The fires are not unprecedented, they are not at all time highs, and they are not being driven by climate change. Apocalyptic reporting failures.

For the past couple of weeks I keep hearing from NPR and the New York Times as well as other mainstream media that the fires in California are 1) unprecedented, 2) are at all time highs, and 3) are driven by climate change.

All three claims are untrue.  Provably untrue.  Widely known to be untrue by anyone with even a passing awareness of the history and the data. 

Intentional gaslighting or ignorant advocacy?  Who knows?  But they are no longer reporting news, they are advancing a set of policy prescriptions with no empirical basis.  

At Georgetown University in my junior year probably, I had a class which dealt with the efficacy of government policy.  One of the case studies we dealt with was forestry management policy in California.  39 years ago, it was already well established that California forestry policy of suppressing fires was raising the risk of catastrophic fires.  

Broadly, the best approach is to let natural fires burn out (though steering them clear of built infrastructure where feasible), and/or controlled burns.  Both with the objective of preventing an accumulation of combustible fuel.  California's policy was to suppress all fires, causing just such an accumulation of fuel for more terrible and deadly future fires.  

We have more than four decades of well established evidence of what works and known that California was deliberately choosing other policies.  It is not a matter of blaming the victim when they are a victim of their own choices.  It is merely a matter of acknowledging the facts.

In addition, we have known from archaeology and historical evidence that the American settlement of California occurred in the midst of a long cycle period of wetter environment.  California's environment is usually drier than it has been for the past one hundred and fifty years.  It goes through long cycles of multi-century drought followed by 1-300 year periods where the environment is wetter.  This is the dominant cycle and would be the case were there no CO2 or other manmade pollution.  

This is certainly climate change, but not anthropogenic global warming (AGW) climate change.  AGW might possibly be real, but that is not what California is experiencing.

And certainly these reports today of fires are not unprecedented.  From Forest Fires Aren’t at Historic Highs in the United States. Not Even Close by Jon Miltimore where he lays out the data.  As an aside, why is the Foundation for Economic Education ("a libertarian and economic think-tank in the United States dedicated to the "economic, ethical and legal principles of a free society") producing more informative and accurate reporting than the New York Times or NPR?  Good question.  

This brings me to my second point. There’s a perception that today’s fires are historically unprecedented.

“Even though the U.S. is only halfway through wildfire season, this year is one of the worst in history,” CNBC reported Friday. “Human-caused climate change has made blazes more frequent and intense, especially during extreme heat waves and drought conditions.”

But, the claim that 2020 is one of the worst in US history is simply not true.

A news story making such a claim might start by telling readers how many acres of land have burned in the record-setting year. CNBC doesn’t. One also sees a second problem: most of its charts don’t include information prior to 1990.

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. These numbers are indeed above the ten-year average—45,711 fires and 5,963,782 acres. However, 2020 is unlikely to exceed the number of fires or acreage burned just three years ago in 2017.

[snip]

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. These were peak years, but they were not exactly anomalies, Lomborg pointed out. The entire data set, 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.

Pictures are sometimes worth more than words.

Click to enlarge.

Things are getting better.  We are getting healthier.  We are living longer.  We are more prosperous.  We know how to better manage forests.  But certain media outlets always have us on the brink of a dystopian future.  

Why?