Fact Check: Amy Klobuchar Says Climate Change May Force Some Californians to Relocate

Some California residents may be forced to move due to climate change, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) claimed Thursday during the Democrat debate in Los Angeles, California.

The 2020 presidential candidate’s statement was in response to a question from Politico‘s Tim Alberta, who asked if she supported a federal program to subsidize the relocation of people away from areas such as Miami, Florida, and Paradise, California.

“Because we know these places are going to be hit time and time again,” Alberta stated, referring to the so-called threat of climate change.

“Well, I very much hope we’re not going to have to relocate entire cities, but we will probably have to relocate some individual residents,” Klobuchar said.

She continued:

And the problem right now is that this climate change is an existential crisis, and you are seeing it here in California with the fires that you just had. You saw it in northern California, was mentioned, with Paradise, and the most moving video from that to me was the 30-second video of that dad, driving his little girl through the lapping fires with the neighborhood burning behind him and singing to her to calm her down. We cannot wait to act.

There’s an Ojibwe saying that “great leaders make decisions not for this generation but seven generations from now.” This president doesn’t keep his decisions for seven minutes, so what I think we need to do, get back into the international climate change agreement. I will do that on day one.

However, a 2017 study published by the National Academy of Sciences said that “Public dialog and ongoing research have focused on increasing wildfire risk because of climate warming, overlooking the direct role that people play in igniting wildfires and increasing fire activity.”

“Human-started wildfires accounted for 84% of all wildfires, tripled the length of the fire season, dominated an area seven times greater than that affected by lightning fires, and were responsible for nearly half of all area burned.”

November 3, President Donald Trump criticized California Gov. Gavin Newsom for his poor management of the state’s recent fires.

“I told him from the first day we met that he must ‘clean’ his forest floors regardless of what his bosses, the environmentalists, DEMAND of him. Must also do burns and cut fire stoppers,” the president tweeted.

Additionally, Breitbart News’s Joel B. Pollak wrote, “There is no scientific link between the current fires and climate change.”

“Scientists have said that a warmer California could be more susceptible to fire in the future, but recent fires are partly a product of conditions already endemic to California, and wind patterns that have little to do with climate change,” he concluded.