Wildfires And Climate Change: Narrative Ever More Detached From Actual Evidence

June 16, 2023/ Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian 

 Here in New York during the past couple of weeks, we had some days where the air was rather incredibly smoky. At times, you could barely see the Empire State Building from where I live (about one mile). The smoke was said to originate from wildfires in the Canadian forests, mostly in Quebec but some farther West.

Getting such a large amount of smoke around here from wildfires in Canada is quite unusual. Indeed, I can’t remember it happening previously, at least to this extent. So something must be different. Could this all be the result of — CLIMATE CHANGE????!!!!

Of course, the media have been filled with articles making the wildfires-to-climate-change link. You probably saw as many of these stories as I did. Here is a small sample:

• From the Washington Post, June 3, 2023: “It’s already a wildfire season for the record books in Canada, with the blistering heat of summer and howling winds of fall still ahead. . . . The rash of blazes, intensified by record heat in many areas, is an ominous sign of the ill effects of climate change, which are not confined to Canada.”
• From Carbon Brief, June 9: “Huge clouds of smoke from the blaze have blown thousands of kilometres down to the eastern US, shrouding cities such as New York and Washington DC in an orange haze and causing levels of toxic air pollution to reach record levels. Scientists have been quick to make the link with climate change. The hot and dry conditions resulting from rising global temperatures are known to make wildfires more extreme. Many US commentators said the fires should act as a “wake-up call” for climate action.”
• From CBS News, June 12: “One month in, Canada is on track to have its most destructive wildfire season in history. Climate change-driven extreme temperatures and drought have created a tinderbox.“

And don’t forget our ever-authoritative Senator Chuck Schumer (quoted in The Hill, June 7):

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called the Canadian wildfires “truly unprecedented” in floor remarks Wednesday and warned of the ongoing damage caused by climate change.

The link between wildfires and climate change just seems so intuitively obvious. Who could be so uncouth as to question it? But do real world data show a correlation between climate change and wildfires that could potentially be an indicator of a causal relationship?

My friend Joe D’Aleo (he’s a member of the Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council that is the plaintiff in our DC Circuit litigation against EPA) runs a website called ICECAP where, among many other things, he regularly posts various research and data in a section called “Climate Alarmist Claim Fact Checks.” On Monday June 12 he posted this piece, with the title “More on the Recent Smoky Days.” Joe’s piece collects data from actual authoritative sources as to numbers of wildfires and acres burned by year.

There is much interesting data in Joe’s piece, all of it contradicting the simplistic “climate change causes wildfires” narrative. I’ll give a few examples. Here is chart of acres burned by wildfires in the U.S. from 1926 to 2017:

This chart was originally compiled by Danish environmentalist author Bjorn Lomborg. There were two main sources: something called the National Interagency Fire Center for data 1960 to 2017, and the Historical Statistics of the United States for 1926 to 1970. The two data sources overlap for the 10 year period 1960-70. D’Aleo describes how the two sources were combined:

Bjorn Lomborg overlapped National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) annual US fire data with the Historical Statistics of the United States – Colonial Times to 1970. There we have statistics for area burnt since 1926 and up to 1970. Reassuringly, the data for 1960-1970 ‘completely overlap.’ “This is the same data series.” Professor Lomborg said.

While these data may be far from perfect, there is no mistaking that the major trend is a dramatic decline in fires, with most of the decline having taken place from about 1930 to 1960. The recent uptick still leaves the amount of acreage burned annually in the range of one-fifth what it was in the early twentieth century. These data are rather obviously inconsistent with a narrative that wildfires are on a rapidly increasing trend due to warming temperatures from “climate change.”

An even more interesting chart reproduced by D’Aleo originates from a 2014 paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research with the very long title “Spatial and temporal patterns of global burned area in response to anthropogenic and environmental factors: Reconstructing global fire history for the 20th and early 21st centuries.” The authors, Yang, et al., are a group associated with the Canadian Forest Service. They put in a massive research effort to determine the acreage burned by wildfires worldwide from 1900 through 2010. The following chart comes from the Yang, et al., paper, with a separate line showing the atmospheric concentration of CO2 superimposed by Gregory Wrightstone of the CO2 Coalition:

Atmospheric CO2 goes continuously up; acreage burned in wildfires goes continuously down. How can that negative correlation be explained? Yang, et al., have many theories as to causation, some of them contradictory. But this one may be important:

CO2 can suppress fire occurrence by retaining more water in the soil [Nelson et al., 2004] through reducing transpiration [Ainsworth and Rogers, 2007].

In any event, whatever the underlying causal mechanisms (which may be complex), there is no denying that the simplistic “climate change causes increased wildfires” narrative cannot be right.

The remarkable thing about this is the extent to which the Washington Post, CBS News, Chuck Schumer, and dozens more of like thinkers just repeat a narrative that is clearly wrong, and see no need to ever look at actual data to try to understand what is going on