Prayers for Rain: New Fires Add to Texas Disaster

Fox Weather: “We’re praying for rain.”

As Texas burns, Alberta declares an early beginning to fire season, and conditions are ripe for a repeat of last year’s poisonous clouds of smoke to cover the US – the usual suspects are out with disinformation on wildfires.
PolitiFact has this very handy, and well annotated, fact check.

PolitiFact:

• Flawed government data appears to show a massive decline in wildfires after 1930.
• The data suffered from double and triple counting, and in the 1920s and 1930s, federal officials wrongly recorded millions of acres of intentional fires as wildfires.
• The best assessments suggest that fires today are about on the scale the country saw in the first few decades of the 20th century.

An article from the conservative Heartland Institute argues that the role of climate change is “grossly overemphasized.” 

“U.S. acres burned each year are much fewer now — even in our worst years — than was the case in the early 20th century,” the Oct. 11 article said.

The author points to U.S. government data that shows a dramatic drop in the number of acres burned, from over 40 million in 1930 down to 10 million around 2015.

The problem is, federal officials have known for some time that their data was unreliable, and this year, they took most of it off their website (which drew accusations of cherry picking the numbers from the Heartland Institute).

Many factors made the data shaky. Perhaps the most intriguing part of this story of bad data is that the government’s old information includes millions of acres in the 1920s and 1930s that burned not by accident, but by intent. On top of that, there was also double counting, and, as some see it, undercounting.

If you go to the federal center’s wildfire page today, you will find this message: “Prior to 1983, the federal wildland fire agencies did not track official wildfire data using current reporting processes. As a result, there is no official data prior to 1983 posted on this site.”

A 2015 article from a Forest Service researcher explained why that data was unreliable. She wrote that multiple federal, state and local agencies filled out fire reports each in their own way, using different approaches to report different kinds of information. The article talked about records “compromised by inherent reporting biases, inconsistencies and errors or uncertainty in the data.”

There were instances when fires were counted twice, or more, said John Abatzoglou, a fire researcher at the University of California Merced.

“Some fires can be counted in triplicate as multiple agencies responding to the fire would count that fire in their summary statistics,” Abatzoglou said.

The Heartland article author, senior fellow H. Sterling Burnett, minimized that concern.

“It’s not that there isn’t any overcounting,” Burnett said. “But people managing federal agencies were smart enough to notice when two organizations reported the same fire.”

As a record of the total number of acres burned over many years, historian Stephen Pyne, Arizona State University professor emeritus, said he thinks the government probably underestimated the damage.

“Most of the country outside federal lands was not counted at all,” Pyne said. 

The most certain conclusion about the government numbers behind the chart is that they can’t be trusted.

But many experts who have dug into the archives talk about a major flaw that greatly inflated the federal statistics. They describe how conflict between the U.S. Forest Service and southern landowners likely threw off the totals by millions of acres.

1920 to 1930: A heated dispute in the southeast

In a 2018 article, Randal O’Toole, a senior fellow with the libertarian Cato Institute, included that same chart showing the dramatic fall in wildfires based on federal data. O’Toole is skeptical of broad claims of climate change. But O’Toole offered this chart with a stinging caption.

“Some people use the data behind this chart to argue against anthropogenic climate change. The problem is that the data before about 1955 are a lie.”

O’Toole noted that at the turn of the 20th century, Congress told the Forest Service to suppress fires. This mandate put the federal agency in direct conflict with landowners in the southeast. The Forest Service was steadfast in its opposition to all fires. But the southeaster landowners burned their forests every four or five years to control underbrush.

“Perhaps 20% of forests would be burned each year, compared with less than 1% of forests burned through actual wildfires,” O’Toole wrote. “The Forest Service responded by counting all fires in that state, prescribed or wild, as wildfires.”

There is broad agreement on this problem.

“The early U.S. Forest Service wildfire activity summaries do include millions of hectares of intentional burning on ‘unprotected’ lands, which, until approximately the mid-20th century was viewed by the U.S. Forest Service as akin to wildfire, as something that should be prevented and ultimately eradicated,” the Forest Service researcher wrote in that 2015 article.

That wasn’t exactly news. Researchers for an outside report commissioned by the Forest Service wrote in 2003 that “in excess of 10 million acres were burned by wildfires annually” between 1930 and 1950. 

“Most of the area burned during this period was in the Southeastern United States and were primarily incendiary fires,” the authors wrote. (Incendiary fires are intentional fires.)

We raised these issues of the unreliability of the federal database with Heartland’s Burnett. He said many articles in peer-reviewed journals had also relied on it.

“You can only go with the data you have,” Burnett said.

He said even if the numbers are flawed, the number of acres lost to wildfires today is still less than it was in 1930. That’s unlikely.