U.S. Forest Fires Aren't At Historic Highs—Not Even Close | Climate Dispatch
"California’s wildfires are a serious matter, but the official record of the United States shows forest fires in the US today are far below the annual average in the 1930s and 1940s.
...a staff writer at The Atlantic who covers climate change and technology, says California has already experienced its worst fire season in state history...In the past few months, one in every 33 acres of California has burned. This year is already the most destructive wildfire season, in terms of acreage affected, in state history...
- First, as I explained recently, there is widespread agreement that California’s megafires stem largely from decades-long mismanagement of its forests.
As The New York Times explained earlier this month, for more than a century, many firefighting agencies have aggressively focused on extinguishing blazes whenever they occur, a strategy that has often proved counterproductive. ...California has spent decades aggressively preventing fire from doing its natural work, which has made it a virtual tinderbox.
- ...This brings me to my second point. There’s a perception that today’s fires are historically unprecedented.
...Fortunately, data from the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) offer some answers. So far in 2020, the US has experienced 42,809 total fires that burned a total of 7,015,956.
Total wildfire acreage burned by year in the United States, 1926 to 2019. Data from NIFC. Graph by meteorologist Anthony Watts ...“The National Interagency Fire Center curiously – and somewhat conveniently – only shows the annual burnt area back to 1960, when fire suppression indeed was going strong, and hence we had some of the lowest amounts of burnt forests ever,” wrote Lomborg, a Danish author and President of the Copenhagen Consensus Center.
News agencies and NIFC were simply ignoring all data prior to 1960. When this data is included, one sees 2017’s record-setting fires burned about one-fifth of the acreage of fires in 1930 and 1931.
...The entire dataset, a quarter-century of figures that comes from the official record of the United States, shows the yearly average between 1926 and 1952 was several times higher than the peaks of today...Read all.
