake Tahoe. The devastation of the Maui fire is some of the worst in American history and the biggest fire catastrophe in a century.
BIDEN: "Where am I going now?" pic.twitter.com/c2Me93Dh81
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) August 31, 2023
