One of the inconvenient truths about the climate debate is advocates’ need to manipulate data. They’ve been doing it for decades. Picking starting points that show favorable rises in data. Ignoring anything that contradicts the current dogma. And Whoever is Running the Biden Administration (WRBA) is erasing inconvenient history.
Over at Real Climate Science, Tony Heller noticed something about Federal data on the amount of annual average or forests lost to fire. At some point since WRBA took power, everything before 1983 is being memory-holed.
For several years the political noise machine (some people mistakenly refer to them as ‘the news’) has been laying the narrative. Forest fires are worse and more frequent, it is your fault, and only an all-powerful government can repair the damage. What that means is, they will erase evidence that this is a lie, deny you a bit of liberty, and then bill you a convenience charge in perpetuity.
Heller has some examples here, but regular readers are familiar with the matter. The media and politicians lie about the events and recreate context to justify an ecological fire of the vanities. The sins are your easy free-market lifestyle; the burning is a conflagration of legislation (a power grab) depriving you of the former.
Just you, not them.
The evidence, as pertains to forest fires?
Stories emerge about the historical scope of a recent fire. One example was a story Heller shares about 8 million acres burning, how rare that is, and how the rise of incidents of this magnitude all occurred in the present century.
Problem.
Before 1950, no one was familiar with a year when only 8 million acres burned annually. Fifteen to thirty million was closer to the norm.
An inconvenient truth that whoever is running the Biden Administration is trying to erase.
You can no longer easily access data before 1983, as noted above, but what do the last few years look like? Accepting that we can’t be entirely sure the same people hiding the contradictory data are not tampering with everything else, it looks like this.
The ten-year annual average (2011-2020) is 7.4 million acres, and 8 million is more than that. And 7.4 million is a higher average than the 90s or the 80s, which is why it looks like such a great place to start the new “history.”
And while there has been a slight uptick in the new century, it pales compared to everything before 1950.
We also need to account for policy-related influences in the modern era. Changes to state and national posture on woodlands have created more and better opportunities for fires.
The Obama administration deliberately underfunded assets and resources to fight fires, while environmental groups opposed proactive clearing out of dead wood.
The latter may be well-meaning, but like a lot of green activist action is counter-productive, and the latter appears deliberate.
None of which matters if the institutions tasked with collecting data honestly and presenting it truthfully does neither and that appears to be how things will work moving forward.
Features Image: Brush fire in Australia by Matt Palmer
