Paul Homewood has done a follow-up on this summer's Amazon forest fire story. It wasn't enough that the original story was phony and overblown, but it turns out the season as a whole has been... average. Both the number of fires and the average smoke emissions are smack dab in the middle of historical ranges. The only Amazon forest fire crisis is the way everybody panicked at a phantom in the fevered imagination of alarmists.

The PR blaze started when the Brazilian Space Agency put out numbers based on a preliminary satellite analysis that seemed to indicate an 84 percent jump year-over-year in the number of fires. But later, more accurate satellite readings from NASA showed the rate of fires was average, though the imaginary fire was out of control by them. Now with the season well-advanced, the data confirm that this season sits somewhere in the middle of the pack since records began in 2003.

It's pretty much an ironclad rule: every alarmist story about climate change eventually turns out to be false. But by then the howling mob has moved on.