Bjorn Lomborg has been trying to quell the hysteria about forest fires in the USA.
As Lomborg writes on Facebook:
Some people have pointed out that the National Interagency Fire Center writes that “Prior to 1983, sources of these figures are not known, or cannot be confirmed, and were not derived from the current situation reporting process. As a result the figures prior to 1983 should not be compared to later data.”
This is convenient, since the NIFC for the longest time didn’t even want to acknowledge that there were data before 1960 (https://web.archive.org/web/20171206160413/https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/fireInfo_stats_totalFires.html). I’ve consistently pointed out that we had early data and where the data starting in 1926 comes from; it is the Wildfire Statistics from USDA, summarized in the official Historical Statistics of the United States – Colonial Times to 1970, p537: http://bit.ly/2hGp7XF.
So, we all know, very well, where this data is from.
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