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National Fire Center Disappears ‘Inconvenient’ U.S. Wildfire Data

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rangerrebew:

National Fire Center Disappears ‘Inconvenient’ U.S. Wildfire Data
By
Anthony Watts -
May 12, 2021 3
 

The National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) has been the keeper of U.S. wildfire data for decades, tracking both the number of wildfires and acreage burned all the way back to 1926. After making the entire dataset public for decades, now, in a blatant act of cherry picking, NIFC “disappeared” a portion of it, and only show data from 1983. You can see it here.

Fortunately, the Internet never forgets, and the entire dataset is preserved on the Internet Wayback Machine. Data prior to 1983 show U.S. wildfires were far worse 100 years ago, both in frequency and total acreage burned, than they are now, 100 years of modest warming later.

By disappearing all data prior to 1983, which just happens to be the lowest point in the data set for the number of fires, NIFC data now show a positive slope of worsening wildfire aligning with increased global temperature. This truncated data set is perfect for claiming “climate change is making wildfire worse,” but flawed because it lacks the context of the full data set. See figure 1 below for a before-and-after comparison of what the NIFC data look like when you plot it.

https://climaterealism.com/2021/05/national-fire-center-disappears-inconvenient-u-s-wildfire-data/

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