The Economist ran a story, titled “Wildfires are getting more frequent and more devastating.” From the headline, which carries the subhead “Climate change is accelerating the blaze,” to the story’s conclusion, it is false. [emphasis, links added]
Data clearly show that even as the Earth has slightly warmed, the frequency and severity of wildfires have declined dramatically, a fact even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) acknowledges.
In a story attributed by The Economist collectively to its “Staff,” the magazine writes, “[w]ildfires are more than a powerful visual metaphor for climate change. Data show they are increasingly fueled by the extreme conditions resulting from greenhouse-gas emissions.”
This is flat-out false.
As Climate Realism has pointed out in dozens of articles, data from NASA and the European Space Agency both show a significant decline in the number of and the amount of acreage lost to wildfires during the recent period of modest warming, as discussed in Climate at a Glance: Global Wildfires. (See the figure, below)
Rather than citing real-world data to prove that wildfires are increasing, The Economist goes through a litany of recent, widely reported large wildfire incidences around the globe, and attributes them to climate change, without providing any evidence of such a connection.
None of the wildfires they reference provide persuasive evidence climate change exacerbates or enhances wildfires – not their numbers or intensity.
Climate Realism provided evidence debunking the claim that climate change was responsible for the Australian brush fires mentioned by The Economist here and here, for example.
The Economist’s assertion that climate change caused Canada’s recent large wildfire was repeatedly refuted more than a year ago at Climate Realism, for instance, here and here.
Nor does evidence support claims that human CO2 emissions had anything to do with wildfires in recent years in California, Greece, or Texas.
The Economist cites a single study from 2022 which said that climate change has caused an expansion in the global fire season. Yet, that supposed expansion is not reflected in the actual data on the frequency and acreage lost to wildfires.
If the wildfire season has expanded, it would also evidently be news to the U.N. IPCC which, as discussed here, found no evidence for an increase in wildfire weather in recent decades; nor did the IPCC project such an increase into the future in its most recent (Sixth) Assessment Report, which came out in 2023, a year after the 2022 report that The Economist cites was published.
In the end, whatever the merits of The Economist as a news magazine discussing the factors that impact the global economy and the businesses and government actions that affect economic growth or decline, it lacks any credibility on the topic of climate science and the consequences of climate change.
Its editors have foregone objectivity, failing to access easily gathered, unalarming facts about wildfires to promote the fake narrative that human fossil fuel use is causing a global climate crisis.
As such, on climate change, The Economist is doing its readers a disservice by misleading them.
Read more at Climate Realism
