As we promised to do, we’re keeping an eye on the Arctic ice that caused such a ruckus when we noted a couple of years back that it had hit a 20-year high for that particular date. And there it goes again. As of Monday August 23’s data, it’s above the middle of the pack for the last decade, ahead of 2025, 2024, 2023, 2020 and 2019 but behind 2022 and 2021 while essentially tied with 2017, and above the average from 2011-20. Essentially a picture of fluctuations without an apparent trend. Despite what they say. Speaking of which, if you prefer facts to arm-waving, Roger Pielke Jr. has just unveiled his “Global Extreme Weather and Climate Change Dashboard” which, he says, offers “288 indicators from 57 variables across 8 phenomena and for the entire world and every continent” plus “a dedicated page for normalized losses and a consistency check with the IPCC AR6, and more.” It is remarkable how often and how loudly people say extreme weather is getting more common, more extreme and more weathery, including obviously wildfires, when in fact it’s not.
For instance, the largely state-funded Canadian Climate Institute just complained that:
“Ottawa’s update on its National Adaptation Strategy documents a good deal of activity – but little sign that any of it is actually reducing the escalating climate and extreme weather risks that Canadians face.”
And while it is always amusing to see people who put their faith in the state surprised to find that it is sanctimonious, inefficient and ineffective, it’s not amusing to see our tax money used to depict an apocalyptic landscape of escalating climate badness including, of course, “[t]his summer’s catastrophic wildfires” when there’s no evidence that things are getting worse.
Undaunted, Canada’s socialist NDP just put out a press release “Carney government using tax dollars to greenwash while Canada burns”, evidently hoping to cash in on our Prime Minister and long-time Net Zero activist Mark Carney’s evident intention to incinerate the planet starting with us. It includes:
“‘As Canadians watch their communities burn, the Carney government is spending millions of tax dollars to mislead them,’ said [NDP Parliamentary Leader Don] Davies.”
Canadians do not actually “watch their communities burn”. Indeed 2026 has been less fiery than 2025, well behind it in fact, and an astonishingly high percentage of the country is not alight except the usual suspects’ tongues. Including, south of the border, at The Atlantic, which hollers:
“America’s Rural Lands Are Burning/ This summer has been a terrible fire season in the U.S. – just not in the most populated places.”
An apocalyptic wasteland? Oh yeah:
“The summer of 2026 has been one of extraordinary fires. In Europe, they have burned hundreds of thousands of acres in France and Spain and destroyed homes across England; they killed 13 people in Spain last month, and an elderly couple in Greece this weekend. In Canada, fires have consumed an expanse of forestland larger than Belgium – which is also battling its biggest recorded wildfire. In the United States, about 7.2 million acres have burned, the largest year-to-date area in the past decade and nearly double what it was at this time last year, according to data from the National Interagency Coordination Center. Allison Rayburn, a program coordinator for the Oregon Department of Forestry, told me that in the eastern part of the state, ‘you can barely see the sun’ through the smoke: ‘It’s just devastation, and miles and miles and miles of blackened landscapes.’”
So basically the US has become Mordor. Just not where people live. Oh, and why pick “the past decade”? Duh. Because if you go back further you get worse ones… even though the dataset in question only goes back to 1983.
If it went back further, it might show something different. Not least because, if you’re keeping score, the deadliest wildfire in American history was the Peshtigo Fire in Wisconsin in… what’s this? 1871. It burned an estimated 1.2 million acres, nearly half the area burned in the whole country in 2023. And the imaginatively named Great Fire of 1910, a 1910 great fire, burned three million acres in Idaho and Montana alone, more than the recorded total in 13 years since 1983, and helped change US firefighting policy though not in entirely desirable ways.
Here we note that Bjorn Lomborg has reacted to the usual arm-waving on fires by reiterating (and updating) his point that 2026 is seeing a quiet fire season compared to the 2012-25 average. Quiet when it comes to fire, that is. Louder than a fire engine siren when it comes to the press, activists and politicians. But facts are facts. Also, as he adds, “Disasters in France, Spain & Canada are tragic – but climate is global. Cherry-picking isn’t science”. And if the alarmists are this irresponsibly, frivolously wrong on wildfires, how much confidence can you have in their research or polemics on anything else?
Canada’s state broadcaster, again amplified by MSN, just featured Katharine Hayhoe, “global chief scientist with Nature Conservancy” (to which one of us used to donate back when it conserved nature instead of spreading nonsense) and bellowed “Climate change ‘loading the dice’ for extreme weather, says climate scientist”. Mind you at least the subhed conceded that Hayhoe:
“says that while powerful storms and disastrous wildfires have always happened, global climate change has created conditions that make them more likely to occur.”
Incredibly, it’s progress that she mentions that disastrous wildfires and storms have always happened, including mentioning that she was joining them from Georgian Bay and “right here on this peninsula I’m on, it was burned to the ground a hundred years ago”. Presuming she means the Bruce Peninsula, the actual fire was in 1908 and consumed between 400,000 and 750,000 acres so between about 161k and 300k hectares (and was just one of many devastating fires there around that time) but who’s counting?
Speaking of which, the question that might occur to some people billing themselves as journalists, of course, is whether they’re actually becoming more likely and how we know. But not to the CBC.
So we say check for yourself. As for RPJ’s new project, of course there are studies and studies. But here’s what he says about quality control. His Dashboard:
“applies the IPCC’s detection framework – the same standard its sibling site, the US Extreme Weather Dashboard, uses for the contiguous United States – globally, across 8 phenomena and on one shared statistical standard. No comparably broad, global, IPCC-aligned trend-detection dashboard exists publicly: most public climate-hazard tools cover either a single phenomenon or a single country, not consistent global detection across an entire hazard set.”
We bring it up particularly because a lot of commentary on supposedly extreme or even unprecedented weather doesn’t talk nearly enough about where the information comes from, how long the data sets are, how we think we know and why we think it’s reliable.
For instance, to return to the question of wildfires in particular, and British wildfires in very particular, if you hunt long and hard enough you can get Copernicus/EFFIS (European Forest Fire Information System) estimates of British fires in particular that let journalarmists call 2025 a record year. Estimates that seem to go back to… um… 2011. And say there were no fires and no area burned in 2012. Since every other year from 2011 on saw thousands of hectares burned (except allegedly 2014, with one fire total burning 85 hectares total) is any of it credible? Does it matter?
We think so. And we think Pielke Jr. has done us a favour by creating this database. But don’t take our word for it, or his. Check it out for yourself and avoid fake news.
