No, Al Jazeera, Climate Change Is NOT Resulting in More Air Pollution From Wildfires

Guest essay by Linnea Lueken

Al Jazeera posted an article titled “Climate-change-driven wildfires increasing air pollution across globe: UN,” which claims that wildfires are becoming more frequent due to climate change, and so air pollution from their smoke is as well. This is false and it’s telling that they framed it the way they did. Wildfires are not getting worse, according to satellite data, and so air pollution due to them is also not getting worse.

Al Jazeera reported that wildfire smoke “made significant contributions to air pollution last year, according to the United Nations’ weather and climate agency[.]” This may be true, wildfires do produce air pollution, but what they say next takes this story from factual to false:

“In a report released on Friday, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said wildfires, likely to have been made more frequent by climate change, are releasing a “witches’ brew” of pollutants that can end up wrecking air quality a continent away.”

Again wildfires absolutely do contribute to air pollution, and they may have caused significant pollution last year, but the framing – that this is getting worse due to climate change—is completely false.

The article does not outright say that anyone tracked a long-term record of increasing air pollution due to wildfires. That is probably because there is no data to support that idea. Indeed, towards the end of the article they acknowledge that human interventions, especially in cities, to mitigate air pollution have had measurable and dramatic effect, with “long term, a strong decrease” over time in recorded air pollution, according to the WMO global atmosphere chief.

Luckily the claim of increasing wildfires causing more pollution is an easy bit of alarmist narrative to slap down. In order for there to be an increase in global air pollution from wildfires over time due to global warming, there needs to be an increase in wildfires in the first place.

However, data show that this is not the case. Satellite data from NASA show that global burned acreage has significantly declined over the period of record since 1998.(See figure below)

According to that NASA data, despite the modest warming of the last several decades, wildfires have declined 24 percent since 1998. As discussed in Climate at a Glance: Global Wildfires, European Space Agency (ESA) data also confirms this trend. Also, reconstructions of global historical records show that wildfires have been in a significant long-term decline since the early 1900s, at least.

One of the regions highlighted by Al Jazeera was the Amazon basin, in which last year the WMO reported the “biggest PM 2.5 surge.” But is this driven by an increase in wildfires? Again, no.

Data from Copernicus, a joint project of the ESA and NASA, show fires are trending down in Brazil, where most of the Amazon basin is located.

Climate Realism has shown many times that this is the case, especially globally, and yet alarmists in the media continue to promote the narrative that climate change is making wildfires worse.

They say “where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” but in this case there is no fire, and thus no resulting smoke. Al Jazeera could have easily checked this data, but instead produced a misleading and alarming report.