by Michael Shellenberger at PUBLIC
Climate change is causing devastating fires around the world, say top government officials, influential scientists, and the world’s largest newspapers. Greece’s civil protection minister said climate change was causing the fires in Greece, Hawaii, and Canada. Climate change is increasing average temperatures that dry out wood and create fire weather. “The only way to prevent these events from becoming more frequent and more intense,” said climate scientist Michael Mann, “is to prevent the continued warming of the planet.”
And yet the amount of area burned annually by fire has declined over the last quarter-century. The area burned declined by an astonishing 25% between 2003 and 2019, according to NASA. That trend has continued since, noted Bjorn Lomborg in the Wall Street Journal. Last year, there was a record-low area burned. There is little doubt about the trend because the emissions from wildfires have also declined globally since 2003.
What’s more, the best science does not attribute fires to climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), notes climate change and disasters expert Roger Pielke, Jr., “has not detected or attributed fire occurrence or area burned to human-caused climate change.” According to the IPCC, the most important factor in fire is not the weather but rather “human activities,” both land management and the starting of fires by humans.
Few leaders, experts, and journalists, including us at Public, doubt climate change has some influence. All else being equal, warmer weather will dry out wood fuel more. The problem is that all else is never equal, and other factors matter much more, as fires in Greece, California, and Hawaii all show.
In a recent and comprehensive scientific review of the literature,…
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