When California erupted in flames, the climate scolds didn't waste any time in pronouncing the disasters - such as the Pacific Palisades wildfire - to be all our fault, because of our unwillingness to sacrifice our modern technological lifestyle on the altar of climate change. Those same scolds, of course, are strangely quiet on the topic of John Kerry's private jets or Leonardo DiCaprio's mega-yacht, but that's a story for another time.
The problem the climate scolds so often run into is that their claims are often not supported by the facts. The Daily Sceptic's Environment Editor, Chris Morrison, brings us the story of a Forest Service-led study showing that wildfires are actually at historic lows since the mid-1700s, and that determination was made by looking at physical data - fire scars.
Sensational new findings published in Nature Communications effectively blow the politicised wildfire climate change scam out of the water. Far from human-caused climate change making wildfires worse across the United States and Canada, it was found that recent fires occurred at a rate of only 23% of that expected from a review of the previous historical record going back to the 17th century. The researchers note that a current “widespread fire deficit” persists across a range of forest types and the areas burned in the recent past “are not unprecedented” when considering the multi-century perspective.
There is a catch (there's always a catch) and that is that, while the number of wildfires was greater in the past, the study data appears to indicate that the extent of individual fires is greater now. This is very likely due to poor forest management practices.
But the overall conclusion slams the door on the climate scold claims of ever-increasing fires.
In a conclusion that should (but it won’t) destroy the non-stop mainstream wildfire fearmongering, the scientists found that based on the fire scar record, the NAFSN sites would have been expected to burn 4,346 times from 1984-2022, yet they burnt only 989 times, a figure that is just 23% of what would have been expected under the historical fire regime. While these factual findings are dramatic, they should not come as a great surprise. Much to the chagrin of climate activists and the attribution artists, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has detected no human involvement in fire weather activity to date and expects none going forward to 2100.
These are facts. Fire scars are actual, physical evidence of a historic event, one that, due to stacking historic tree-ring data, can be very accurately dated. The records go back to the mid-1700s, conveniently when European explorers and settlers first came into the various landscapes and started cutting trees for building houses and other buildings - and some of these trees bore fire scars, and some of those structures are still standing.
It's an interesting technique.
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The climate scolds and their enablers in the legacy media, of course, always seem to find a way to massage the data. In this case, they do so by cutting the data off in the early '80s.
The graph below shows that US wildfires were much worse in the past and its veracity is confirmed by Parks et al. Dramatic improvements are shown since the end of the 1920s. But in 2021, at the height of the Biden Green Mania, the chart was withdrawn by the National Interagency Fire Centre and replaced with information from the conveniently low point of 1983. Excuses were made that the past data were unreliable.
The graph in question:
Here's the onion:
The replacement of course meant that trusted messengers could report that wildfires had been increasing in the US, creating the obligatory ‘record’ years. The American meteorologist and founder of the climate site Watts Up With That? Anthony Watts was less than impressed. “This wholesale erasure of important public data stinks, but in today’s narrative control culture that wants to rid us of anything that might be inconvenient or doesn’t fit the ‘woke’ narrative, it isn’t surprising,” he observes.
This is not just fudging the data. This is dishonest. It's journalistic malpractice. It's breaking faith with the readers/viewers who depend on the media to bring them accurate information, but, of course, it's been many years since the legacy media did any such thing.
In this case, the facts are plain to see. Human-caused climate change is not causing an increase in wildfires, because there has not been an increase in wildfires since the start of the Industrial Revolution, which climate scolds seem to agree is the wellspring of everything wrong with the environment today. But, as always, if you look at the actual data, the actual numbers, they don't support the climate scold's claims.
As I'm fond of saying: These are facts.
You can view the original study here.
