The World Is Not as on Fire as You Might Believe | Hacker News Reader

The World Is Not as on Fire as You Might Believe

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2 pointsunnamed76ri7 comments

On the positive side, and maybe surprisingly so given the flak that Twitter / X has correctly received as of late, the discussion thread below this tweet / post is rather diverse, faceted, and informative. There's your Climate Change DOUBTer alright, but there's also supplementary info on how you shouldn't throw burns of annual fuels (grasslands) into one bucket with wild fires in long-standing forests for several reasons (volume of biomass, CO2-neutral vs source of CO2). There's also two tweets / posts that call the author a well-known liar and payed propagandist. There's a real smorgasboard of additional data, and I actually find this tweet / post should be shown to people who don't understand the potential of and reason for having something like Twitter / Not-X.

The raw NASA data is that:

Open savannah, grasslands, managed area burns are greatly reduced - yes.

Wildfires in dense forest areas that have not seen massive fires for decades have increased.

Total square area burned per annum has been trending downwards for a few years now, a bland 2D figure that doesn't capture the increase in intense burning of very 3D woodlands.

Totally OT but this is the 2nd time I'm reading 'square area' and—shouldn't that be either 'square footage' or else 'area'? Area is already measured in power-of-two units, so why 'square area'? 'Cubic volume' anyone? 'Linear distance'?

I'm leaving it for context but you're correct it should be something else - I commented too fast and came back for review.

The intent is to convey the reality - the "fires decreasing" trope (in relation to climate change) is based on total global area - a flat measure.

It's true the total area of sparse relatively open grass fires has decreased.

As a number it doesn't reflect the increase in volume of material being burned in dense older growth heavily wooded areas seen in California, Australia, Canada, etc.

At some point NASA (or anyone else that wants to pull the raw data) might look at removing periodic annual burn from their fire data sets and look at the differential on "new area burned" that hasn't seen fire for a decade (perhaps).

The source for the graph is just "NASA", without even a hint of a proper attribute. The link to the sciencedirect paper is a nifty and super geeky description of a continuous effort to extract more and better information from one of the many, many datasets NASA has on wildfires.

Without a proper citation, climate change denier is denying climate change in a way that doesn't have enough data to challenge. Given that Bjorn is supposed to be an actual scientist, they should know better.

"climate change denier is denying climate change"

He is not a climate change denier...

He is saying the hysteria is unnecessary and we may not be following the optimal approach for dealing with the changing climate.

It's different...

This just in, professional sceptic says be sceptical. More at six.

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