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It is like a Hollywood disaster movie with a difference: it really is happening close to Hollywood, and the stars involved, such as James Woods and Eugene Levy, aren’t acting — they really are fleeing their homes as a wildfire singes residential areas in the Pacific Palisades area on the north-west fringe of Los Angeles. Several film premieres have been canceled, along with the nomination ceremony for the Screen Actors Guild awards.
Because fire services have become better at putting out fires, the natural cycle has been interrupted
We know what to expect, however, when we do get to those awards ceremonies: celebs lecturing us on climate change and how it has been brought to their doorstep. Except that the habitual attribution of wildfires to climate change somewhat ignores the reality:that actually global wildfire burn has decreased over the past twenty-five years. In the US we have data going back a century, and it tells a story which is very different from that which tends to get told whenever fires break out.
It is true that the areas currently affected by fire have had a very dry six months. Between July 1 last year and January 5 Santa Barbara, just along the coast, had 11 percent of its average rainfall for the time of year — although this followed an especially wet period. There have been some changes in rainfall patterns which have extended the fire season in some areas. But then every year at some point, almost without fail, conditions in Southern California are ripe for wildfires, which have been a natural part of the ecosystem for thousands of years. One Californian tree, felled in in 1854 — long before climate change entered the public debate — was found to have survived thirty-three fires in its 300-year life.
The effect of climate change on wildfires, however, is dwarfed by another man-made effect: we have become far better at tackling them, with the result that in the US at least, they happen far less frequently than they did a century ago. Statistics kept by the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) show that from 1926-35 an average of 41.5 million acres a year were burned by wildfire. From the late 1940s, however, the acreage being burned started to plunge. In the decade to 2023 it was l7.02 million acres.
But that is part of the problem. Because fire services have become better at putting out fires, the natural cycle has been interrupted, with the result that deadwood is allowed to accumulate on the forest fire. When a fire does eventually take hold it ends up being a much bigger fire because the source of fuel is so much greater. As Valerie Trouet, professor of dendrology at the University of Arizona puts it, the US is suffering from a “century of fire deficit.”
Another factor in recent devastating fires is that suburban development is ever encroaching into forested areas, and in contrast to a century ago the neighborhoods being created tend to be leafier because, for ecological and aesthetic reasons, residents like mature trees to be retained. As ever, Google Earth is a valuable research tool: if you visit the Palisades area you can see how limbs of speculative development have spread into wooded hillsides — and how these new suburbs are almost as green as the surrounding undeveloped land.
It is harder, however, to find to above data from the NIFC because four years ago the figures prior to 1983 were disappeared from its website on the supposed basis that there was a methodology change in that year and so figures might no longer be directly comparable. Yet the data is still online if you know where to look and shows that there was no great discontinuity in 1983 — the fall in wildfires started in the 1940s and fell all the way to the 1970s. Between 1973 and 1982 wildfires in the US burned an average of 3.42 million acres a year. Since then, there has been a rising trend — which of course is all that visitors to the NIFC website now see. Not for the first time, selective data is feeding the idea that climate change is inflicting major disaster on the world when the real picture is somewhat more nuanced.
