Among the top items in a Google News search under “climate change,” National Public Radio (NPR) is warning of a wildfire apocalypse, even as the United Nations reports a decline in drought and objective data to show a decline in wildfires.
The NPR article, “Everything Is Unprecedented. Welcome To Your Hotter Earth,” asserts global warming makes wildfires worse, claiming “the most power wildfires … are all in our future.” That would require a sudden and unexplained reversal in recent climate trends.
Drought is the primary climate component that would affect wildfires. Yet, as reported in Climate at a Glance: Drought, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports with “high confidence” that precipitation has increased over mid-latitude land areas of the Northern Hemisphere (including the United States) during the past 70 years.
Also, IPCC has “low confidence” about any negative precipitation trends occurring globally.
Moreover, in 2017 and 2019, the United States registered its smallest percentage of land area experiencing drought in recorded history.
Furthermore, the United States is undergoing its longest period in recorded history with less than 40 percent of the country experiencing “very dry” conditions.
If global warming is making drought – and thus wildfires – more frequent and severe, why do the objective data show exactly the opposite?
Data from federal government sources confirm the IPCC’s findings. As reported in Climate at a Glance: Wildfires, long-term data from U.S. National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) show wildfires have declined in number and severity in recent decades.
Using data on U.S. wildfires from as far back as 1926, NIFC reports the number of acres burned is far less now than it was throughout the early 20th century.
As Figure 1 below shows, current acres burned run about 1/4th to 1/5th of the record values which occurred in the 1930s.
Globally, the data on wildfires are just as clear. In his book False Alarm, Bjorn Lomborg observes:
“There is plenty of evidence for a reduction in the level of devastation caused by fire, with satellites showing a 25 percent reduction globally in burned areas just over the past 18 years … In total, the global amount of area burned as declined by more than 540,000 square miles, from 1.9 million square miles in the early part of the last century to 1.4 million square miles today.”
It is easy to make unjustified, alarmist climate change claims. We at Climate Realism, however, will continue to set the record straight.
Read more at Climate Realism
The only thing unprecedented is the media claiming every weather event or forest fire is unprecedented. They get away with it because of the ignorance of the young who haven’t lived long enough to see that disasters like hurricanes and forest fires have happened many times in the past.
The big trouble with the M.S. Media like with the Democrats and the Eco-Freaks is they blame all weather disasters on Global warming/Climate Change and Trump as well since maybe of these same idiots blame him for the Virus
Bushfires in Australia are nothing new. They come from a dry climate, flammable vegetation that uses fire for reproductive advantage and land management, the latter being something that the Aboriginal people living a stone-technology semi-nomadic lifestyle achieved to a high standard but which cannot be fathommed by our highly mis-educated environmentalists with all the resources available today.
If carbon dioxide warms the Earth, it shall dampen the land too. CO2 doesn’t warm it much though, but it does grow more vegetation. In Australia that means more fires potentially. However, more vegetation also increases rainfall, so the net result may well be no real change to the overall bushfire threat. To say CO2 will cause an apocalyptic fire problem is to play politics.
If we want to reduce the threat we need to reduce the environmentalist grip in conservation policy. It makes no sense to have those who stand to benefit politically from the devastation caused by bushfires, through mis-information, holding the keys to preventing bushfires.
We need to get back to some Common Sense and use science instead of Politics and Litigation