Knowing Your Arson from Your Elbow, 2
Burnie’s European Tour, Summer 2022
Posted on 17 Nov 24
by JitIn
In Knowing Your Arson from Your Elbow, I skated over some of what I could find out about arson and wildfires, and promised to return with more. A year passed with no addition: but see more discussion under John’s piece, plus my transcript of the BBC’s coverage of the 2024 Greek wildfires. But yesterday I wondered whether the 2023 EFFIS report was out yet. It wasn’t. But I discovered that in the original blog post, I had not referred to the 2022 EFFIS report, which contains a few nuggets on arson in Europe.
EFFIS stands for European Forest Fire Information Service. While seemingly funded by the EU, external countries contribute to it, including North African and Middle Eastern countries with a Mediterranean coast. The annual reports consist of a mini-report on the year’s fires from all the constituent countries. There are also broader scale statistics, so that we can examine trends, if we care to. Of course, we don’t need to look at the actual data, do we? We already know how wildfires are changing thanks to Teh Climate Emergency.
Some countries, but not all, include data on the causes of fires. As this series is trying to get to the bottom of how important arson is as a cause of wildfires, it’s useful information. Now, it’s a long and dry document; I didn’t read it all. Instead I whizzed through instances of “arson” and “lightning” and otherwise skimmed for identified causes. Here’s a summary of what I found.
Reminder: fires can have natural or artificial causes. Dry lightning is almost the only natural cause. The artificial causes may be accident, infrastructure failure, carelessness, or arson.
https://cliscep.com/2024/11/17/knowing-your-arson-from-your-elbow-2/
