The New York Times just ran a story on April 12 claiming that climate change has caused record-setting numbers of forest fires and of acreages burned. See here.
The story, headlined “Wildfires, Once Confined to a Season, Burn Earlier and Longer,” proclaimed that
“The 10.1 million acres that burned in the United States last year were the most on record, and the top five years for acres burned were in the past decade. The federal costs of fighting fires rose to $2 billion last year, up from $240 million in 1985.”
Of course, these claims are untrue. The graph above shows that the total acreage burned by forest fires has declined significantly since the 1920s and ’30s.
