As fires explode once again in Canada’s boreal forests, and unprecedented smoke clouds descend over the Eastern US, atmospheric expert Daniel Swain explains a newly popular climate denial meme, above.
Liars can use statistic. Who knew?
Nature -Increasing frequency and intensity of the most extreme wildfires on Earth:
Here we identify energetically extreme wildfire events by calculating daily clusters of summed fire radiative power using 21 years of satellite data, revealing that the frequency of extreme events (≥99.99th percentile) increased by 2.2-fold from 2003 to 2023, with the last 7 years including the 6 most extreme.
Although the total area burned on Earth may be declining, our study highlights that fire behaviour is worsening in several regions—particularly the boreal and temperate conifer biomes—with substantial implications for carbon storage and human exposure to wildfire disasters.
—–
Below, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, in his confirmation hearing, stands by his assertions that wildfire intensification from climate change is “hype”.
The frequency and magnitude of extreme wildfires around the globe have doubled in the past two decades because of climate change, according to a study published last year in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. Rising temperatures have ushered in an era of hotter and drier weather, lending the right conditions for wildfires to erupt, the researchers found.
A study released last week in the journal Nature Reviews also found that climate change is contributing to “weather whiplash” — periods of torrential rain followed by dry, tinderbox-like conditions — in the Los Angeles area. Experts say this trend set the stage for the Los Angeles blazes, along with other key factors such as urban sprawl and a resistance to clearing vegetation around homes.
In the opinion piece that Wright cited on LinkedIn, Lomborg noted that the total acreage burned globally by wildfires has been declining since 2001. This shows that “climate change hasn’t set the world on fire,” Lomborg concluded.
Several climate scientists told The Post that this argument is misleading because it focuses on total acreage rather than certain regions where climate change has fueled more frequent and destructive blazes.
“Acreage does not tell the whole truth,” Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, said in an email. “Places are burning today that never burned in the past. … Climate change has fundamentally altered the nature of wildfire.”
Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, said Lomborg averaged “irrelevant” decreases in the burning of savanna and grasslands with “far more relevant” increases in the burning of forests in parts of the United States and Australia.
“He cites irrelevant statistics to obscure the well-established trend toward more extensive and more intense wildfires in dry subtropical regions of Australia and the U.S.,” Mann said in an email.
“Human-caused climate change is the primary factor in the more widespread, damaging and deadly wildfires we have seen in the western U.S. in recent decades,” he added.
Dry forests have much more combustible mass than grassland.
The wildfire fighters noted decades ago that more of the fires they were fighting were crown fires, burning through the tops of trees, rather than understory forest “litter” fires.