Are Wildfires Really Burning More Land?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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.
The text read... In the line of fire, losing the war against climate change. Earth is smouldering. From Seattle to Siberia this summer, flames have consumed swathes of the Northern Hemisphere.
What sparked the Twitter debate about wildfire coverage and The Economist front page?
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.
Please stop the misleading fire stories. The US is smouldering less, not more. 2018 will likely see burnt area one-sixth of the US record.
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.
How reliable are US historical wildfire acreage figures before 1983?
But a Twitter follower commenting on Dr Lomborg's tweet posted the following in response.
You forgot something important, did you not? If you read in the very top, the data from before 1983 is inaccurate.
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.
Prior to 1983, sources of these figures are not known or cannot be confirmed, and were not derived from the current situation reporting process.
Why do agencies warn against comparing pre-1983 and post-1983 fire data?
As a result, the figures prior to 1983 should not be compared to later data.
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...
Yes, the Forest Service provided those numbers, but the raw data I've seen came from multiple sources, and we don't know if some acres were double or triple counted. Further, it's only been in more recent times that mapping accuracy has improved by leaps and bounds with advent of GPS. Tens of millions of acres is a massive amount of land, and up through the middle of the last century, the tools, manpower, and time it would take to actually map those fires were not available.
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.
How have fire counts and burned area in the US changed over the last 35 years?
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.
I am consistently amazed at the way that our record keeping in a really meticulous, accurate way doesn't go back very far. I did a story a couple of years ago about tornadoes in the US and Over and over, basically, I was told that I shouldn't trust the numbers before the 1980s. That is something that you hear a lot with natural disasters.
What factors explain longer, larger wildfires today and is water scarcity to blame?
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.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–0:29
2
What sparked the Twitter debate about wildfire coverage and The Economist front page?
0:29–1:33
3
How reliable are US historical wildfire acreage figures before 1983?
1:33–2:05
4
Why do agencies warn against comparing pre-1983 and post-1983 fire data?
2:05–3:44
5
How have fire counts and burned area in the US changed over the last 35 years?
3:44–4:25
6
What factors explain longer, larger wildfires today and is water scarcity to blame?
4:25–5:45
7
Do European wildfire trends show increasing burned area or a decline when recent years are included?
5:45–8:55