SPACE.com ran a story claiming that 2024/2025’s wildfires are proof that climate change is making wildfires larger and more severe. This is false. Ground based data, where available, and satellite data both show that wildfires have declined in number and acreage lost over the past century, even as the Earth warmed slightly.
The SPACE.com article, “Wildfires are getting more intense around the world due to human-driven climate change,” is based on a single study published in the journal Earth System Science Data (ESSD), “State of Wildfires 2024-2025,” which makes the unscientific claim that a single year of severe wildfires provides proof that climate change is causing an increase in wildfires.
This assertion suffers from a number of deficiencies. First, it is impossible to honestly attribute a single year of weather or disaster phenomena to climate change. Only a long-term measurement and averaging of trends could indicate a pattern that might suggest climate change as a causal factor. Global wildfire incidences from 2024 to 2025 were due a combination of disparate factors – with different factors resulting in wildfires in different areas. Some factors were common among regions, some not. But none were common across all regions.
The 2024/2025 wildfire season was not, as will be demonstrated shortly, part of a long-term trend.
The underlying study used cherry picked data to claim wildfires were worsening. A review of larger data sets, both location-based historical measurements of wildfire acreage burned and large satellite data sets for recent decades, show the total number of wildfires and acreage lost to wildfires have declined sharply both over the past 130 years covering the pre-satellite era (see Figure 1 below for the United States) and the post-satellite era.
Looking at broader global data during the satellite era, data sets from both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) show a marked decline in the amount of acreage lost to wildfires, with NASA recording a 24 percent decline in acres lost to wildfires from 1998 to 2015. (See figure 2, below)
An ESA data set shows a similar declining trend. Scientific journals such as Science, Remote Sensing of the Environment, and Nature confirm these findings.
If there is an overall declining trend in wildfire numbers and acreage lost to wildfires, then climate change can’t be causing an increase in wildfires.
Those facts alone should be sufficient to discredit the SPACE.com article and the study it is based upon. When examining the specific wildfires discussed in the ESSD study one discovers that the wildfires in many instances weren’t wildfires at all. For instance, while the Los Angeles wildfire was large and destructive when compared to recent decades, it wasn’t historically unusual for the region. Also, its ignition, size, and destructiveness were the result, not of a changed climate – since temperatures have actually declined slightly there and precipitation has increased, but rather of a combination of arson, poor water management and neighborhood planning, and lack of fire response management. Nor as discussed at Climate Realism, were recent wildfires in Europe, the Mediterranean, Brazil, and Canada, historically unusual, or tied in anyway to long-term climate change. Moreover, they did create greater air pollution than they would have produced absent climate change.
The ESSD study ties the heightened danger of wildfires to climate change driven worsening drought and fire weather. However, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been unable to detect any change in fire weather patterns. (See the table, below)
The IPCC also reports that more precipitation is falling on average than in the previous 30 years of climate change.
As far as drought goes, in its 2021 Sixth Assessment report, the IPCC distinguishes four categories of drought: hydrological, meteorological, ecological, and agricultural. According to the IPCC, there is limited evidence climate change has increased the number, duration, or intensity of hydrological or meteorological droughts, and it has only medium confidence it has “contributed to changes in agricultural and ecological droughts and has led to an increase in the overall affected land area.”
Even for ecological and agricultural droughts, the data are not clear. The IPCC divides the world into 47 separate regions of study when analyzing drought trends, and its survey of the literature suggests ecological and agricultural drought may have increased during the period of modest warming in 12 of those 47 regions. However, in only two of those regions does the IPCC have even “medium confidence” for any human role in the observed increase. For the remaining regions experiencing a possible increase in droughts, the IPCC has low confidence human activities have had any discernible impact.
In short, there is limited to no evidence, meaning real-world data, suggesting that climate change, whether human-caused or not, has made droughts worse or resulted in heightened fire weather. By contrast, data clearly show that wildfires have declined during the present period of climate change. If SPACE.com wants to be taken seriously as a credible source of science information for the wider public, it should not be in the business of publishing uncritical stories sycophantically promoting the latest alarming study on climate change. Had the journal done a simple fact check, it would have easily discovered that the ESSD study was wrong or misleading on nearly all, if not all, of its major points.
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News. In addition to directing The Heartland Institute’s Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy, Burnett puts Environment & Climate News together, is the editor of Heartland’s Climate Change Weekly email, and the host of the Environment & Climate News Podcast.
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“Moreover, they did create greater air pollution than they would have produced absent climate change.”
I think that sentence needs a “not”.
The ONLY things Climate Change HAS done, to date, is …
Increased gullibility amongst liberals
Made Bleeding Heart Liberals more susceptible to fear and panic (Sheeple Panic Syndrome)
Induced an all too apparent bias in both the Liberal run Media and Liberal run Education.
I prefer the word, “illiberal.”
The American Southeast is now mostly forest- and most of it is intensely managed- and- there are very few wildfires in the region even during droughts. The foresters do set fires to manage species composition. They plant mostly pines and set the fires to reduce the hardwood species. So most of the forests there are not a wilderness but it’s closer to being natural than the cotton fields they replaced.
The only increase in forest fires is where they replaced traditional forest management with green forest management, like in California,
which is just a sophisticated mix of sabotage and Arson.
Now we have a unnatural fuel load increase as result of former good forest management that is burning like crazy as result of current bad forest management.
And then they blame it on AGW instead of Newsome and Brown..
In the past before organized fire-fighting efforts, fires mostly burned until they burned themselves out. To suggest that fires are now worse than ever is ignorance and/or willful misrepresentation, that is to say, lying…
That’s kind of the biggest problem that many people know nothing about real life.
Combined with the fact that the MSM uses every opportunity to complain and attack( standard commie MO) they successfully created the illusion of a climate crisis.
They don’t care if their “news” is factual or not. Once the lie bomb is dropped the damage is done and the propaganda supports the narrative.
And social media picks it up and it spreads like wildfire.
Hello Sterling, you are correct that climate change is a very minor factor in most of the increase in forest fires since the 1950s, but your paper misses the 900 pound gorilla in the room which is the fuel load buildup on our forested lands. The Interagency chart you used has been discredited because the early data included millions of acres of prescribed burning in the Southeast U.S. I used the same chart in several of my earlier papers before I was informed of that. However, setting that aside we have been obtaining data from the recently completed North American Tree-Ring Fire Scar Network that shows that from 1600 onward the indigenous peoples burned forested lands to a much greater extent than we ever imagined, dwarfing the Interagency data.
In short, the native Americans keep fuel loads down for millennia. However, during the past couple of centuries we wiped out as much as 90% of the native Americans with introduced diseases and then confined the survivors to reservations which stopped their prior burning practices.
If we don’t take steps to reduce fuel loads, the forest fire sitation will only get worse, and probably more rapidly than we anticipate, but you are absolutely correct that the effects of climate change are very minor players in this situation.
Thanks, Don
Bullseye. Thank you, Don. Anthropogenic (human set) fires burned as much as 1/3 of the flammable landscape every year, for millennia (since ~10,000 BC). But no more.
In the absence of hominid fire, the biomass (vegetation) has accumulated. The biomass is what fuels fires. It’s the fuels, stupid.
Today across NA the standing biomass is heavier (more dense) than at any point in the Holocene. This a-historical accumulation has been going on for 200 years on some acres, less on treated acres. For the last 30 years all treatment (fuel removal) has ceased on Federal acres which comprise almost half of the Western USA. That’s why entire National Forests now burn up in one fell swoop (Plumas, Rogue, Fremont, Payette etc.).
To some people this is an interesting puzzle. To others it is a heart breaking monumental tragedy. Some people think that if everybody (except the billionaires) huddles in the cold and dark in mud huts, then there won’t be no mo’ forest fires. Others, the people who actually know and care, want those idiots lined up against a wall and …
It’s the fuels, stupids. Catch a clue, smell the smoke. Either help fix the problem via Stewardship or get out of the effing way.
Yes, the same “pattern burning” techniques were practiced by Australian Aborigines for millenia.
Dr. Bill Gabbage tells it how it was in his fascinating book –
“The Biggest Estate On Earth”
https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/6004601
Funny how we are told we must include indigenous science, but when it comes to forest management it is NO.
Spaced Out more like?
a single study published in the journal Earth System Science Data (ESSD)
What the kids at Skeptical Science call single paper syndrome…. But then, they also said one weather event is not climate
How right/wrong they were.
One paper, 50+ authors, all DEI, with token Africans and Chinese, written by some abstruse ecology centre in the UK, where the entire country is undergoing civilizational collapse. A libtard screed from the dying vestiges of a perverse neo-Weimar apocalypse. Avoid these folks. They are zombified.
some abstruse ecology centre in the UK…
The UEA – The University of Easy Access.
They (the zombies) “NEED MORE BRAINS.”
Literally.
Regards to Return of the Living Dead for the quote.
Story tip: Billy No Mates
The PM and his bag carriers tried repeatedly to organise a meeting with the French during the COP30 summit, only to be given the cold shoulder by Macron’s team. Numerous attempts were made by increasingly senior officials to call the French delegation and track them down. A government source tells Guido that the French “managed to effect the most amazing disappearing act“, with no meeting or call taking place. Macron’s David Copperfield act was reportedly very effective…
The FT reported Starmer had the same issue with Ursula Von Der Leyen, who also dodged his request for a meeting over the the EU’s money demands for the SAFE defence fund. – Guido
Paranoia has set in…
Downing Street is already trying to shove the genie back in the bottle after last night’s preemptive attack on Wes Streeting. The Starmer camp have now briefed Robert Peston that they were “not deliberately stirring things up” and were only “reactively responding” – Fawkes
Byline: Washington State It’s WIND.
Over 80% of wildfires are caused by something people do, or don’t do. A driver can pull off-road and over dry grass with a muffler heated to over 500°F, or perhaps fail to have electric wires to out-buildings properly installed. The list is long.
In recent years, better agency cooperation and better technology [Pano AI cameras] allow quicker response to many fires. Sometimes, fires in difficult areas are allowed to burn and “acres involved” climbs with a major decrease in fuel load. Come visit and we can have a look at fuel build up in high elevation steep terrain. The highest point in Pennsylvania is 3,213 feet (979 m). I-90 at Snoqualmie Pass is 3,015 ft or 919 m. Ten miles north of me the high point is over 6,000 ft (1830 m).
Wind is the major driver of fast moving fires – not a degree or two or 3 of warmer temperature. Wind! Who knew?
And given shrinking temperature DIFFERENTIALS as the climate gets warmer, there will if anything be LESS wind.
Kinda like hurricanes.
Same with ground cover. We can control any fire in low wind, and above some wind speed we have no control. Some of our worse fires in the past decade have been where there is low to no ground cover. but high wind.
Coming into summer down here in Australia, and had the fist whiff of bushfire smoke yesterday.
Must have been a fair distance away, but carried on the wind. You could see it in the air.
Last bad bushfire season was 2019, and since then we have had some really wet years.
The undergrowth and bush grass is high, and drying quickly.
If the weather gets hot and windy, could be a bad year. Let’s hope not
On another matter.. You know how UAH had anomalously warm October 2025 for Australia.. well…
Looks like November might be just the opposite
Weather news: Temperatures dip to record lows across Australia’s south-east
In some places the previous years’ vegetation dries before the current growth starts. Canada, east of the Rocky Mountains is famous for this set-up. Agencies should be flooding the media with information about “fire season” with tips on prevention. Good luck.
2019 was an exceptionally dry, hot year after 2 years of above average rainfall.
It is Australia.. that’s what happens 🙂
CLIMATE NORMAL !!
No such thing as a bushfire season. That is alarmist propaganda speak invented a few years ago to scare the crap out of us each year. There is only fire weather.
You don’t live in Australia, do you !!
“Fire weather” is basically 5-6 months of the year !
But differs in different parts of the country.
Actually I do. In the most fire prone area of Australia. The South East.
That actually nullifies your ”fire season” concept then does it not?
When I lived in Southern California, there most certainly WAS “fire season”. I remember that going back to the 70’s, so it’s not “alarmist propaganda speak”, it’s been common vernacular for decades in fire-prone regions.
There is no such thing as a fire season. If there were we would have fire in the same place every year. There is only fire weather and even that does not guarantee fire. The concept of a ”fire season” is utter nonsense. I live in one of the most fire prone regions of the world and we have had no fire for decades including in the most fire prone areas of the most fire prone region. So much for you fire seasons.
If you’re being completely technical in that there is no “fire season” in the same way there are the four seasons caused by axial tilt, you’re right. Happy?
But “That is alarmist propaganda speak invented a few years ago” is flat out wrong. Whether or not they use the term where you live, it’s a phrase that’s been used in California for over 50 years. It’s not alarmist rhetoric, it’s an old colloquialism that’s been in use for many decades at least.
For wildfires you have to ask the question, what steps can be taken at the local level to mitigate the damage and what will be the impact of each.
A) Harden electrical grid infrastructure to reduce ignition sources
B) Build firebreaks and clear out fast burning brush and grasses to reduce the rate of fire spread and the intensity of fires
C) Reduce the ease of ignition of structures by having non-flammable cladding on sides, eves and roof structures
D) Use weather forecast to preposition fire control resources to fight small fires before they explode out of control
E) Solve Climate change
A, B and C are the only things where local preparation will be effective if you can get by the permitting and budgeting issues to make meaningful changes. D is really a Band-Aid and require good emergency decisions by local officials who have not seemed up to the task in the last few fire emergencies. California can cut emissions all it wants but if emissions grow faster in Asia developing countries, which they have been, it’s pointless.
I believe the earth has greened during the satellite era, the result of increased broad leaf extent, or something to that effect. You cannot have less forests from more frequent and intense fires and have greater broad leaf extent.
The increase in U.S. forest fires (see uptick in mid 1990s) coincides with the logging companies being forced out of western US forests to save the spotted owl. This is a management problem not a climate problem. I’m interested to know how the spotted owl has fared in the face of this uptick in fires.
Since the Clinton-Gore owl plan of 1994, the spotted owl population has decreased (crashed) by over 90%, from 22,000+ birds to less than 2,000. They aren’t made of asbestos. Of the 25,000,000 acres that were “set aside” 6,500,000 acres have burned. An estimated $500 billion in timber value has been incinerated.
Think of it. Half a trillion dollars lost for no gain. The owl wasn’t saved; instead it has been extirpated. Total madness. Absolute junk science coupled with anti-human eco-communism has decimated the economy and the environment.
The greatest factor in the demise of the spotted owl is the natural immigration of the barred owl into the “protected” areas. We have 2 barred owls for every spotted owl lost. The barred owls are more aggressive, out-competing the spotted and they don’t respect politically established boundaries.
In order for “wildfires to be getting worse”, there has to be some measurement control criteria that is followed, otherwise the statement is meaningless.
A wildfire by definition has no controls. You cannot control the weather and you cannot control the terrain. You also cannot control the response.
Therefore, a single wildfire can never be shown to be getting worse or better than any other wildfire. All you can do is measure the area burned and estimate the damages.
And as more people build larger houses, of flammable materials, in and near fire-prone areas..
… the damage is bound to increase.
Sort of like building on floodplains wrt flooding damage.
The entire continent is “fire prone”. WTF are you suggesting? Mud huts? Is that what your home is made of? Here’s a shovel – go dig yourself a new house.
In NSW, we have what is called a BAL rating. Because of where I am I have to meet BAL29 rating if I want to get insurance, or even permission to build
BAL 29 | Bushfire Construction Reference Guide | AS3959:2018
Brick or other non-flammable exterior, in my case 9mm thick gap-sealed fibrous cement siding.
Steel frame under house with non-flammable lining under the floor
Roof is Colorbond steel, eves etc are 6mm fibrous cement sheet.
How many houses in the Palisades had flammable roofs and exteriors ?
Don’t know what your agro is all about, I’m just saying that many more people are building big houses closer and closer to bushfire areas and are being allowed to build on flood plains.
And building codes have changed to allow less expensive materials to keep sales up.
Most people these days cannot afford to buy a home. It’s a crying shame and a disruption to the social fabric. Affordable housing is a huge need. In no way have building codes lightened! Instead govt rule making and high interest rates have priced home ownership out of reach.And you can thank Climate Alarmism hysteria for a lot of that.
Glad to hear you live in a concrete/steel bunker. Most of the rest of us live in wood framed houses. My agro is that it is better to treat forests, manage fuels, than to capitulate to holocausts. In 2020 the Santiam Fire traveled 80 miles from the Cascade crest to Lyons, OR where it burned down a subdivision. How far exactly away from fuels must one get to be “safe”. Must we all live in concrete bunkers? Wouldn’t it be better to tend our planet than to abandon all stewardship?
In the US, wood-framed houses are now being built with much lighter and more flammable materials than in the past. New furniture is also much more flammable.
There are videos of tests showing a fire on a timber-framed (dimensional lumber) vs. modern LVL framing, and the LVL is pretty much completely gone while the older construction is even still safe to walk on.
Very nice Sterling.
IPCC lying once again. Should be…
Funny how the sub headline is:
“A new report shows how satellites are helping scientists track the planet’s future.”
How the hell do you track something that has yet to occur?