Fire Tornadoes!

Along with “The oceans are boiling!” the latest global warming hysteria relates to fire tornadoes:

A massive fire burning across both California and Nevada is generating extreme fire behavior, spawning “fire whirls” and creating dangerous conditions for firefighters, authorities said.
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The blaze is among dozens of wildfires burning around the country as some areas swelter under unrelenting heat – including one fire raging on both sides of the US-Canadian border.
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Firefighters battling the blaze have seen fire whirls – “a vortex of flames and smoke that forms when intense heat and turbulent winds combine, creating a spinning column of fire,” the Mojave National Preserve said Sunday.

Of course, if you read to the end of CNN’s breathless account, you learn that acres burned in wildfires so far this year are down 81% compared with the same date last year.

More broadly, acreage burned by wildfires in the U.S. is down by around 80% compared with the 1920s and 1930s, and if you go back to the 18th century, there were even more acres burned. Forest fires have been a fact of life for millions of years. To the extent that there has been a slight increase in recent years (although still vastly below historical levels), it is largely in California and is the result of poor forest management practices that are insisted on by environmentalists.

Bjorn Lomborg provides additional perspective in the Wall Street Journal (see original for links):

For more than two decades, satellites have recorded fires across the planet’s surface. The data are unequivocal: Since the early 2000s, when 3% of the world’s land caught fire, the area burned annually has trended downward.

In 2022, the last year for which there are complete data, the world hit a new record-low of 2.2% burned area.

That’s right. 2022 set a record low for global acres burned by wildfires. This is the chart:

Fewer wildfires represents good news that is being suppressed:

The thick smoke from the Canadian fires that blanketed New York City and elsewhere was serious but only part of the story. Across the world, fewer acres burning each year has led to overall lower levels of smoke, which today likely prevents almost 100,000 infant deaths annually, according to a recent study by researchers at Stanford and Stockholm University.

Lomborg provides historical context as described above:

In the case of American fires, most of the problem is bad land management. A century of fire suppression has left more fuel for stronger fires. Even so, last year U.S. fires burned less than one-fifth of the average burn in the 1930s and likely only one-tenth of what caught fire in the early 20th century.

You might think that due to the law of averages, if nothing else, climate hysterics would sometimes be right about something. But their batting average is abysmal:

When reading headlines about fires, remember the other climate scare tactics that proved duds. Polar bears were once the poster cubs for climate action, yet are now estimated to be more populous than at any time in the past half-century. We were told climate change would produce more hurricanes, yet satellite data shows that the number of hurricanes globally since 1980 has trended slightly downward.

Fortunately, most voters have heard the environmentalists cry “Wolf!” too many times, and are not disposed to sacrifice their standard of living to chimerical climate goals. Now they need to make their views known to politicians, too many of whom are following the “green” money.