Last Saturday, the Daily Sceptic examined the claim reported by Matt McGrath of the BBC that forest fires had nearly doubled in the last 20 years, and the “key factor” was climate change. We looked at the underlying data and found a more rational explanation was the improvement in the collection of satellite data around 2012. The story became the subject of a Twitter fact check by the Forbes climate writer Dave Vetter.
“Once again, climate denier Toby Young is trumpeting fossil fuel industry propaganda. This time it’s about forest fires. He links to his blog Daily Sceptic, a site where a handful of middle aged guys practice science illiteracy”.
One might raise a complaint that Vetter missed “white and pale” out of his introduction, but no matter. He says that I picked several studies to support the contention that there were fewer wildfires today than there were in the past. But Vetter ignored the central data point around which the story was constructed. The data on tree loss came from Global Forest Watch (GFW), which used a satellite feed from the University of Maryland. It was claimed over half the 9.3 million hectares burnt globally were to be found in Russia.
Above is the Russian graph on tree fire loss we published (taken from GFW). We reported that past results going back to 2001 were flat for a decade, then different reporting and modelling came in and, after an initial upward adjustment, they have been flat ever since. Far from global fire losses being “staggering” over the last 20 years, as faithfully reported by the BBC, it’s possible that they haven’t changed much over the period. That was certainly the opinion of the Royal Society in October 2020, which said there had been no overall increase in total area burnt by fire in the past two decades.
At this point, Vetter entered the fray. “Morrison claims there are fewer wildfires today than in the early 20th century, and cites a 2016 paper from Professor Stefan Doerr and Dr Christina Santin who conclude ‘there is less fire in the global landscape than centuries ago’.” Not mentioned by Vetter is the additional statement that the global area burned “appears to have declined over past decades”. Of course, I didn’t make the claim he attributes to me, but reported factually what the two academics had found. At least Vetter is accurate in reporting some of the academics’ views.
But he continued: “Curiously, Morrison doesn’t cite more recent work from Doerr and Santin, who this year wrote ‘wildfire risk has grown nearly everywhere’ and ‘the pace at which fire weather conditions are increasing is accelerating faster than climate models predicted’. Equally curious, it might be noted, is that Vetter is just quoting opinion to counter the “increasing evidence”, supplied by the same academics in 2016, that there is “less fire in the global landscape than centuries ago”. It’s true, however, that many academics go out of their way to stress ‘climate change’ in their work these days. The 2016 paper barely mentioned it. To all intents and purposes, the last statement about climate models is meaningless.
Finally, Vetter tops up the abuse, accusing the Daily Sceptic of “regurgitating the same old debunked lie in order to further their agenda”. The lie in question? This official US wildfires graph:
This graph has long been distressing for those who want to paint a picture of a world ablaze with uncontrolled fires caused by humans changing the climate. So distressing, it seems, that last year the National Interagency Fire Center removed all data before 1983 from its official record. No doubt by the sheerest of coincidences, the new 1983 start date is a convenient low point, so the mainstream media can report that wildfires have recently been increasing in the U.S.
There has been much debate about the validity of this data. Some argue record keeping was not as strict in the earlier part of the 20th century. Different agencies might have recorded fires twice, although others note that some fires would have escaped official notification. But we know that the 1920s and ’30s were prone to high levels of heat in the U.S., and prolonged droughts led to ‘dustbowl’ conditions. The overall downwards fire trend suggests numerous natural factors at work, and anthropogenic climate change is unlikely to have played a big part. Vetter points to a recent PolitiFact fact check in which it was claimed that the “best assessment suggests” that fires today are about on the scale the country saw in the first few decades of the 20th century. PolitiFact provides a list of sources to back up its claim. Many are detailed science papers, but there seems little sign of any serious attempt to cast doubt on the veracity of the full record.
Of course, Vetter can throw around all the abuse he likes. But wildfires are a natural, and vital, part of the Earth’s ecosystem. Humans do not cause fires by warming the planet, although they do ignite a vast number of them, either accidentally or on purpose. Biblical incantations of fire and damnation have always been popular with religious cults – the climate Thermogeddonites are just the latest in a long line.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environmental Editor.
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“Middle aged guys”
Lol. You know they feel their argument is weak when they throw in that kind of stuff. Middle aged, literally Hitler.
Obviously Toby Young spouts fossil fuel industry propaganda as he’s getting kickbacks from Shell, Esso etc. But no “vaccine” advocates receive money from Big Pharma.
Ten out of ten for your final paragraph!
“Curiously, Morrison doesn’t cite more recent work from Doerr and Santin, who this year wrote ‘wildfire risk has grown nearly everywhere.’ ”
“wildfire risk”
That’s not fires is it? I could describe our house as a “wildfire risk,” but in the twenty years we’ve lived here it hasn’t caught fire; especially after we ripped out the dodgy old electrics.
What’s the saying, once they attack the person rather than the position, they’ve lost the argument?
Play the ball, not the man.
I love it when they just throw in “right wing” or “Trump supporter” and think it’s QED. In their woolly-headed world, if you have any opinions in that direction then everything you say can be immediately disregarded and it’s demonstrably false.
Trump is part of the same evil cabal with a different colour rosette pinned onto his jacket. He’s a member of the Scottish Masons.
I’m not a huge fan of his but I would have voted for him over Clinton and Biden and I think their respective records vindicate my choice. He was flaky over covid, sadly.
He’s the alternative to Biden/Clinton/Obama in terms of voter choice but just a different face to front the cabal
The ‘ad hominen’ approach is most often seen in politics and the law. I wonder why?
We’re used to those who question the narrative being called ‘climate change deniers’, ie as in ‘Holocaust denier’. That term is silly enough, as many scientists are not ‘denying’ that ‘climate’ ‘changes’ every so often, but are questioning how much of that change is due to man-made activity.
But ‘climate denier’? Has anyone here ‘denied’ that we have a ‘climate’?
As far as I am concerned, anyone who uses the term “denier” has automatically lost the argument (unless they’re talking about ladies’ stockings or tights, of course).
LOL – yes!
I’m absolutely a climate denier: I deny that what the climate change affirmers consider to be an indicator of climate change, namely, the so-called average global temperature, has any meaning as averages of measurements of different things still don’t make any sense.
Apart from that: One can only speculate what other shortcuts people who are intellectually to lazy to include the change in climate change denier and the dioxide in carbon dioxide neutral usually make when expressing or formulating their thoughts. Eg, the could possibly have dropped the not from The risk of wild fires has not increased to arrive at The risk of wild fires has increased and this ellipsis could than accidentally have gotten lost in the mists of time.
Fires have also declined globally – see figure 6 in this paper: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2013JG002532
Our leaders have destroyed lives, it’s time for them to take a walk
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Just a suggestion – if at the head of each piece DS says that any ‘fact checks’ will themselves be subjected to ‘fact checks’, that will encourage people to return to the DS to see the reply.
There is definitely a need for a Fact Checker Checker. Reuters puts out some particularly poor quality fact checking, it’s full of mistakes.
Reuters is the mouthpiece & source of all the approved news for the NWO
It’s behind a paywall isn’t it, hardly any reads it anymore.
It’s behind the ‘fact checkers’ quoted by MSM & is the coordinator of the news, nothing to do with paywalls.
It’s time we stopped referring to these people as ‘fact checkers’. Perhaps ‘paid propagandist’ is more apt.
Spot on.
How many facts can a fact checker check if a fact checker’s fact checks fact…or something like that. Meaningless nonsense anyway, they might as well be Chubby Checker’s Checkfact Band…
There are videos circulating on Telegram (couldn’t find a source so haven’t posted here) of helicopters dropping water onto forest fires which when examined closely are flame throwers dropping flames onto forests….
Heres a rabbit hole for you.
“Is the military industrial complex insane enough to incinerate Earth’s last remaining forests in order to achieve the objectives of the global controllers? The short answer is yes. A formerly classified US military document titled “Forest Fire As A Military Weapon” is a truly shocking exposé of planned scorched Earth destruction. The US Forest Service actually participated in the research and planning that went into this military instruction manual for carrying out orchestrated forest fire catastrophes. What part have climate intervention operations played in the preparation of forests for extreme and unprecedented incineration all over the world? The short video report below reveals the shocking degree of research that the US military and the US Forest Service has put into preparing forests for extreme incineration.
“Geoengineering operations are completely disrupting the global hydrological cycle, drying out forests and driving record wildfires around the world. Climate engineering is fueling global incineration.”
https://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/wildfires-as-a-weapon-us-military-exposed/
Thanks. You & I must be in the same rabbit warren
Yes it’s getting busy down here. Newcomers moving in all the time.
If the essence of this article, that forest fires aren’t increasing, is correct then your forest burning project isn’t very effective. I don’t need a convoluted theory to explain something that isn’t happening.
Brilliant riposte.
The PolitiFact text is interesting. Firstly, because it relies on the standard postmodern historians trick of casting speculative doubt on historical sources by enumerating all kinds of errors believed to exist in a dataset and pointing out that it’s unknown how large their effects happened to be. The same obviously applies to any dataset: There will always be errors in it and we don’t know how large the actually are because the data we have is the one with all the known errors eliminated.
Secondly, and that’s much more interesting, because someone tried to reconstruct historical accurate historical data by using unspecified heuristics to eliminate what he believed to be errors. The resulting data set isn’t any better than the actual one, it basically just represents an unverifiable opinion on how the historical should have looked like, according to a climate change affirmer. And the outcome is: After 100 years of ever more human-generated CO2 in the atmosphere, things are basically back to where they were before this increase happened. So, the basic claim is climate change caused wildfires to become as bad as they were before climate change!
WTF?
Being a grizzly old b’stard, I take ‘middle-aged’ as a compliment.
Thank you.
These fact checkers are merely noisy propagandists promoting their evil hard left agenda, call them out.
Ukraine account for over the 50% of the area burned by forest and wildland fires in Europe as of August 2022 this year. The area burned is some 25 times the country’s average between 2006-2021. At the same time there is a decrease in Portugal, Greece, Italy, and Turkey. If it wasn’t the war in Ukraine, believe it or not, we would be well below the 15y average, this year of “disastrous” climate phenomena.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1260777/area-burned-by-wildfire-in-european-countries/
If the fact checkers are piling in you know that you are over the target!
That’s a good one, Bill, thanks – taking on a bit of flakcheck. One to remember.
And the policy of greenies to allow the dead wood load in forests to build up?
I heard or read a report somewhere that the increase in forest fires is caused by poor forest management. What used to be done for thousands of years was a bit of controlled burning to burn the dry tinder on the ground, so that large scale fires can’t happen. Does anybody else know anything about this and can anyone post any such links?
I posted the 1200 scientist article and Facebook “fact checked” it, then censored it. I think this might be a good thing. They know the wheels are falling off their whole catastrophic anthropogenic climate change narrative It is so obviously BS at this point that they’re now running scared.