It was another vintage year in 2024 for ramping up the great wildfire climate change scam in southern Europe. The Guardian reported that fires in Portugal showed climate breakdown in action. “The global reality of the climate breakdown has moved into the everyday lives of Europeans,” noted the EU’s crisis management commissioner Janez Lenarcic. For those of us with less vivid imaginations living in the real world it might be observed that wildfires across southern Europe fell for the second year in succession and are running below average, while the overall trend is little changed since the 1980s.
Paul Homewood has published his latest updated graph showing wildfire trends across southern Europe. It is not difficult to understand why this graph will not be shown in mainstream media, where almost constant disinformation suggests wildfires are increasing due to human-caused climate change. In fact wildfires levels were often worse before the turn of the century and 2024 was the 10th lowest year since 1980.
Alas we did not have a repeat of Suzanne Moore’s hilarious commentary on European wildfires when she told readers of the Daily Telegraph in 2023 that the “world is on fire – and we can’t ignore it any longer”. She went on to suggest that a retreat by cautious holiday makers on the Greek island of Rhodes was “what climate refugees look like”. Never to be outdone when it comes to pouring Ultra Processed News into the mainstream diet, the Guardian observed that the lesson from Greece is that the “climate crisis is coming for us all”.
Homewood also notes a December 2024 BBC World Service broadcast that referred to deadly wildfires raging in countries like Spain, Canada and Greece. “And as the Earth warms up, they’re becoming increasingly common and harder to deal with,” it claimed.
Again the factual details from Greece are unlikely to feature in any future Net Zero-inspired messaging. As can be seen, 2023 was a particularly bad year for fires but last year came in around the average. Discerning a human hand behind the regular ups and downs of Greek wildfires is not immediately apparent.
As Homewood notes: “The BBC – the place where facts go to die.”
Last Saturday, the Daily Sceptic published the sensational findings of a group of scientists working for the USDA Forestry Service that found the United States and Canada were currently running a massive ‘fire deficit’ compared to the recent past. Examining tree fire scar data going back to 1600 they found that recent fires were running at a rate of only 23% compared to the historical record. Areas burned by wildfires during the last few decades “remain relatively low”, they noted. Non-fire years were found to occur “significantly more often” in the contemporary period than in the historic record. Alarmists of course were alert to the dangers posed by such inconvenient findings. One pre-publication reviewer saw the possibility of it being drawn to the attention of climate change deniers. “Consider if possible some rephrasing to put even more emphasis on impact rather than burned areas,” was the helpful suggestion. In other words, dial down the facts a tad, and a bit more please on all the fleeing refugees.
There is little doubt that humans have intervened to disturb the natural wildfire processes, not by changing the climate but by altering land use, while variously clearing forest debris or letting it accumulate. In addition, a role sometimes downplayed is an apparent rise in human fire-raising, whether deliberate or accidental. Given the facts and complexities surrounding wildfires, the attempts to attribute it to humans somehow changing the climate is little short of risible. Even the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has ruled out human involvement, both in the past and going forward to the turn of the century.
In 2023 the climate world was rocked when the scientist Patrick Brown blew the whistle on a paper he had published in Nature that focused exclusively on how climate change has affected extreme wildfire behaviour. “I left out the full truth to get my climate change paper published,” he admitted, adding: “To put it bluntly, climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change.”
Meanwhile, what news of the great olive oil drought in Spain that has restricted supplies for the last couple of years? Fears for the future of the local olive oil industry have grown “as the climate crisis worsens” stated the Guardian in July 2023. The BBC opined that climate change meant traditional assumptions that a poor harvest would be followed by a good one “are no longer safe”. Would Brits have to restrict use of the oil to removing ear wax, as in former times, and revert to pouring ‘salad cream’ on their lettuce? Fear not – the Daily Sceptic enjoys a good change in the weather story and is happy to report news from Olive Oil Times that ideal winter conditions, described as not too cold or hot, combined with a “perfect” level of rainfall has led to a bountiful 2024 harvest.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Whatever the year, whatever the place, mostly down to mishap, arson and neglected forestry curation, under activist pressure from green neophytes, fantasists and wishful thinkers.
Flood damage similarly largely down to drains, dredging and town and country planning.
All bread, butter, motherhood, apple pie and neighbourhood stuff. Meanwhile human welfare, life expectancy and a clean environment indisputably correlate with economic prosperity and the benefits of industrialisation. Compare Haiti and Holland and draw your own conclusions.
Go figure, greenies. The Madness of the Climate Crowd knows no bounds.
Well done. Of course, “altering land use” has included the construction of residential and industrial areas at locations that are vulnerable to wildfires, or indeed floods from time to time. No shortage of examples of that.
A real sceptic might observe that “a bountiful 2024 harvest” could lead to a collapse in market value of certain products, though!
And the EU will demand the UK contributes to their relief fund for olive growers.
We were taking a family holiday in Silves, Portugal, about 20 years ago and the local fire got so bad we had to evacuate to another cottage. I was told by several bar owners and even firefighters that a major cause is local farmers who see the chance of a quick Euro and set fire to an old barn, or the area surrounding it, and claim on insurance. Of course, it rapidly gets out of hand.
And some sources still insist that wildfires are worse now than ever!
So many factors must contribute to how much a wildfire spreads. So (rhetorically) I wonder how seriously we should take what must anyway be a rough and ready measurement.
I always enjoy Chris’s articles. Not least because he gets straight to the point!