Ben Carter
speaker
694 appearances
29 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2013
last heard Aug 2018
Ben Carter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service with me, Ben Carter.
Earlier this month, the Economist newspaper ran a front page which caught the eye of a number of people on Twitter.
On August 4th, Dr Bjorn Lomborg, author of the book Skeptical Environmentalist, which set him up as perhaps the world's best-known critic of the dominant scientific view of global warming, tweeted a picture of The Economist's front page and drew attention to the situation in the United States.
Dr Lomborg attached a chart produced by the National Interagency Fire Centre in the United States, which showed the annual number of acres burned by wildfires in the US from 1926 to 2018.
The chart showed that between the 1950s and present day, there were very few years that wildfires had exceeded more than 10 million acres per year of damage.
But before the 1950s, it was not unusual to see annual numbers over 30 million, and on a couple of occasions, as high as 50 million.
But a Twitter follower commenting on Dr Lomborg's tweet posted the following in response.
What this tweet was referring to was the fact that the National Interagency Fire Centre's data on its website does come with an explicit warning.
This doesn't mean the data before 1983 is definitely inaccurate, as the tweeter described it, but it does mean that numbers before 1983 shouldn't be compared with the ones after, for the reasons given.
Dr Lomborg argued on Twitter that the National Interagency Fire Centre was wrong to claim that they didn't know where the figures prior to 1983 came from.
and cited a 1975 document published by the US Census Bureau, which contains numbers for the years 1926 to 1967, which were provided by the US Forest Service.
I asked the National Interagency Fire Centre why they had claimed that the sources of the figures prior to 1983 were not known, and a spokesperson told me...
When I told Dr Lomborg this, he maintained that the early numbers were accurate, citing a peer-reviewed article on biases in the early data which did not support claims of double counting.
Instead, he says, it shows that early reporting covered less than 30% of present-day area.
So early fire data is likely to be severely underestimated.
But science reporter Maggie Kurth-Baker, who regularly writes on natural disasters, says she's been surprised at how hard it's been to get accurate data prior to the 1980s.
Maggie has written about the wildfires for FiveThirtyEight.com, a website that crunches the numbers, much like More or Less.
She looked at the numbers over the last 35 years, and she started by focusing on the number of fires in the US this year.
But why is this happening?
Well, one reason might be that the fire season, which is the time elapsed between the first large fire ignition and last large fire control, has increased from 138 days in the 1970s to 222 days in the last decade.
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