Tag: Space.com

SPACE.com Swallows Lies that Climate Change Is Making Wildfires Worse, It Isn’t

SPACE.com ran a story claiming that 2024/2025’s wildfires are proof that climate change is making wildfires larger and more severe. This is false. Ground based data, where available, and satellite data both show that wildfires have declined in number and acreage lost over the past century, even as the Earth warmed slightly.

A dramatic wildfire scene with thick smoke and flames rising from a hillside, surrounded by dry grass and charred trees under a cloudy sky.

From ClimateRealism

By H. Sterling Burnett

A dramatic image of a wildfire engulfing a ruined structure, surrounded by flames and smoke, with the word 'NOPE' overlaying the scene.

SPACE.com ran a story claiming that 2024/2025’s wildfires are proof that climate change is making wildfires larger and more severe. This is false. Ground based data, where available, and satellite data both show that wildfires have declined in number and acreage lost over the past century, even as the Earth warmed slightly.

The SPACE.com article, “Wildfires are getting more intense around the world due to human-driven climate change,” is based on a single study published in the journal Earth System Science Data (ESSD), “State of Wildfires 2024-2025,” which makes the unscientific claim that a single year of severe wildfires provides proof that climate change is causing an increase in wildfires.

This assertion suffers from a number of deficiencies. First, it is impossible to honestly attribute a single year of weather or disaster phenomena to climate change. Only a long-term measurement and averaging of trends could indicate a pattern that might suggest climate change as a causal factor. Global wildfire incidences from 2024 to 2025 were due a combination of disparate factors – with different factors resulting in wildfires in different areas. Some factors were common among regions, some not. But none were common across all regions.

The 2024/2025 wildfire season was not, as will be demonstrated shortly, part of a long-term trend.

The underlying study used cherry picked data to claim wildfires were worsening. A review of larger data sets, both location-based historical measurements of wildfire acreage burned and large satellite data sets for recent decades, show the total number of wildfires and acreage lost to wildfires have declined sharply both over the past 130 years covering the pre-satellite era (see Figure 1 below for the United States) and the post-satellite era.

Line graph showing the number of acres burned in wildland fires in the USA from 1926 to 2019, illustrating a decline in acreage burned over the decades.
Figure 1. Available wildfire acreage burned, by year, in the United States, 1926 to 2019. This includes data from NIFC prior to the disappearance of data that occurred in 2021. Graph by Anthony Watts.

Looking at broader global data during the satellite era, data sets from both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) show a marked decline in the amount of acreage lost to wildfires, with NASA recording a 24 percent decline in acres lost to wildfires from 1998 to 2015. (See figure 2, below)

Global map showing burned area trend from 1998 to 2015, with areas of increased and decreased fire activity marked in blue and red.
Figure 2: Global observations of burned areas and trends show a decline in wildfires from 1998-2015. Source: “NASA detects drop in global fires,” NASA website, June 29, 2017.

An ESA data set shows a similar declining trend. Scientific journals such as Science, Remote Sensing of the Environment, and Nature confirm these findings.

If there is an overall declining trend in wildfire numbers and acreage lost to wildfires, then climate change can’t be causing an increase in wildfires.

Those facts alone should be sufficient to discredit the SPACE.com article and the study it is based upon. When examining the specific wildfires discussed in the ESSD study one discovers that the wildfires in many instances weren’t wildfires at all. For instance, while the Los Angeles wildfire was large and destructive when compared to recent decades, it wasn’t historically unusual for the region. Also, its ignition, size, and destructiveness were the result, not of a changed climate – since temperatures have actually declined slightly there and precipitation has increased, but rather of a combination of arson, poor water management and neighborhood planning, and lack of fire response management. Nor as discussed at Climate Realism, were recent wildfires in Europe, the Mediterranean, Brazil, and Canada, historically unusual, or tied in anyway to long-term climate change. Moreover, they did create greater air pollution than they would have produced absent climate change.

The ESSD study ties the heightened danger of wildfires to climate change driven worsening drought and fire weather. However, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been unable to detect any change in fire weather patterns. (See the table, below)

Chart displaying climatic impact-driver types and their classified confidence levels regarding changes in historical periods and future projections.

The IPCC also reports that more precipitation is falling on average than in the previous 30 years of climate change.

As far as drought goes, in its 2021 Sixth Assessment report, the IPCC distinguishes four categories of drought: hydrological, meteorological, ecological, and agricultural. According to the IPCC, there is limited evidence climate change has increased the number, duration, or intensity of hydrological or meteorological droughts, and it has only medium confidence it has “contributed to changes in agricultural and ecological droughts and has led to an increase in the overall affected land area.”

Even for ecological and agricultural droughts, the data are not clear. The IPCC divides the world into 47 separate regions of study when analyzing drought trends, and its survey of the literature suggests ecological and agricultural drought may have increased during the period of modest warming in 12 of those 47 regions. However, in only two of those regions does the IPCC have even “medium confidence” for any human role in the observed increase. For the remaining regions experiencing a possible increase in droughts, the IPCC has low confidence human activities have had any discernible impact.

In short, there is limited to no evidence, meaning real-world data, suggesting that climate change, whether human-caused or not, has made droughts worse or resulted in heightened fire weather. By contrast, data clearly show that wildfires have declined during the present period of climate change. If SPACE.com wants to be taken seriously as a credible source of science information for the wider public, it should not be in the business of publishing uncritical stories sycophantically promoting the latest alarming study on climate change. Had the journal done a simple fact check, it would have easily discovered that the ESSD study was wrong or misleading on nearly all, if not all, of its major points.


No, Space.com, Cutoff of Satellite Sea-Ice Data Won’t Make Any Difference

Saying, “The changes are the latest attacks by the U.S. government on science and the funding of scientific research in an effort to slash the budget to enable tax cuts elsewhere,” Space.com sets the stage for some malevolent action where there is none.

From ClimateRealism

By Anthony Watts

The recent Space.com article, dated July 10, 2025, titled “US military cuts climate scientists off from vital satellite sea-ice data,” makes the false case for panic about the loss of data from the Special Sensor Microwave Imager/Sounder (SSMIS) operated by the Department of Defense.

Saying, “The changes are the latest attacks by the U.S. government on science and the funding of scientific research in an effort to slash the budget to enable tax cuts elsewhere,” Space.com sets the stage for some malevolent action where there is none.

The Space.com piece details how the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado, Boulder, will lose access to SSMIS data, which tracks sea ice coverage. The article paints this as a devastating blow, tying sea ice loss to catastrophic glacier melting and sea level rise, while also admitting to commercial benefits like shorter shipping routes.

It also admits that NSIDC plants to pivot to Japan’s Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2) data, but frets about a temporary data gap. Their tone is predictably dire, framing the decision as part of a broader attack on science, with references to budget cuts, NASA mission threats, and evictions of scientific institutions (like GISS).

The article insists the cuts blind scientists to a critical climate indicator, but let’s take a step back and examine why this might not be a catastrophe, and why sea ice data, in the grand scheme, isn’t the climate change proxy it’s cracked up to be.

Sea ice has long-been a poster child for climate alarmism, but as we’ve discussed extensively at Climate Realism, and Climate at a Glance here, here, and here, it’s a flawed and noisy proxy for climate change. First off, Arctic Sea ice, while lower than its 1979-2000 average, has not vanished as predicted. Since the notable low in 2007, Arctic Sea ice extent has stabilized at a new, lower plateau, fluctuating year to year but showing no consistent downward spiral toward an “ice-free Arctic” summer, as seen in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1: Shows satellite derived summer minimum Arctic Sea ice extent values from 1979 to 2023, with dashed line showing the linear trend. The added trend line in red shows no change in summer minimum extent since 2007. Image source: NSIDC. Red trend line from 2007 and trend line examples under the title added by A. Watts

This stabilization is despite endless model-based forecasts and dire predictions from Al Gore.

For example, Arctic sea ice has remained stable for nearly 20 years. Meanwhile, Antarctic sea ice tells an even more inconvenient story. Contrary to models predicting ice loss in a warming world, Antarctic sea ice has shown periods of growth, particularly in recent years. Further, in 2014, Antarctic sea ice reached a new record high extent. This growth directly contradicts the narrative that a warmer planet universally melts sea ice, exposing the oversimplification of tying ice extent to global temperature.

But even worse, as has been pointed out at Climate at a Glance, even the losses of Antarctic ice are insignificant in the much bigger picture of total ice in Antarctica.

Figure 2: (click to enlarge) Comparison of satellite data for Antarctic ice mass loss. Cumulative ice mass loss on the left and that same data compared to the total mass of ice on the right. Data source: http://imbie.org. 
Graphs originally by Willis Eshenbach, adapted and annotated by Anthony Watts.

Why is sea ice such a shaky climate proxy?

As we’ve long argued, it’s influenced by far more than just temperature. Wind patterns, ocean currents, and natural variability like the Arctic Oscillation play massive roles. For instance, note how changes in wind patterns affect Antarctic sea ice. In Antarctica, changes in atmospheric circulation, not just temperature, drive ice variability. Add to that the fact that sea ice data is riddled with measurement challenges: sensor calibration issues, satellite drift, and algorithm tweaks can all skew results. The Space.com article’s claim that losing SSMIS data blinds us to climate change ignores these complexities and assumes sea ice is a straightforward barometer of climate change, which it’s not.

Tracking daily sea ice provides, at best, a rough indication of what’s happening in the polar regions, heavily filtered by natural variability and technical limitations. For actual climate science, this metric tells us less about the climate than about the limitations of our models and the persistent urge to find a simple answer to a complex system. The scientific value is, therefore, minimal—especially when compared to the breathless importance often assigned to it.

Moreover, the article’s panic over a temporary data gap is ironic, especially given NSIDC’s history of downplaying data issues when it suits them. Back in 2009, WattsUpWithThat.com wrote about a significant data loss at NSIDC due to a catastrophic sensor failure on their satellite, leading to erroneous data and a gap in records. NSIDC’s Walt Meier dismissed it in comments as “not worth blogging about.” You can read the details in the article, “George Will’s battle with hotheaded ice alarmists”, where the hypocrisy was highlighted. Funny how a data gap was no big deal then, but now a similar issue is framed as apocalyptic.

This selective outrage undermines NSIDC’s credibility and highlights the politicized nature of their narrative. Expanding on the article’s premise, the loss of SSMIS data isn’t particularly crippling for climate science because sea ice data, in the context described, has limited utility. It’s a noisy, multifaceted metric that doesn’t directly correlate with global warming or CO2 levels. Other datasets—like global temperature records, ocean heat content, or even alternative satellite sources like AMSR2—provide more robust insights.

The article’s claim that sea ice is a “significant measure of climate change” overstates its importance, ignoring how natural variability and non-climatic factors muddy the signal. If anything, the DoD’s decision to prioritize military needs over feeding an alarmist narrative might force scientists to focus on more reliable metrics.

The DoD has its own priorities—ship deployments, national security—and isn’t obligated to subsidize NSIDC’s research. The pivot to AMSR2, while requiring calibration, isn’t insurmountable; Japan’s data is already available and comparable. The article’s fearmongering about a “blind spot” ignores that climate science has never relied solely on one dataset. So perhaps a pause in data will prompt a reevaluation of these flawed predictions. Also, check coverage where models are shown failing on sea ice predictions.

In short, the Space.com article is another example of climate alarmism without factual basis. Sea ice isn’t the climate oracle it’s made out to be, and the loss of SSMIS data is more inconvenience than catastrophe. Arctic ice has stabilized, Antarctic ice has grown, and natural variability trumps simplistic model narratives. As we’ve said for years at Climate Realism, the climate story is far more complex than the headlines suggest. NSIDC’s past dismissal of data gaps, as noted in 2009, only underscores the selective hysteria at play here. Time to move on to better metrics and less dogma.