Last week we showed you death and destruction from floods, drought, earthquakes and all manner of natural horrors. But since the picture was such a cheerful one, with a dramatic drop in the harm they’ve been doing, we thought this week we would show you something actually getting worse (sort of) namely wildfire activity in the US. If you want to look up the number of fires and the acreage burned in this era of global boiling and the climate inferno you can go to the National Interagency Fire Center website where the data are shown, though not conveniently graphed. The area burned looks like this:

It’s going up. Sort of. It went up from 1983 to about 2005, but after that it has bounced around but didn’t trend up further. And, as we will show you, the number of fires has actually been decreasing. And also, as we will show you if you click the link below, compared to a century ago the recent numbers are remarkably low.

Here is the number of fires from 1983 to 2024:

Again there was a peak just after 2000 and it has trended down since then. But the really interesting contrast arises when we go back prior to 1983.

To #Lookup those numbers you have to go to the Internet Archive because the Interagency Fire Center has taken all the pre-1983 fire numbers down. They say that the method of measuring forest fires was different back then so the numbers can’t be compared to the recent data. Which frankly is rather suspicious, since when it comes to measuring hurricane severity the historical data was based on very incomplete sampling methods compared to what we use today, but since the result is a slight upward trend in the number of major storms they are happy to show you all the numbers.

In the case of wildfires the opposite is the case. The historical data shows a remarkable decline in US forest fire activity. So they try to stop you from looking, but as noted we were determined to #LookItUp anyway:

Despite the minor recent upward trend, the record shows far greater numbers of fires burning far more acres in the pre-1980 period. Everything before 1983 is now scrubbed from government websites because the experts say the earlier data is uncertain and incomplete. Which is probably true: they may well have undercounted the number of fires. But they certainly didn’t overcount them. And even so what the full record shows is that today’s fire situation is relatively mild compared to conditions in the early 20th century… before we had man-made warming.

Fortunately the internet is forever, which means we can see the full record. So when the subject of modern wildfires comes up and someone wants to get the full picture, you can help them #Lookitup.