Ross Clark has written a good piece for the Spectator’s Coffee House blog pointing out that 2023 has not been an unusually bad year for forest fires in Europe and, according to Nasa satellite date, the number of forest fires globally actually fell by about 25% between 2001 and 2015. Here’s how it begins:
Summer wouldn’t be complete without hordes of disgruntled British tourists being evacuated from their hotels, flown home early or spending their holidays sprawled on the floor of an international airport. But are the scenes of Rhodes really a symptom of a the world ‘being on fire’, as Greta Thunberg would put it?
Actually, in spite of scenes of burning forests on Rhodes and elsewhere being presented daily on our television screens, 2023 has not been a devastating year for forest fires in Europe. Data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), which covers the EU, shows that it has been an average year to date – with an early burst of fires in the spring followed by less activity since then.
It is a similar story with wildfires globally. A 2016 study published in a Royal Society journal using Nasa satellite data surprised many people by revealing that the amount of land burned annually in wildfires globally had decreased by about a quarter between 2001 and 2015. The authors have since updated their study and confirmed that in spite of increasing agonising over fires in the US, Europe and Australia, the amount of land being burned is still falling. This data includes all wildfires, not just forests – and globally 70% of fires are on grassland rather than forests.
None of this is to say that climate change is not increasing the risk of fires in certain locations at certain times of year, but it does rather undermine lazy claims about the world being on fire. If anything, the world is being damped down.
We have been conditioned to think that climate change is the overwhelming problem facing human civilisation and all other life on Earth. But why is the extent of fires not actually increasing in the way that climate campaigners frequently claim? Partly because in some places shifting patterns of rainfall have reduced the risk of fire. But also because rising global temperatures are not the only influence on fires.
The incidence of wildfires also has a lot to do with land use. Where wildfires have increased in recent years, such as in some parts of Eastern Europe, it is down to farmland being abandoned and allowed to return to scrubland, which contains far more flammable material. Urban development close to forested areas also plays a big role, increasing the sources of ignition through barbecues, overhead electricity wires and so on.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: The more likely cause of the fires in Greece is arson. Firefighters in Rhodes have indicated arson may be to blame, while local officials in Corfu say the fires in Corfu were started by arsonists. Not surprisingly, the BBC is still trying to argue that global warming is to blame: “There are reports that some fires may have been started by arsonists, but southern Europe’s extended heatwave has helped create the dry conditions that make it easier for flames to take hold and spread,” writes Justin Rowlatt, the Beeb’s Climate Editor. Careful with that straw you’re clutching, Justin. It might catch fire.
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Australia.
California.
Canada.
The land of Zeus and Odysseus.
Forest fires all starting at once and in defined areas.
I see a pattern. I am not the science and too stupid to understand it. But I think it means something. Ot maybe the plant food has organised a coordinated assault on these locales directed by Thunturd and Al Whore. So nuanced.
It’s the best psyop since covid
Wait for a heat wave
Get the useful idiot “environmentalists” to light strategic fires
Authorities over react and blame it all on climate change
Make sure MSM is on hand to spread scare stories
How many hotels have actually burned down?
Arsonists funded by… I wonder who? Something about oil, perhaps?
About “stopping oil”?
JUST STOP OIL!
My fiver will be on a green eco-terrorist who is angry at being ignored by normal people.
Wildfires in Greece are nothing new.
Must have been fake news. And anyway, TheScience™ has changed, sor.
Gladiator 2 is on the cards! Comes out next year, Marcus Aurelius isn’t in it, neither is maximus but, lucius is, and his mother..just thought you should know Marcus Aurelius!
Not if the strike continutes, it won’t.
No doubt some fires like that occur naturally, and sometimes they are caused by the stupid. Arson is probably rare. No shortage of opportunism by the usual suspects.
Sometimes better land management in various regions can reduce the risk as well, as mentioned by soundofreason. A fairly recent example is that I can remember times when it was common practice in some parts of agriculture to burn off stubble deliberately, after harvesting wheat and other crops. Not done now, but sometimes it caused a fair bit of disruption, if it resulted in fire damage spreading across the land boundary, like onto a railway line.
A couple of hundred people were charged after the Australian fires.
That’s almost as rare as Covid vaccine complications.
Let’s assume for a moment that it is true that the planet is warming and that more natural fires are occuring as a result.
But the question, as ever, would remain: WHY is the planet warming?! Because it sure isn’t down to anything us paltry little humans do.
The bigger question is why does higher temperatures start fires considering the temperature needed for spontaneous combustion. I can see that a warmer and dryer climate will result in more dry material to support fires but how does nature start them except by lightening strikes?
“None of this is to say that climate change is not increasing the risk of fires in certain locations at certain times of year…” – what on earth does that mean? There are no indicators from observational evidence that anything is happening to increase the risk of fires, and the climate always changes.
Well it’s a double negative, that doesn’t necessarily make a positive: “NONE of this is to say that climate change is NOT increasing the risk…” Very ambiguous. Is he implying that he believes it is? More likely he cleverly got around the hurdle of not being allowed to stray too far from the orthodoxy, by hiding behind some ambiguity… “None of this is to say that climate change IS increasing the risk” is also implicit from the same statement.
At least it’s good to see a small amount of healthy scepticism creeping into the mainstream publications these days. Once a pioneering few have put their heads above the parapet and voiced their human-induced-climate-change scepticism and other until-recently seemingly taboo subjects, others will follow, one can only hope!
Till my tongue stiffens! Oxygen, fuel, ignition !!
Spontaneous combustion does not exist!
Best way to get catastrophe attention! Start a fire🔥
The BBC describes the fires as a ‘biblical catastrophe’, not realising that a real biblical catastrophe – the coronal mass ejection of Rev 8:7, when all the world’s grass is burned up – is just round the corner.
Also there’s rarely mention that fewer mature trees are being cut down at the behest of environmentalists, meaning more old and dead trees in woods and forests than there used to be, providing lots of fuel. The old burnbacks have also been discontinued, meaning there’s more tinder. The ecoloons are making things worse.
Last summer, when it was warm, our local council didn’t cut back any weeds or grass in my area. The same as last year, there was brown grass three feet high that could have been set off by a carelessly tossed cigarette. This year, the council finally turned up and cut some of the grass about a month ago. It’s growing again, but I’ve been cutting it back 20 feet on the land adjacent to our house to keep some sort of buffer area for safety. And the council have the nerve to increase our council tax! They used to cut all the grass and weeds regularly. Now everywhere looks unkempt.
Many moons ago when I was in Zakynthos there was an enormous burned out area on the hillside. My friend who lived there said it had been started deliberately so that as it was no longer a natural forest houses etc could now be built there. Don’t know if this applies to the rest of the Greek island but it does make you think?
Also i know a firefighter who worked in California. He and many others in that service were complaining about the ‘dead wood’ in the forests. This ‘deadwood’ was not allowed to be cleared by the locals as use for firewood ‘cos it would damage the eco-system’ Talk about the dry tinder effect.
This is as well as the ancient aboriginal tribes in Australia used to practice controlled burning of areas which encouraged new growth. I do believe that this practice has now restarted in some areas.
Surely a fire can have an immediate cause of arson but climate chnage sets the conditions which make the arson more likely to succeed and the consequences more severe. No one is suggesting that climate change provides the spark or the match that sets the thing going.
Except that, as someone posted direct from the latest IPCC report on another topic (which the software won’t let me cut and paste) “a signal of climate change has not yet emerged … for… droughts of all types… and heatwaves” (amongst all other extreme weather phenomena). It goes on to say that such a signal is not expected to emerge, even under the extreme RCP8.5 scenario, by 2100 – with the possible exception of heavy rain.
On that basis, the last week’s weather in Britain might be a very early harbinger of climate change, but nothing that’s happened in Europe is.
So it seems you expect us not to believe our lying eyes, and not to believe even the technical report of the IPCC, but to believe politicians, broadcasters and meteorologists who know better. This appeal to authority I do not understand.
I’ll take the IPCC over the press. I was only disputing the argument “it was arsonists therefore it wasn’t climate change”. It would be interesting to read the relevant section of the IPCC report but no one seems to link to it. Whatever it says, it would obviously be looking back a few years not at current events.
I heard it first in a long-form interview with someone who is almost unique in having read the whole report of however many thousand pages. If I remember he was a former IPCC editor. The thing is constructed in layers, an initial scientific working-group report by scientific referees being based on selected research (which is itself, of course, only funded by IPCC if in line with its mission statement to demonstrate the adverse effects of anthropogenic climate change).
That report then gets edited by political appointees at IPCC (so it’s not uncommon to find conclusions that are contradicted by the cited sources, sometimes on the same page).
That in turn gets condensed as the report for policy makers, entirely by political types, so that this time, for example, the hockey stick diagram that was abandoned in previous reports because discredited is included again, though nothing in the “deeper layers” justifies it.
The politicians for the most part don’t even read that summary, but presumably a further precis made by their own civil servants with an eye to previous government policies. And the journalists rely on press released based on those, I guess.
In the case of the statement on extreme weather events (no trend) it’s right there in the final version of the working group report, but not, of course, in the summary for policy-makers. I had nor reason to remember the citation or its page number when I heard the discussion, but I saw it at the time and it’s there OK.
But even without wading through IPCC reports, the data on individual extreme weather types is easily found. For example, sourced information on US wildfire trends is here.
Which working group?
If I remembered that after several months I’d search out the reference for you myself, being ever helpful. I only record references for things I’m actually researching.
Fair enough. I just thought you might remember – after all there are only three to choose from. I tried searching the full report for WG1 but it is such a big document and I wasn’t certain I was using the right words I gave up. I guess we will never be certain what the IPCC actually wrote.
Is anyone looking into the poisonous chemicals falling from the chem trails being a reason things are more flamable at certain temperatures?
I don’t know about Europe; but fire season is big business in the USA. Starting about 25 years ago, our governments, US and states, have gone all in on fire-fighting infrastructure: command centers, very large budgets, equipment purchases, aircraft. Forest firefighters can make easily six-figure salaries in good year.
“…but southern Europe’s extended heatwave has helped create the dry conditions that make it easier for flames to take hold and spread,”
Where did the flames come from? Do they just appear when it’s hot?