The World Ablaze

By m.mphoto @ Shutterstock.com

Originally posted August 1, 2023.

Read almost any headline this summer, and it would be easy for you to think the world is in a cataclysmic burn.

Despite what you are told, it is not, writes Bjorn Lomborg in the WSJ. The percentage of the globe that burns each year is on the decline. Has been since 2001.

The World Is Not Burning

The most common trope in our increasingly alarmist debates is that global warming has set the world afire.

For more than two decades, satellites have recorded fires across the planet’s surface. The data are unequivocal: Since the early 2000s, when 3% of the world’s land caught fire, the area burned annually has trended downward.

In 2022, the last year for which there are complete data, the world hit a new record-low of 2.2% burned area. Yet you’ll struggle to find that reported anywhere.

Postcards from Hell

Mr. Lomborg smokes out the NYT, which in late 2021 employed more than 40 staff on a project it called “Postcards from a World on Fire.” The project was accompanied by a photorealistic animation of the world in flames.

(NYT’s) explicit goal was to convince readers of the climate crisis’ immediacy through a series of stories of climate-change-related devastation across the world, including the 2019-20 wildfires in Australia.

This summer, we have fresh stories on the Canadian wildfires and how large parts of the Northeast are enveloped in smoke.

Both the Canadian prime minister and the White House have blamed climate change.

Yet the latest report by the United Nations’ climate panel doesn’t attribute the area burned globally by wildfires to climate change. Instead, it vaguely suggests the weather conditions that promote wildfires are becoming more common in some places. Still, the report finds that the change in these weather conditions won’t be detectable above the natural noise even by the end of the century.

Keep the Discussion Balanced and Centered

Mr. Lomborg accuses both the NYT and the Biden administration of painting a convincing picture of a fiery climate apocalypse. They selectively focus on the parts of the world that are on fire, not the much larger area where fires are less prevalent.

Yet the latest report by the United Nations’ climate panel doesn’t attribute the area burned globally by wildfires to climate change. Instead, it vaguely suggests the weather conditions that promote wildfires are becoming more common in some places. Still, the report finds that the change in these weather conditions won’t be detectable above the natural noise even by the end of the century.

In the case of American fires, most of the problem is bad land management. A century of fire suppression has left more fuel for stronger fires. Even so, last yearU.S. fires burned less than one-fifth of the average burn in the 1930s and likely only one-tenth of what caught fire in the early 20th century.

Mr. Lomborg doesn’t deny that climate change is happening. It is a real challenge, he admits. What doesn’t get mentioned by the media is the biggest culprit: poor forest management, where fuel has been allowed to accumulate over decades.

Over the next century the costs associated will be the equivalent of one or two recessions. The common-sense response would be to recognize that both climate change and carbon-cutting policies incur costs, then negotiate a balance that puts the most effective measures first.

Surveys repeatedly show that most voters are unwilling to support the very expensive climate policies activists and green politicians have proposed.

Overheated headlines about climate Armageddon are an attempt to scare us into supporting them anyway, at the cost of sensible discussion and debate.

Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus, is a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and author of “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.”