Forest Fires – March 2022

CSS-17 This Forest Fire Update has played out the same as my recent OPS-57 – Hurricane Update – 2021 Season post. Like the Hurricane downtrend, Forest Fires have been and will continue to trend down for awhile as well. Even the dramatically high (local) seasons like 2020 (in California) or the dramatically low (local) season (like the 2020 all time record low burn acreage in Canada) do very little to change or alter the longer-term trends. Given that atmospheric CO₂ levels have continued their unabated rise (despite substantial emissions drop due to COVID in 2020, OPS-45 – CO₂ Emissions and the IPCC), the IPCC should include the obvious net benefits (from Hurricane and Forest Fire declines) in their non-existent, comprehensive, ideology free Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) estimates. I am not going to hold my breath.

#climatechange #delaythegreen #globalwarming #showusthedata

Alarmingly, this update was complicated by various governments’, very obvious attempts to hide older data that does not conform to the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) alarmist narrative. That is not surprising, given the alarmist “climate scientist” community’s decades long program that routinely and repeatedly “homogenizes” the measured surface temperature data to conform to the CAGW narrative (rather than correcting the “narrative” to conform to the data). Can you say Scientific Method?

The most recent example is the Biden Administration’s decision to remove the pre-1983 fire information from their public government websites. That conveniently happens to be the year where Forest Fires hit their lowest value in the last 100 years. Not that surprising that the result is then a rising burn acreage trend. Conveniently (for the CAGW alarmist crowd), the general public is no longer exposed to the massively higher burn acreages that were common at LOWER CO₂ concentrations. The 2021 USA fire season burn acreage was 7.13 MMacres. Tragic and in many localized areas, disastrous, but those numbers are small compared to the 40 to 50 million acres that burned each year during the Dirty Thirties or the 145 million acres that burned annually between 1500 and 1800 AD.

Ironically, hiding the older data has not been as successful as the CAGW alarmists might have liked. The fire data (which fortunately cannot be homogenized) still shows an overall anti-correlation to CO₂ (CO₂ is rising, forest fires are declining). The Number of Fires and Burnt Acreage in the USA has been declining for most of the 21^st century. In Canada, the Number of Fires has been declining and the Burnt Acreage has been flat since the early 1980s. In Australia and Europe, Burnt Acreage has been generally declining over the data periods (1900 – 2020 and 1980 – 2020, respectively). The number of fires was not available. And that can all be wrapped up with a NASA satellite-based study that showed Burned Area Trends were down globally from 1998 to 2015 by 24%. So no, there is NO CLIMATE EMERGENCY!