Climate Activists Blowing Smoke On Wildfire Fears

Add wildfires to the long list of natural disasters that are overhyped in climate coverage.

It scares adults and kids alike, as when Rep. Katie Porter’s (D., Calif.) 9-year-old daughter worries: “The Earth is on fire and we’re all going to die soon.” This simply isn’t true.

In the early 1900s, about 4.2% of land worldwide burned every year, as you can see on the nearby graph. A century later, that had dropped almost to 3%.

That decline has continued through the satellite era, and 2021 is likely to end with only 2.5% of the globe having caught fire, based on data through Aug. 31.

This data is entirely noncontroversial.

Even a report from the World Wildlife Fund—chillingly subtitled “a crisis raging out of control?”—concedes midway through that “the area of land burned globally has actually been steadily declining since it started to be recorded in 1900.”

Human ingenuity gets the credit: People have moved from hearths to power stations, converted untamed land into protected farms, and created enough excess wealth that societies can increasingly afford to defend their surroundings with fire suppression and forest management.

Climate studies that predict significantly more fires typically ignore this history. They model only temperature changes, excluding what people might do in response.

As this year’s United Nations climate report argued, fire weather—conditions conducive to wildfires—is going to become more common as temperatures continue to increase. But this doesn’t mean people will sit idly by and let it happen.

When models factor in human adaptation, it turns out that these increases in fire damage disappear. An April study predicts that population growth and economic development will overwhelm the potential of global warming to encourage fires.

Climate policies could achieve a greater reduction in burned land but at the cost of many trillions of dollars.

Much of the media coverage of wildfires is similarly ignorant of data. The Los Angeles Times’s entire front page screamed about “California’s Climate Apocalypse” last fall as wildfires burned through the state.

But those fires look unremarkable in historical context. Before 1800, wildfires on average burned between 4.5% and 12% of California each year, far more than the 4.2% of the state consumed by the “climate apocalypse” in 2020.

While the share of the U.S. burned by wildfires has risen since the 1980s, influenced in part by climate change, that’s not the whole story.

Fires in the U.S. today burn less than a fifth of the area that was scorched each year in the 1930s, and an expert panel found that the recent uptick is mostly the result of poor forest management.

Perhaps the best example of unwarranted media histrionics came in response to Australia’s 2019-20 fire season. Papers plastered their covers with images of the destruction, capped with headlines such as “Apocalypse Now,” “Terror Coast,” and “This is what a climate crisis looks like.”

Yet satellite measurements show that the total burned area that fire season was one of the lowest Australia had seen in the last 120 years.

In the laconic phrasing of this year’s annual environmental report by Australian National University, the 2019-20 fires were “well below average.”

It is true that more people will probably be threatened by fires in the future, but this is because part of the world’s growing population will settle where wildfires are more common.

The number of homes in high-fire-risk zones in the Western U.S. has increased 13-fold over the past 80 years and is set to increase further by 2050. A 2016 Nature study concludes this is true globally.

“Contrary to common perception,” the researchers write, “human exposure to wildfires increases in the future mainly owing to projected population growth in areas with frequent wildfires, rather than by a general increase in burned area.”

Helping future wildfire victims has little to do with strict and expensive climate policies, and everything to do with simpler, cheaper measures like better forest management and building codes. There’s no good reason to terrify children with stories of apocalyptic firestorms.

Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. This op-ed is adapted from his new book, “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.”

h/t Steve B.

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