“Inconvenient” US Wildfire Information “Disappeared” by the Nationwide Interagency Hearth Middle @NIFC_Fire – Watts Up With That?
It’s been an open secret since Dr. Michael Mann used “Mike’s nature trick” to “hide” the decline by covering up some inconvenient tree ring data on the hockey stick climate graphs, climate alarmists will reach almost any length Show the public the “crisis side” of climate data.
The National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) has been the steward of US forest fire data for decades, tracking both the number of forest fires and acreage burned through 1926. NIFC has “disappeared” some of it and only shows data from 1983. You can download it here see.
Fortunately, the Internet never forgets, and the entire record is stored on the Internet Wayback computer and elsewhere, even though NIFC tried to make the data disappear.
Why should they do that, you ask? The answer is simple; Data prior to 1983 show that US forest fires were far worse in terms of both frequency and total area burned. If we make all the data disappear before 1983, which happens to be the lowest point in the dataset, we suddenly get a positive slope in the deterioration of the forest fire that is consistent with the increased global temperature. This is perfect to claim that climate change is making wildfire worse. ”In Figure 1 below, before and after you compare, you can see what the data looks like when you plot it.
Figure 1: A comparison of the NIFC record before and after deletion with morning burned. Notice that the blue trendline changes from a negative to a positive trend when using cherry-picked data. Click to enlarge.
Obviously, forest fires have been far worse in the past, and now the data clearly tells a very different story if only data after 1983 are shown. The new story told by the cleansed data is in line with the irrational screeching of climate alarmists that “forest fires are driven by climate change”.
This sweeping erasure of important public data stinks, but in today’s culture of narrative control that seeks to rid us of anything that might be impractical or that doesn’t fit the “bright” narrative, it’s not surprising.
Interestingly, the history of the Internet Wayback Machine shows how NIFC streamlined this deletion of critical public data.
As early as June 2011, when these data were presented to the public for the first time by the NIFC, they were simply presented “as they are”. They just say this:
Figures prior to 1983 can be revised when the NICC reviews historical data.
In 2018 they added a new constraint and said the following:
The NIFC’s National Interagency Coordination Center produces annual forest fire statistics for federal and state agencies. This information is provided by situation reports that have been used for several decades. Prior to 1983, the sources of these numbers were not known or cannot be confirmed and were not derived from the current situation reporting process. Therefore, numbers prior to 1983 should not be compared with later data.
According to the Internet Wayback Machine, this limitation first appeared on the NIFC data page between January 14 and March 7, 2018.
Oddly enough, this caveat appeared just weeks after I first brought great attention to the problem in December 2017, with an article citing NIFC fire data by the title Is climate change REALLY to blame for the California wildfires?
It seems like they received a setback from the idea that when their data was recorded it clearly showed that forest fires were far worse in the past, completely blasting the link between global warming, climate change, wildfire out of the water.
Here’s what NIFC says now:
Prior to 1983, federal forest fire authorities did not track official forest fire data using current reporting procedures. As a result, no official data was published on this website before 1983.
Not only is this a lie of omission, it’s ridiculous. Your agenda seems very clear. When the data was first published, the public was only informed that some data prior to 1983 may “… be revised when the NICC reviews historical data”.
There were no published concerns that the data might be invalid or that we should not use it. In addition, the data is very simple; a count of the number of fires and the number of acres burned. How hard is it to compile and verify that accurately?
What’s worse is that this data has been trusted in almost every news of a devastating fire that has ever occurred in the United States for decades. In virtually every message of a devastating fire, the number of acres it burned. THE NUMBER that the press used in history without there is no scale for the severity of the fire. Similarly, for each story about “what a bad forest fire season we had” the press gives the number of fires and the area burned.
And now, after decades of making this data available to the press and the public, and NIFC making it publicly available on their website for nearly a decade, would you like us to believe that it is now unreliable data?
Seriously, how hard is it to count the number of fires and the number of acres burned?
Essentially, what NIFC does is label every firefighter, firefighter, ranger, and smoke jumper who has fought forest fires for decades as untrustworthy in assessing and measuring this critical but very simple fire data. I will use bureaucratic dual languages of the government to access data from people at the scene of the fire every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
This whole matter is outrageous. What is even more outrageous, however, is that the NIFC is not at all transparent about the reason for the change. You are essentially saying, “The pre-1983 data is not good, trust us”. There is no citation of a study, no methodology, no justification for the removal. It’s not science, it’s not statistics, it doesn’t even make sense, but that’s exactly what happens.
Plotting the entire NIFC dataset (before it’s partially gone) gives us some clues as to why this was done and how forest fire and weather patterns have been inextricably linked for decades. Notice Figure 2 below, which combines the number of fires and the number of acres burned. See the notes I added.
Figure 2: Representation of the entire NIFC forest fire data set with area burned in amber and the total number of fires in a given year in blue. Annotations indicate major weather events in the United States. Click to enlarge. h / t to E. Calvin Beisner for Excel file.
It is clear that what NIFC did in calling data prior to 1983 “unreliable” and not only hiding key burn histories, but also choosing a data starting point that is the lowest in the entire data set, to ensure that there is an upward trend at this point.
The definition of cherry harvest is:
Picking cherries, suppressing evidence, or mistaking incomplete evidence is to point out individual cases or data that appear to corroborate a particular position, while ignoring a significant portion of related and similar cases or data that might contradict that position.
By picking the lowest point in the dataset for the total number of fires from 1983 and making all data prior to that unavailable, the NIFC ensures that any comparison between fires and climate change over the past 38 years will always have an upward trend and a correlation with increasing temperature shows.
It seems to me that the NIFC has very likely given in to pressure from climate activists to remove this inconvenient data. By deleting past data, NIFC can no longer be trusted. In addition to being unscientific, this deletion is dishonest and potentially fraudulent.
For posterity, the entire data set from NIFC (including before 1983) is available here in an Excel file (.xlsx):
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