Irrefutable NASA data: global fires down by 25 percent Using satellite technology, NASA determined that between 2003 and 2019, global fires have dropped by roughly 25 percent.
This makes the “climate change is worsening wildfires” argument completely moot.
From NASA Earth Observatory
The control of fire is a goal that may well be
as old as humanity, but the systematic monitoring of fire on a global scale is a much newer capability.
In the 1910s, the U.S. Forest Service began building
fire lookout towers on mountain peaks in order to detect distant fires. A few decades later, fire-spotting airplanes flew onto the scene. Then in the early 1980s, satellites began to map fires over large areas from the vantage point of space.
Over time, researchers have built a rich and textured record of Earth’s fire activity and are now able to analyze decadal trends. “The pace of discovery has increased dramatically during the satellite era,” said
James Randerson, a scientist at the University of California, Irvine. “Having high-quality, daily observations of fires available on a global scale has been critical.”
The animation above shows the locations of actively burning fires on a monthly basis for nearly two decades. The maps are based on observations from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. The colors are based on a count of the number (not size) of fires observed within a 1,000-square-kilometer area. White pixels show the high end of the count—as many as 30 fires in a 1,000-square-kilometer area per day. Orange pixels show as many as 10 fires, while red areas show as few as 1 fire per day.