Bjorn Lomborg debunks wildfire study: Climate disaster science gets huge coverage. When it’s found to be wrong… crickets

In the world of climate politics, highly pessimistic scenarios can drive headlines and coverage, and so in turn have an impact on policy. Two recent unfortunate episodes show that the rush to shout “fire” means that some scenarios are gaining massive influence when they should instead be attracting sceptical reviews of the science used to construct them.Take wildfires. Despite repeated claims of a “world on fire”, data set after data set shows that the world burns ever less in terms of burned area. Disrupting this unhelpful reality, a splashy paper in Nature last year finally found a worrying narrative: “extreme wildfire events” had more than doubled globally over the past two decades. Using satellite data from 2003 to 2023, the authors clustered fire hotspots and tallied their “fire radiative power” – a proxy for intensity. Predictably, this ignited a media bonfire. Outlets from The New York Times to CBS News blared warnings of a planet ablaze, seeing fiercer fires as proof that we are hurtling toward a global inferno.Hold the extinguishers. New research indicates that the study was wrong. The new analysis shows that extreme fire is down by 35 per cent over the same period. The fires are burning less intensely, and we already knew that less area is getting burned as time goes by – but this contradicts the extreme climate script, so we heard crickets from major media outlets.

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