SPACE.com Swallows Lies that Climate Change Is Making Wildfires Worse, It Isn’t – Watts Up With That?

From ClimateREALISM

By H. Sterling Burnett

SPACE.com ran a story claiming that 2024/2025’s wildfires are proof that climate change is making wildfires larger and more severe. This is false. Ground based data, where available, and satellite data both show that wildfires have declined in number and acreage lost over the past century, even as the Earth warmed slightly.

The SPACE.com article, “Wildfires are getting more intense around the world due to human-driven climate change,” is based on a single study published in the journal Earth System Science Data (ESSD), “State of Wildfires 2024-2025,” which makes the unscientific claim that a single year of severe wildfires provides proof that climate change is causing an increase in wildfires.

This assertion suffers from a number of deficiencies. First, it is impossible to honestly attribute a single year of weather or disaster phenomena to climate change. Only a long-term measurement and averaging of trends could indicate a pattern that might suggest climate change as a causal factor. Global wildfire incidences from 2024 to 2025 were due a combination of disparate factors – with different factors resulting in wildfires in different areas. Some factors were common among regions, some not. But none were common across all regions.

The 2024/2025 wildfire season was not, as will be demonstrated shortly, part of a long-term trend.

The underlying study used cherry picked data to claim wildfires were worsening. A review of larger data sets, both location-based historical measurements of wildfire acreage burned and large satellite data sets for recent decades, show the total number of wildfires and acreage lost to wildfires have declined sharply both over the past 130 years covering the pre-satellite era (see Figure 1 below for the United States) and the post-satellite era.

Looking at broader global data during the satellite era, data sets from both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) show a marked decline in the amount of acreage lost to wildfires, with NASA recording a 24 percent decline in acres lost to wildfires from 1998 to 2015. (See figure 2, below)

An ESA data set shows a similar declining trend. Scientific journals such as Science, Remote Sensing of the Environment, and Nature confirm these findings.

If there is an overall declining trend in wildfire numbers and acreage lost to wildfires, then climate change can’t be causing an increase in wildfires.

Those facts alone should be sufficient to discredit the SPACE.com article and the study it is based upon. When examining the specific wildfires discussed in the ESSD study one discovers that the wildfires in many instances weren’t wildfires at all. For instance, while the Los Angeles wildfire was large and destructive when compared to recent decades, it wasn’t historically unusual for the region. Also, its ignition, size, and destructiveness were the result, not of a changed climate – since temperatures have actually declined slightly there and precipitation has increased, but rather of a combination of arson, poor water management and neighborhood planning, and lack of fire response management. Nor as discussed at Climate Realism, were recent wildfires in Europe, the Mediterranean, Brazil, and Canada, historically unusual, or tied in anyway to long-term climate change. Moreover, they did create greater air pollution than they would have produced absent climate change.

The ESSD study ties the heightened danger of wildfires to climate change driven worsening drought and fire weather. However, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been unable to detect any change in fire weather patterns. (See the table, below)

The IPCC also reports that more precipitation is falling on average than in the previous 30 years of climate change.

As far as drought goes, in its 2021 Sixth Assessment report, the IPCC distinguishes four categories of drought: hydrological, meteorological, ecological, and agricultural. According to the IPCC, there is limited evidence climate change has increased the number, duration, or intensity of hydrological or meteorological droughts, and it has only medium confidence it has “contributed to changes in agricultural and ecological droughts and has led to an increase in the overall affected land area.”

Even for ecological and agricultural droughts, the data are not clear. The IPCC divides the world into 47 separate regions of study when analyzing drought trends, and its survey of the literature suggests ecological and agricultural drought may have increased during the period of modest warming in 12 of those 47 regions. However, in only two of those regions does the IPCC have even “medium confidence” for any human role in the observed increase. For the remaining regions experiencing a possible increase in droughts, the IPCC has low confidence human activities have had any discernible impact.

In short, there is limited to no evidence, meaning real-world data, suggesting that climate change, whether human-caused or not, has made droughts worse or resulted in heightened fire weather. By contrast, data clearly show that wildfires have declined during the present period of climate change. If SPACE.com wants to be taken seriously as a credible source of science information for the wider public, it should not be in the business of publishing uncritical stories sycophantically promoting the latest alarming study on climate change. Had the journal done a simple fact check, it would have easily discovered that the ESSD study was wrong or misleading on nearly all, if not all, of its major points.

H. Sterling Burnett

H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News. In addition to directing The Heartland Institute’s Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy, Burnett puts Environment & Climate News together, is the editor of Heartland’s Climate Change Weekly email, and the host of the Environment & Climate News Podcast.