Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
The third annual State of Wildfires report went up as a discussion preprint in Earth System Science Data on August 3. It covers the fire season from March 2025 through February 2026. By the report’s own count, global burned area was 18% below the 2002 to 2024 average, and fire carbon emissions were 20 to 31% below average.
The third annual State of Wildfires report went up as a discussion preprint in Earth System Science Data on August 3. It covers the fire season from March 2025 through February 2026. By the report’s own count, global burned area was 18% below the 2002 to 2024 average, and fire carbon emissions were 20 to 31% below average.
That gets one sentence. The rest of the abstract goes region by region:
In the Midwestern Canadian Shield Forests, the epicentre of Canada’s anomalous season, we find that anthropogenic climate change has doubled the likelihood of extreme fire weather in this region and made the observed BA around 61 times more likely during July–August 2025, while BA extent in the region is 46 times greater. Many parts of Europe also experienced record or high-ranking BA and fire C emissions, including in Spain, Portugal, and the UK, and a record USD 4.11 billion of physical assets were exposed to fire across the continent. Direct fatalities occurred in Türkiye (17), Spain (8), Portugal (6), Cyprus (2), Greece (1) and France (1), and evacuations in Türkiye, Spain, and Greece totalled over 110,000. In the Northwest Iberian Peninsula, we find that extreme fire weather over August 2025 was around 3 times more likely due to climate change. Under a high-emissions scenario (SSP3-7.0), fires of the same return interval are likely to burn about 78 % more area by the end of the century, with some projections within the same scenario suggesting increases of around sevenfold. In Chile and northwest Argentina, January–February 2026 fires caused 23 fatalities, displaced 55,000 people and threatened a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In the Chilean Temperate Forests and Matorral, the epicentre, we find that BA was around 36 % larger due to anthropogenic climate change.
A below average year could be luck. So I went to the satellite record. NASA’s MODIS burned area product, MCD64A1, maps burn scars from the Terra and Aqua satellites every month at 500 meter resolution. The University of Maryland fire group, which produces it, also distributes a quarter degree version for climate work, MCD64CMQ, with the burned hectares already summed into each grid cell. I added up every month from January 2001 through December 2023, the last full year in the files.
Global area burned each year, 2001 to 2023. NASA MODIS MCD64CMQ.
The five years 2003 through 2007 averaged 450 million hectares burned. The five years 2019 through 2023 averaged 353 million. The fitted trend from 2003, when both satellites were flying, is a loss of about 1.5% per year, and it is not marginal: the odds of a trend like that turning up by chance are less than one in ten thousand. 2023, the year of Canada’s record-breaking fire season, comes in 14th of 23 globally. The lowest year in the record is 2022.
None of this is a discovery. In 2017 Niels Andela and colleagues, using the same MODIS product along with the GFED4s database, reported in Science that “global burned area declined by 24.3 ± 8.8% over the past 18 years.” They traced most of it to farming, as agriculture spread into savannas and grasslands that used to burn. They also found that fire models could not reproduce the size or pattern of the decline, and suggested the models may overestimate fire emissions in future projections. At the time, MODIS alone gave them −1.15% per year for 2003 to 2015, significant only at the 90% level. Eight more years of data have taken care of that.
MODIS at 500 meters misses a lot of small fires, so in 2023 the GFED team rebuilt the record. Chen et al. corrected MCD64A1 against Landsat and Sentinel-2 imagery, which see small burns MODIS doesn’t, and their total came out 93% higher. The decline survived.
From the abstract:
The global annual burned area during 2001–2020 is estimated to be 774 ± 63 Mha yr−1 or 5.9 ± 0.5 % of ice-free land. Burned area declined by 1.21 ± 0.66 % yr−1, a cumulative decrease of 24.2 ± 13.2 % over 20 years. … The global reduction is primarily driven by a decrease in fires in savannas, grasslands, and croplands. … Forest, peat, and deforestation fires did not exhibit significant long-term trends.
So the raw satellite product, the Science paper and the corrected database all point the same way. About a quarter less land burns each year than at the start of the century.
The usual answer is that the decline is African grassland and doesn’t count. Africa is most of it. But I split the totals with a rough box around the continent, and the rest of the world is falling at about the same rate.
Burned area in a box around Africa and everywhere else, 2001 to 2023. NASA MODIS MCD64CMQ.
The right panel is noisier, and the trend there is weaker statistically, but it is down, not up. North of 50°N, where the boreal forests are, the series jumps around with no significant trend in either direction. Its biggest year is still 2003.
The field has a response to all this. In June 2024 Calum Cunningham of the University of Tasmania and colleagues took roughly 30 million fires, kept the 2,913 most energetic, and found that these extreme events increased 2.2-fold from 2003 to 2023. Cunningham told the Washington Post the work began as a response to skeptics who asked how there could be a growing fire crisis while the area burned was shrinking. The increases are real and concentrated in temperate conifer and boreal forests. But the measure is about one fire in ten thousand, on a record that starts in 2003, and by Nature’s own account the study does not directly connect the trend to global warming.
Continued climate change is expected to intensify these hydroclimatic extremes, yet mitigation has already reduced projected end-of-century wildfire risk: under a high-end emissions pathway (SSP3-7.0), the extreme BA events in our focal regions are projected to be 4–23 % smaller than they would have been under a worst-case emissions scenario no longer considered credible (SSP5-8.5).emphasis added
SSP5-8.5 was never the road we were on. Zeke Hausfather and Glen Peters pointed out in Nature in 2020 that it requires “an unprecedented fivefold increase in coal use by the end of the century,” and that global coal use peaked in 2013.
There was nothing to mitigate.
Global burned area was 18% below average this past season and has been falling for two decades. Why is that one sentence?
If the fire models could not reproduce the decline in 2017, how much weight do their end-of-century projections carry now?
Burned area data: NASA MODIS MCD64CMQ Collection 6.1, monthly 0.25° burned area, January 2001 to December 2023, from the University of Maryland fire group (fuoco.geog.umd.edu). Annual totals are sums of the monthly BurnedArea field. “Africa” is the box 36°S to 38°N, 18°W to 52°E.
In a recent article in the Independent, “Prince William warns ‘inch-by-inch’ action is not enough to stop climate change,” Prince William points at recent forest fires in the UK as evidence that climate change is devastating the globe and that the world’s peoples must make rapid, sweeping economic and social changes and sacrifices changes to prevent catastrophe. This is nonsense.
In a recent article in the Independent, “Prince William warns ‘inch-by-inch’ action is not enough to stop climate change,” Prince William points at recent forest fires in the UK as evidence that climate change is devastating the globe and that the world’s peoples must make rapid, sweeping economic and social changes and sacrifices changes to prevent catastrophe. This is nonsense. The kind of civilizational overhaul Prince William insists on would be unacceptably authoritarian and would produce far more harm and death than it would prevent. Also, this year’s wildfires are a bad example to point toward as evidence of climate change since they were neither unprecedented nor part of a long-term trend.
The Prince of Wales is reported to have made a series of comments hyping an alarmist perspective of climate change, albeit an optimistic one… with a deadline of course.
The Independent writes:
Current measures are proceeding at a snail’s pace “inch by inch” and are nowhere near enough to address the problem, he said.
…
He said action must be stepped up in what is left of this decade, effectively setting a deadline of 2030, less than four years from now.
He referenced this summer’s wildfires in the UK as an example of the troubling evidence that climate change is causing dangerous weather.
The problem for Prince William is that data debunks his wildfire assertions. Data from the collaborative project between NASA and the European Space Agency, Copernicus, covering the 2002 to 2023 time period demonstrate that over the past two decades there has been no trend towards worsening wildfires in the UK. (See figure below)
This summer’s wildfires burned about 23,000 ha of land in the UK, which is certainly high, but not unprecedented, and is clearly not part of a long-term trend according to this dataset. Global satellite data on wildfires likewise show that they are not becoming worse or more common, but the opposite. (See figure below)
Figure 2. Historical and Satellite data on wildfire acreage burned. Blue curve, global wildfire area burned reconstruction. Orange curve, global wildfire area burned measured by satellites. Graph plotted by Bjorn Lomborg, Ph.D.
The set of solutions that Prince William suggests to prevent supposedly dangerous climate change are nebulous, nothing specific is ever promoted in the article itself. The closest we get are those promoted by his Earthshot Prize competition, which thus far have primarily focused on environmental issues like cleaning up water resources and waste management. It is unclear what exact solutions he advocates for when it comes to, as Earthshot says, “fixing the climate,” but the Prince of Wales said his favored plans “requires people willing to fund them.”
He does deserve some credit for insisting at the same time that “competition, invention, and optimism are the best means of overcoming the multiple environmental challenges facing the world.” This is true, much better than top-down government intervention. But if, as he says, the world is moving too slowly and must “take action” to stop climate change, the solutions he has in mind almost have to be authoritarian and burdensome in nature.
Unfortunately for him, but fortunately for everyone else, the most stringent net-zero policies are also the most unpopular among even climate-concerned UK and European residents. As covered at Climate Realism three years ago, a YouGov poll showed that most Europeans believe that climate change is a problem, but few are willing to agree to changes like limiting the number of children they have or stopping consuming meat in order to reach net-zero carbon dioxide.
Meanwhile, net zero policies are preventing people from obtaining life-saving technology like air conditioning and the plentiful, reliable energy needed to power it.
Prince William is behind the curve when it comes to climate change, which seems to be collapsing as a popular cause even among true believers. He is also very misinformed, most likely by the biased media, about the history of European and global wildfire occurrences. Setting yet another deadline for climate action, like the dozens of deadlines that have gone by before with no ill consequences, will not make people believe more urgently that a climate cataclysm is in the offing or that radical changes in their lifestyles are justified.
A recent article in Fortune Magazine “Climate change pushes thirsty bears into Coloradans’ cars — one honked a horn for hours from 3am onward,” from The Associated Press (AP), blames climate change for bears breaking into cars and homes in Colorado. This is false.
Bears have gone in search of food and water amid a drought in Colorado, that much is true, but it’s not because of long term climate change.
“Millions of people live in or near bear habitat across the Rockies, where widespread drought has reduced supplies of nuts, berries and plants that bears eat,” the article explains this is “prompting the animals to roam far and wide for food.”
This is nothing unusual, except perhaps in the amount of bears that had dangerous contact with humans this year. The article blames climate change for the increase in bear encounters, but one of the most glaring issues with this AP piece is that it does not even once address the fact that there are significantly more bears than ever.
It is difficult to get exact counts of black bears, in large part because they live in dense wooded areas, but generally the bear population in Colorado is believed to have increased in recent decades. The same is even more true for parts of the country where bears were nearly eliminated, like in Pennsylvania, which has more than four times as many bears today as it did in the 1970s.
In addition to there being more bears, there are also more people living in what were once remote areas, so bear encounters will naturally increase. Food availability draws bears even when their natural sources are not suppressed. As land is developed, more contact with the wild animals that used to live and forage there should be expected.
The availability of human food sources from garbage bins probably disturbs the natural pattern of population booms and busts. When drought occurs that suppresses berry and acorn production in late summer, bears would normally have a harder time putting on weight for winter, and many would die off. Now, they have other sources of food, which sustains a larger population and exacerbates the issue of human-bear contact.
On the issue of climate change and drought, the article says that the Upper Colorado River Basin had a snowpack this year that was “the worst on record,” and that “[s]cientists say human-caused global warming made that far more likely.”
“Made that far more likely” is a couching statement, because the data show that despite more than 100 years of warming, Colorado has not seen an increase in drought.
It is true that snowpack hit a record low this year, which spelled trouble for water supplies since snow melt feeds the Colorado River and its tributaries. And long term data show that in general snow water equivalent in Colorado was higher in the 1970s than it is today, but it has been fairly stable since the late 90s and early 2000s.
In terms of precipitation-related drought, data show that there is no trend in worsening drought conditions, and in fact there were much more lengthy and severe droughts in pre-industrial Colorado.
The article adds that “vast areas of bear habitat” have been “scorched by record wildfires,” but it’s not clear that they mean Colorado. Colorado’s wildfires are not becoming more frequent or extreme, despite big fires in 2020 and 2018, which were outliers from a generally flat trend according to the available data from the National Interagency Fire Coordination Center.
Interestingly, the vast majority of the article was not about climate change, despite it getting the leading spot in the article headline. The majority of the article was discussing the bear-human interactions themselves, which certainly make for interesting news, but are not indicative of human-caused climate change.
The Associated Press and, by extension, Fortune Magazine by republishing their piece, seem more interested in promoting the catastrophe narrative of climate change in any way they can, regardless of nuances. The climate comments in the article were completely unnecessary to tell the story of increased human-bear encounters, and only serve to advance the outlets’ political climate slant.
California homeowners are struggling to find insurance against wildfires and other natural disasters, as the state chases insurance companies away, and as the California Insurance Commissioner fails to hold insurance companies accountable.
The California Department of Insurance is partnering with UC Santa Cruz Center for Coastal Climate Resilience to explore how insurance policies could protect “green infrastructure.”
Abstract blurred background of Firefighters using water fog fire extinguisher to fighting with the fire flame in large building. Firefighter and industrial safety disaster and public service concept.
So what does the California Department of Insurance want to do? Insure “urban forests” against climate change!
The department is working on a pilot project to study how it can work with insurance companies still doing business in the state to insure forests against “storms, extreme heat, drought and pests.”
The idea is to provide “parametric insurance,” which is a lump sum of money, rather than compensation for losses. (That’s how most earthquake insurance works: It won’t be enough to rebuild your house, but some smaller amount.)
The California Department of Insurance is partnering with UC Santa Cruz Center for Coastal Climate Resilience to explore how insurance policies could protect “green infrastructure.”
The United Nations Environment Programme is running a related project, encouraging something called “Total Balance Sheet Transition” (TBS).
The idea is to encourage insurers to write policies to insure the natural environment against the anticipated effects of climate change.
The UN’s idea is designed to let government and corporate players interpret the new world of insurance any way they want — and ultimately con, scam, and fleece hard-working families and businesses.
Bureaucrats will get new powers and cultivate new corporate allies as they force consumers and property owners to pay more for insurance.
Insurance companies will have new justifications to raise rates, supposedly to cover risks like rising sea levels. The companies might never have to pay claims, since sea levels will only rise several feet under the worst-case scenario.
Legislators, regulators, activists, and journalists can continue blaming petroleum companies and their customers for rising seas, wildfires, energy prices, and social and climate injustices.
Meanwhile, the thousands of aggrieved families who lost homes and loved ones in the Palisades Fire, Eaton Fire, Camp Fire, and other recent conflagrations in California will be left out in the cold.
These families won’t even be counted among the “stakeholders” in this grand TBS insurance transition, which barely offers an afterthought about wildfires.An aerial view shows homes in various stages of construction following the 2025 Eaton wildfire on Monday, August 3, 2026, in Altadena. VCG via Getty Images
That’s likely because urban, state, and national forest wildfires have been horrifically destructive and lethal in recent years — for reasons that have nothing to do with climate change.
The state’s forest management, endangered species, and fire response policies have prevented tree thinning and brush removal; emphasized diversity over competence in hiring, and failed to ensure adequate water supplies.
TBS mumbo-jumbo says nothing about better forest management, adequate fire insurance, ensuring faster permits to rebuild homes, or holding insurance companies to the terms of their policies.
It’s little wonder State Farm, Allstate, Farmers, and other insurers have paused or stopped selling or renewing property insurance policies in California.
Homeowners left with inadequate or no coverage must now rely on California’s FAIR Plan, the insurance pool of last resort — which hardly covers victims for their damages.
It’s business as usual for a state that’s become infamous for planning to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a high-speed train system that has yet to lay one inch of track.
These are the typical climate change and “renewable” energy obsessions that bring blackouts, rolling outages, and the highest gasoline and electricity prices in America.
Somehow, the state continues to embrace policies that delay housing permits and raise construction costs — while keeping and even expanding homeless encampments, which are themselves the cause of wildfires.
None of this is surprising when voters have blessed one-party control of state government for most of the past fifty years.
With two Democrats — Bernie Sanders-backed Jane Kim, and State Senator Ben Allen — running for California Insurance Commissioner, voters have limited choice.
But Californians can demand that the two candidates explain if they intend to continue UN-backed pipe dreams like TBS — or if they will finally put homeowners first.
Deutsche Welle (DW) claims in “How climate change is teaming up with ‘Super El Nino” that a developing “Super El Niño,” combined with climate change, could make 2026 one of the hottest years on record while increasing the risks of heat waves, wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, and marine heat waves around the world. This is highly misleading.
Deutsche Welle (DW) claims in “How climate change is teaming up with ‘Super El Nino” that a developing “Super El Niño,” combined with climate change, could make 2026 one of the hottest years on record while increasing the risks of heat waves, wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, and marine heat waves around the world. This is highly misleading. El Niño are long-recognized naturally recurring ocean-atmosphere cycles that have operated for thousands of years and strong El Niño events have occurred periodically throughout history, long before industrial greenhouse gas emission began to increase.
The first red flag appears in the headline itself. There is no official meteorological definition of a “Super El Niño.”
Neither the World Meteorological Organization, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center, nor the American Meteorological Society recognizes “Super El Niño” as a formal scientific classification. Meteorologists describe El Niño events by measuring sea surface temperature anomalies in the Niño 3.4 region of the tropical Pacific. They may characterize an event as weak, moderate, strong, or very strong, but “Super El Niño” is largely a media invention designed to make a naturally occurring climate pattern sound unprecedented.
That alone should make readers skeptical.
El Niño is not a new phenomenon, nor is it evidence of climate change. Long before automobiles, coal-fired power plants, or industrial emissions existed, El Niño events periodically warmed the tropical Pacific Ocean, temporarily altering normal weather patterns around the globe. Paleoclimate records from corals, lake sediments, and other shell middens, and other proxy data show that El Niño events have repeatedly occurred for thousands of years.
Nothing about its existence is evidence of a climate crisis. DW also suggests that climate change is “teaming up” with El Niño to produce record warmth.
That statement reverses cause and effect.
El Niño transfers enormous amounts of stored ocean heat into the atmosphere. That is precisely why global temperatures often spike during strong El Niño years and then decline as La Niña conditions return. This pattern has repeated for centuries.
The strong 1997-98 El Niño produced record global temperatures.
More recently, the 2023-24 El Niño contributed to another jump in global temperatures before they began moderating as the event weakened. There is nothing unprecedented about this sequence, which is made clear in the Figure below.
It is exactly what climatologists expect from a strong El Niño. DW further claims that El Niño could intensify heat waves, wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, and marine heat waves around the world.
Some of those statements contain a speck of truth, but mostly they are misleading talking points.
El Niño does influence weather patterns globally. It can make some regions temporarily wetter and others drier. It can suppress Atlantic hurricane activity while increasing hurricane activity in parts of the Pacific. It affects rainfall, temperatures, and storm tracks across much of the globe.
But that is very different from claiming El Niño automatically causes more weather disasters worldwide.
Wildfires depend on ignition sources, fuel loads, forest management, humidity, and local weather. Heat waves have occurred throughout recorded history, long before anyone worried about greenhouse gases. Droughts and floods are influenced by regional circulation patterns that vary considerably from one El Niño event to another.
Simply invoking El Niño and climate change together does not establish that either is responsible for any particular extreme weather event, much less every such event. DW also repeats a common media refrain that climate change remains “the main driver” of rising temperatures while El Niño merely amplifies its effects.
That claim is presented as settled fact, but no evidence is offered by DW to support it.
In reality, year-to-year changes in global temperature are overwhelmingly dominated by natural variability, particularly the transition between El Niño and La Niña. That is why global temperatures can rise sharply during a strong El Niño and then level off or even decline afterward. Over decades and centuries, other natural oceanic current patterns, like the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and the Pacific Meridional Overturning Circulation are significant factors in climate change as they redistribute ocean heat.
Natural variability remains a major driver of short-term climate fluctuations. Perhaps the biggest journalistic failure is that DW never distinguishes between weather forecasting and climate attribution.
Forecasting that a strong El Niño may influence global weather over the coming months is reasonable science. Claiming that climate change is “teaming up” with El Niño to produce nearly every type of extreme weather is speculation. Those are not the same thing.
The article also hints that 2027 could be even hotter, despite acknowledging that the future evolution of El Niño remains uncertain. That is another projection built upon assumptions, not observations.
No one knows today what the global average temperature will be in 2027 because it will depend on countless variables, including the evolution of ENSO, volcanic activity, cloud cover, ocean circulation, and other natural influences that cannot be predicted with certainty years in advance.
Good journalism should help readers understand the difference between natural climate variability and long-term climate trends. DW’s story linking the developing strong El Niño to climate change is not good journalism.
Readers deserve better than catchy labels and speculative headlines. They deserve reporting that distinguishes between what scientists actually know, what climate models project, and what remains uncertain. In this case, DW chose drama over clarity, turning one of Earth’s oldest natural climate cycles into yet another vehicle for climate alarmism.
This weekend, another wildfire started in the same area. Interestingly, police have arrested a man on suspicion of arson in connection with this blaze.
It turns out Glasgo is homeless, with a history of arrests and mental health problems.
Earlier this year, one of my clients had to evacuate a building because of a wildfire that began in an adjacent valley.
This weekend, another wildfire started in the same area. Interestingly, police have arrested a man on suspicion of arson in connection with this blaze.
A cigarette-smoking poker dealer has been unmasked as the alleged firebug behind a 131-acre blaze that threatened homes and forced evacuations in San Diego.
Brandon Glasgo, 30, was arrested on suspicion of arson in connection with the Sorrento Fire — which erupted Sunday afternoon and quickly tore through the Peñasquitos Creek area, according to San Diego police.
Glasgo, who worked as a poker dealer at Jamul Casino Resort, was taken into custody Monday morning.
Police have not revealed what allegedly sparked the blaze or disclosed further details about the accusations against Glasgo, who is scheduled to be arraigned Wednesday.
Here is video of the suspect arrested for allegedly starting the Sorrento Fire in California, which is still burning & forced San Diegans to evacuate their homes.
We don’t have to live like this.
Court records show the 30-year-old has been in and out of the criminal justice… pic.twitter.com/WiVoGEAime
As I noted in my previous review of arsons and wildfires, the forensic literature on arson is blunt about who is lighting these fires. Studies of arrested and referred arsonists consistently find that 54 to 90 percent have diagnosable psychiatric histories, with schizophrenia rates more than 20 times higher than the general population and substance abuse present in roughly two-thirds of cases.
SDPD spokesperson Officer Colin Steinbroner said shortly after the fire started, officers were flagged down by an individual who said they had seen someone suspicious near the fire start area. The man, later identified as Glasgo, was detained and later arrested. He was in custody Monday with a bail set at $75,000, according to jail records.
Glasgo’s father said his son is mentally ill and homeless. Court records obtained by NBC San Diego show Glasgo has been arrested multiple times for chargest that include felony battery and resisting arrest.
The Sorrento Fire sparked around 3:15 p.m. between Sorrento Valley Boulevard and Carmel Mountain Road and grew to about 130 acres within a few hours, according to the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department. It was halted just before 7 p.m. By Monday evening, the scorched acreage was updated to 138 acres and containment increased to 60%.
Arson suspect remains jailed as Sorrento Fire reaches 60% containment https://t.co/gqS11Qg1gY
By late Tuesday, crews had the fire 75% contained, a significant increase from the 25% containment reported over the weekend, according to the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department.
“Crews continue to make good progress, building nearly a mile of handline and adding 2,300 feet of hose line to help secure the perimeter,” according to a SDFD statement. “Fire crews will continue patrols overnight. 150 personnel will return tomorrow for continued mop-up.”
Glasgo was being held at the San Diego Central Jail in lieu of $75,000 bail pending his arraignment, which is scheduled for Wednesday afternoon.
This fire was contained, but San Diegans should not mistake that outcome for an acceptable status quo. This allegedly deliberate act had the potential to trigger the rapid unemployment of more than 100 people, devastate nearby businesses, and put residents, workers, and evacuees directly in the path of a fast-moving wildfire.
The response to this suspected arson also pulled fire crews, engines, and other emergency resources away from the rest of the city, leaving them unavailable for the next medical emergency, structure fire, collision, or brush fire.
Furthermore, if the prevailing winds or weather conditions had been slightly different, the consequences could have been disastrous for the surrounding community. San Diego got a real break, inasmuch as the day was relatively cool and the air humid. If this fire had started in, let’s say, October, Santa Ana winds could have allowed the blaze to ignite into a Los Angeles-like disaster.
As it was, the fire heavily damaged one of the loveliest wild areas in this portion of San Diego, Peñasquitos Valley. It is one of my favorite hiking spots. My client is now trying to figure out what to do about the coyotes that moved into its parking lot after the earlier fire.
We do not have to live like this.
Californians should not tolerate local or state leadership that allows untreated severe mental illness, chronic homelessness, repeat criminal conduct, and public-safety failures to compound until they become a regional emergency.
Compassion must include protecting the public, enforcing laws, providing meaningful treatment, and refusing to normalize preventable danger as simply another feature of life in California. In other words, we need climate change…but the political kind.
In her UnHerd column last week, Kathleen Stock writes from a “horrifically well-insulated sweatbox”, the fan beside her registering 29°C while the air outside hits 33.
Ms Stock has absorbed the idea of a “new kind of summer” as lived experience.
In her UnHerd column last week, Kathleen Stock writes from a “horrifically well-insulated sweatbox”, the fan beside her registering 29°C while the air outside hits 33. Every day is the same: clear blue, suffocatingly hot, uncannily still. The parks are brown, gardens turning to dust. Stressed trees drop huge boughs. At night, foxes prowl, thirstily searching for water. Brambles appear far too early; the pond at the end of the road is silting up. She feels discombobulated – sweaty, exhausted, her mind as vacant as the cloudless sky.
This opening of her UnHerd essay, ‘Why I’ve got the hots for localism’, is an existential register of fatigue, rendered through direct observation and an aesthetic sensibility rather than charts or organised empirical data. Ms Stock has absorbed the idea of a “new kind of summer” as lived experience. The cider-apple harvest is failing, harebells and wasps are disappearing, parts of the New Forest are blackened, elderly neighbours wilt in oven-like flats and local farmers watch stunted wheat and barley. She asks how we feel about this “new normal” and answers with sadness and “discombobulation” that require no grand theoretical defence – much as grief for people or pets needs none.
Dr Stock OBE, a gender-critical feminist and philosopher, is right about the larger strategic point that follows. Whatever the causes and consequences of global warming, a small country like Britain cannot do anything about it alone. Provisional UK territorial greenhouse-gas emissions for 2025 stand at 367 MtCO₂e, less than 1% of the global total according to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. Any meaningful reduction is swamped by emissions growth in China, India and other large developing economies. The coordination and free-rider problems among major emitters in any proposed global deal are near-impossible. Gathering the world’s nations at the UN annual climate summits – the next one, COP31, to be held in Antalya, Türkiye, from November 9th to 20th 2026 – has made little difference to global emissions over the past three decades.
Instead of clashing endlessly over the global warming narrative, she proposes detaching the local from the global. Chasing impossible global solutions hampers useful consensus-building on urgent local and regional problems to save vanishing landscapes and help the elderly in oven-like flats, manage failing harvests and buckling rails and form practical adaptation plans “without any grand theory about carbon dioxide.”
An unprecedented hot summer, raging wildfires, failing agriculture: not by the numbers
Start with the weather itself. Stock treats the current summer as a novel meteorological regime – “the new kind of summer”, a heat so unfamiliar that “no one can remember what rain feels like”. The parks are brown, trees drop boughs, foxes search for water. Yet British summers have been hot and dry before, and worse. The 1976 heatwave and drought produced 16 consecutive days above 30°C at Heathrow, a peak of 35.9°C at Cheltenham and a drought so severe that a Cabinet minister was appointed specifically to manage it; some parts of southern England received under 55% of average rainfall over more than a year. The 1995 drought is now regarded by meteorologists as drier still. Neither event required elevated atmospheric CO₂ to be explained; both were driven by persistent blocking high-pressure systems, the same phenomenon operating today. The insistence that 2026 is meteorologically unprecedented functions less as observation than as mood music for the argument that follows. Note that the UK Met Office itself, relying on junk weather stations and purveying “homogenised” – read massaged – temperature trends, has lost credibility as a reliable organisation, as my colleague Paul Homewood has documented rigorously over the years.
The same selective framing appears in Stock’s treatment of local crises. She notes a nearby train derailment that observers speculate was caused by heat-buckled rails. Stock’s catalogue of local issues includes early brambles, a silting pond, New Forest fires, a failing cider-apple harvest, disappearing harebells and wasps and stunted wheat and barley. Some of these can cause real hardships. But the causal story she tells is incomplete, and conveniently so. The “heat buckling” of rail tracks is being investigated by rail officials but, until it is confirmed, the likely culprits are poor maintenance of tracks and other infrastructure.
Wildfire investigators have long found that the overwhelming majority of UK wildfires are started by people, not lightning – the House of Lords Library concludes that almost all UK wildfires result from accidental or deliberate human acts, while Natural Wales estimates roughly 30% are arson and 70% accidental or careless. Ignition, in other words, is a human-behaviour problem before it is a climate problem.
What has changed is fuel load. The fashion for ‘wilding’, and the accompanying retreat from controlled winter burning, has left England’s uplands carrying more combustible vegetation than at any point in living memory. Labour’s extension of restrictions on controlled heather burning across 1.6 million acres of peatland has removed one of the oldest and most effective tools for breaking up continuous fuel and creating firebreaks; gamekeepers, moorland managers and land-owning bodies have warned for years that the policy was building toward exactly the kind of record wildfire season Britain has now had. The fashion for ‘rewilding’ and the abandonment of controlled burns are not neutral acts of nature; they are policy choices, promoted under green banners, made by identifiable people in Whitehall and Cardiff. When Stock attributes the blackened New Forest simply to “the heat” of “a new kind of summer”, she erases the agency of those who decided that traditional land management was environmentally incorrect.
Water stress and agricultural shortfalls raise similar questions. Reservoir capacity, leakage rates and abstraction rules – rules for extracting water from natural resources – are not dictated by atmospheric CO2. They are set by decades of underinvestment and regulatory choices. Fertiliser costs inflated by energy taxes and carbon-pricing on natural gas pass through to farmers agonising over stunted wheat and barley yields.
It is remarkable that Ms Stock agonises over elderly people wilting in poorly insulated flats or sweltering in Britain’s many hospitals without once mentioning the glaring lack of air-conditioning – the one technology already proven, unambiguously, to reduce heat mortality wherever it has been allowed to spread. Yet the Luddite ruling class in the UK and EU would rather have their citizens face the risk of a grisly, painful death from heatstroke than provide cheap electricity and allow them to install a $400 air conditioner. Air conditioning is nearly universal in American and Japanese homes (approximately 90%) but remains the exception rather than the rule across Europe (approximately 23% average) and is especially uncommon in the UK (estimated at low-teens to single-digit percentages).
Dr Stock is absolutely right that politicians can address these problems without first settling the precise role of carbon dioxide in the climate system. But she is wrong to imply that practical, local and national policymaking can proceed while bracketing out the overarching policy choices – Net Zero mandates, land-use dogma and energy-price interventions – that have already made adaptation more expensive and less effective than it needs to be.
A caricature of the sceptical position
Ms Stock’s portrait of the wider climate debate is equally skewed. She sees a sterile symmetry: apocalyptic greens on one side, “stubborn scepticism” on the other offering “little acknowledgment of local social and environmental losses” and “no nuanced plan of action, except to keep buggering on as before”. The renewables discussion, she says, is “absurdly polarised”, with one side talking only of benefits and the other only of harms.
This is a caricature. Serious analysts of renewable energy – David Turver, Kathryn Porter and Dieter Helm among them – have performed the elementary work of cost-benefit analysis that Stock claims is missing. They examine intermittency, system balancing costs, backup requirements, grid reinforcement and the displacement of firm generation. Turver’s own submission to Parliament’s cost-of-energy inquiry laid out, in granular detail, why levelised-cost comparisons that ignore firming and network costs systematically understate the true price of wind and solar. None of these analysts deny that turbines and panels generate electricity when the weather cooperates; they ask whether the full system, backup included, delivers net benefit at the reliability a modern economy actually requires.
Global integrated-assessment models, including the DICE model of Nobel laureate William Nordhaus, abstract from local detail precisely because their purpose is aggregate, long-run quantification of costs and benefits under uncertainty; that is methodological necessity, not indifference. Local and regional studies exist alongside them. To accuse sceptics of ignoring local losses is to ignore a literature that has spent years documenting deindustrialisation, the uglification of the countryside by wind turbines, acres of solar farms, and pylons and the household cost of subsidising intermittency.
The Peterson–Self exchange, and the lean toward Self
Stock briefly referees a skirmish between Jordan Peterson and Will Self. Peterson notes the Medieval Warm Period and the greening effect of elevated CO2; Self dismisses the former as unmeasurable and non-global, and the latter as irrelevant because biodiversity is allegedly still collapsing. Stock leans toward Self. This is misplaced on both counts.
Proxy reconstructions – tree rings, ice cores, sediments, documentary records – have long been used to estimate historical temperatures; the irony is that the same proxy method underpins the “hockey stick” reconstruction that climate campaigners have treated as gospel for a quarter of a century. Evidence of the Medieval Warm Period appears well beyond the North Atlantic, in the Sierra Nevada, the Andes, China, Tasmania and New Zealand, even as researchers continue to debate its precise global synchrony.
On biodiversity, the crude claim of relentless, undifferentiated decline sits awkwardly with the finding that only a small fraction of assessed species – roughly 1.5% of birds and 1.4% of mammals – have actually gone extinct since 1500, well below the figures earlier apocalyptic projections implied. Greening, meanwhile, is not a talking point; it is measured from space. NASA satellite data show that a quarter to half of the planet’s vegetated land has significantly greened over the past four decades, with CO2 fertilisation responsible for roughly 70% of the effect – an area of new leaf growth equivalent to twice the continental United States. One would imagine that the greening of formerly arid and semi-arid areas could only help in enhancing biodiversity.
The deeper error in Stock’s piece is the false equivalence itself. One side has spent decades converting scientific debate and uncertainty into moral certainty and policy absolutism. The other has pointed out that the UK accounts for roughly 0.8% of annual global CO2 emissions, that Chinese and Indian emissions growth swamps any conceivable British reduction many times over and that unilateral “climate leadership” is a luxury belief whose chief practical effect is to export British industry and import the emissions of less efficient overseas producers.
This is not a new argument in these pages: I have set out at length, here and here, how a deindustrialising island contributing under 1% of world emissions convinced itself it could “lead the world” out of fossil fuels. Rupert Darwall has detailed the costs to Britain in its “folly of climate leadership”.
The costs are not abstract
Those costs are not abstract. Analysis commissioned for the Conservative Party under Claire Coutinho has put the potential saving from abandoning the current all-renewables pathway, in favour of a system that retains gas alongside nuclear and renewables, at £320 billion in electricity system costs over two decades. Separate research for the Institute of Economic Affairs has found that official Net Zero cost estimates have fallen sharply in recent years not because decarbonisation has become cheaper, but because the methodology used to calculate it has changed. Energy-intensive industries have already left Britain or scaled back their operations here. The countryside is being littered with solar arrays, wind farms and the pylons and substations needed to move intermittent power around the grid.
Stock mourns changing landscapes and living conditions yet passes over the most visible recent alteration to the British countryside: the subsidised hardware of the energy transition itself. Deindustrialisation undertaken in the name of decarbonisation does not reduce global emissions; it merely relocates them to China and India, typically to less efficient, more coal-intensive producers. Living standards suffer in the process, for no measurable planetary benefit. Cheaper, more reliable electricity and installation of cheap air-conditioners would do more for elderly people in overheated flats and hospital wards than another round of behavioural exhortation about carbon footprints.
Stock’s best sentence, and the one she declines to follow
Stock’s most valuable sentence is also the one she fails to follow through to its logical conclusion: “It is obviously possible to worry about such [local, regional and national] problems, and for politicians to form plans to address them, without espousing any grand theory about the role of carbon dioxide.” Precisely so. Adaptation – better building standards, resilient water infrastructure, intelligent fire and land management, affordable and reliable energy – does not require prior resolution on equilibrium climate sensitivity parameters or the exact social cost of carbon. It requires competence, and a willingness to abandon the specific policies that have already raised costs and reduced resilience: burn bans that let fuel accumulate, planning rules that block reservoirs and a decarbonisation timetable that prices gas and fertiliser out of reach of the farmers she worries about.
She anticipates the rejoinder that local concern without global action is insufficient. Her reply is that the coordination problem among major emitters is practically insoluble, and that Self’s vision of controlled markets, rationing and “particular forms of restraint for which the established political vocabulary has no adequate name” sounds mad. On that last point she is entirely right. Authoritarian climate policies of the green globalist governments are not a solution to the coordination problem; it is a confession that voluntary coordination has failed, and that coercion is the only instrument the true believers have left.
Kathleen Stock’s incomplete localism
Yet Stock’s localism remains incomplete, for a reason she does not examine. She wants us to notice what is vanishing locally and to mitigate the impacts. Fair enough, as far as it goes. But the vanishing she describes is not solely climatic and the mitigation she wants is obstructed by the very policies whose global efficacy she declines to adjudicate. Reservoirs are not built because green-obsessed planning and environmental rules block them; controlled burns are discouraged because peatland regulation prohibits them; fertiliser is taxed and gas is made artificially expensive in service of a decarbonisation theory she says she cannot be bothered to evaluate. The result is that the local suffering she catalogues so movingly is real, and substantially self-inflicted by policy choices made in the name of a global theory that a country responsible for eight-tenths of 1% of world emissions cannot meaningfully affect either way.
Conservatives who merely poke holes in the Left’s preferred theories without offering practical alternatives deserve the criticism Stock levels at them. She is right about that much. But the remedy is not symmetrical disengagement from the underlying facts. It is rigorous attention to costs, benefits and adaptation at every scale, grounded in accurate description rather than atmospheric pathos. Geological time has oscillated between ice ages and inter-glaciation for hundreds of millennia; the choice of 1850–1900 as the sacred pre-industrial baseline is itself a political convention, not a self-evident natural fact. Feeling sad about a hot, dry summer is entirely human, and understandable. Treating that feeling as a reason to suspend scrutiny of the policies that made the summer harder to bear than it needed to be is not.
There is indeed a great deal of work to be done, as Stock says. It begins with accurate description rather than mood music, with cost-benefit accounting rather than moral symmetry between a rigorous empirical literature and its caricature and with the plain recognition that a country responsible for roughly 1% of global emissions cannot save the planet by impoverishing itself first. Localism without data is just another, more comfortable, form of the same exhaustion.
Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO₂ Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.
In their Goss et al (2020) paper Climate Change Is Increasing the Likelihood of Extreme Autumn Wildfire Conditions Across California, those alarmist scientists clearly stated their intention was to make climate change the culprit by presenting an investigation that “only considers changes in climatic contributions to wildfire risk, irrespective of changes in fire ignitions, vegetation, land use or management strategies.”
In their Goss et al (2020) paper Climate Change Is Increasing the Likelihood of Extreme Autumn Wildfire Conditions Across California, those alarmist scientists clearly stated their intention was to make climate change the culprit by presenting an investigation that “only considers changes in climatic contributions to wildfire risk, irrespective of changes in fire ignitions, vegetation, land use or management strategies.” However, all those other factors can completely account for wildfire trends unrelated to climate change. For example, while much research has shown human ignitions have tripled the length of fire season, alarmist scientists dishonestly push a narrative that it is climate warming trends that have extended fire season. Papers not accounting for all confounding factors affecting a narrative, should never pass peer review. It is advocacy, not science! So, lets learn some science.
History shows that despite cooler and moister conditions pre-1800, an estimated ~4.5 million acres burned annually in California during the Little Ice Age (Stephens 2007). This far exceeds a 1979–1988 average of ~337,000 burnt acres/year, which then recently increased to a 21st century average of ~708,000 acres/year. However, California’s August 2020 fires did reach a similar burnt area of 4.4 million acres, when a rare swarm of thousands of dry lightning strikes ignited several small fires. Understanding the importance of vegetation analyses, reveals the great majority of lightning fires begin by igniting “fine fuels” like dead grasses, which then produce the fastest moving fires and burn the greatest area. Despite alarmists’ claims the recent increased burnt area is an indicator of climate change, vegetation changes are far more important. Burnt area is mostly determined by the presence and continuity of “fine fuels” and strong winds. But there were not any unusually strong winds when those 2020 fires began. But there has been an increase in invasive annual grasses creating greater fuel abunadance and continuity. For example, fine fuels (invasive annual grasses) have increased more than eightfold from 1990 to 2020 in the Great Basin which includes most of Nevada, half of Utah, and 10-20% of California, enabling a greater burnt area.
Understand The Critical Role of Fine Fuels
“Fine Fuels” are defined as dead vegetation less than ¼ inch in diameter. This includes cured grasses, weeds, pine needles, fallen leaves, and the small twigs of shrubs. They are also classified by fire experts as 1-hour fuels because they gain and lose moisture extremely quickly, gaining or losing 63% of their moisture in just 1 hour. Fine fuels can become highly flammable in just 60 minutes after a light rain. Climate change is totally irrelevant for fine fuel dryness and flammability.
Accordingly, 90+% of all wildfire ignitions happen in easily ignited fine fuels. Depending on the winds a grass fire, as seen in graphic A, will then rapidly spread the fire by advancing about 1 foot/second. The fire will keep advancing as long as flammable fuels are present near the flame front. However, a road may prevent the extent of grass fires, which partially explains why roadless areas experience the worst fires. Furthermore, statistics suggesting an increase in forest wildfires, obscure the fact that typically ~90–97% of the forest floor area in Sierra Nevada forests/woodlands is covered by 1-hour and 10-hour fine fuels. A grass fire’s flame front does not remain in one position for more than 5 to 15 seconds, so it moves rapidly through the forest floor without killing trees which require much more heat for a much longer time (graphic B).
However, if the fires are carried into the forests where poor land management has allowed shrubs and young trees and fine fuels to increase, the undergrowth provides ground fuels and enough fuels to release ample heat that can ignite ladder fuels and torch trees to create crown fires that emit embers that then spread the fire rapidly through the air. (graphic C & D)
Understand The Critical Role of Heat Source
Fine fuels require a heat flux (minimum rate of energy input) of 8,000–16,000 W/m² for several seconds. Higher fluxes ignite fine fuels more quickly. The flame front of an advancing grass fire releases 20,000–50,000 W/m², and that amount of heat easily dries and ignites 1-hour and 10-hour fuels, but not enough heat to burn live trees or dead logs with diameters greater than 3 inches. Multiple embers released by torched trees often collect on roofs with average heat fluxes of 15,000–80,000 W/m². Those heat sources are enough to ignite your house.
For heat flux comparisons, the sun provides at most about 1,000 W/m² of energy onto the earth’s surface on a clear day at noon. CO2’s current concentration adds less than 2.5 W/m² of energy since the Little Ice Age. However, a standard match provides about 25,000 W/m², but only for about 15 seconds. So, an arson’s match easily ignites any fine fuels and starts a wildfire. Depending on the electric current strength and other factors, a downed power line can produce 10,000 to 600,000 W/m² for several seconds to minutes. Thus, many major fires have been ignited when sparking electrical lines ignited the surrounding fine fuels. Although lightning can deliver up to a billion W/m², it only does so for less than a second. Such a short heat pulse rarely ignites a tree so primarily limits lightning’s wildfire ignitions to fine fuels.
Understand The Critical Role of Dryness
Flammability is high for most woody fuels when moisture content falls below 30%. Firewood is generally considered ready to burn efficiently below ~20–25% moisture content. Under 60% relative humidity, fine fuels commonly reach 10–20% flammable moisture content at air temperatures ranging from 30–100°F (–1 to 38°C). In contrast to claims by alarmist scientists, 1.5°C of global warming adds meaningless drying relative to the range of natural temperature fluctuations.
For example, during the rainless summer in California’s Mediterranean climate, relative humidity naturally falls and dries fine fuel’s moisture content to below 10% every day. Consider in California’s inland valleys and foothills during August, high relative humidity of 60% to 75% typically happens in the morning with temperatures in the 50s to mid-60s°F (10–19°C). Despite those cool temperatures, fine fuel moisture content reaches a very flammable 12% to 15%. As temperatures warm in the afternoon, commonly to the 80s and 90s°F (27–37°C), relative humidity falls to 30%-40%, drying fine fuels to a highly flammable 6-8% moisture content. More amazing, during the colder fall and winter temperatures when Santa Ana and Diablo wind events occur, the dry air descending from the deserts often lowers relative humidity to just 2%. Below ~10% moisture content, ignition probability from a single spark or discarded burning cigarette becomes extremely high. This evidence partially explains why despite 1.5°C cooler average temperatures during the Little Ice Age, 4.5 million acres had still burned annually in California.
To prevent rotting from fungi, exterior wood and building materials for houses range from 9% to 14% moisture content causing your house to burn more efficiently than dry firewood. Thus, we often observe neighborhoods burnt to the ground in a wildfire despite being surrounded by living trees with unaffected leaves and needles (graphic E in Paradise Camp fire and graphic F in the Dixie fire).
How to Protect Your Home from Wildfire
While so-called climate experts obfuscate wildfire science and claim you can reduce the threat of wildfire by reducing fossil fuel use, NOTHING could be further from the truth. Sadly, too many people have been lulled into wrongly thinking they are protecting their homes by buying electric vehicles or not eating meat. These obfuscating climate alarmists encourage people to stop critical thinking about how to honestly deal with wildfire threats, while useful idiots in social media advocate meaningless actions like eating bugs instead of beef.
To protect your home, simply prevent fine fuels and embers from carrying the fire into your flammable home. Create a defensible perimeter at least 5 meters away from your home by removing any fine fuels and any flammable vegetation. Don’t store flammable materials next to your home. Remove any tree branches overhanging your home and remove all low hanging branches that would provide der fuels that produce canopy fires and wind carried embers. Install fire resistant roofing and screens over all vents where embers could enter. If you understand the science of how wildfires spread, these precautions are just common sense. Alarmist climate experts be damned. Once you install these precautions, you can then guiltlessly enjoy a hamburger and fossil fuel powered heating and cooling systems.
The map shows the current distribution of wildfires in Canada and hotspots as of August 6, 2026. The Eastern part has now reduced down greatly. The action now is in the West along the US border. The infographic provides the data on Active fires, new fires and extinguished fires. There are numbers for year to date and 10 yr. averages. The graph on the left shows area burned each year from 2017 through 2026 to date. Humans caused 42% of the number of wildfires, and nature caused 92% of the area burned.
As Chris Martz pointed out in an interview, boreal forests burn every year as part of their natural life cycle. Also Canada forests are vast and remote so that management is challenging. A previous post here mentioned that some practices can and should be improved, especially since recent years have been more active and destructive, especially 2023, 25 and now 2026. Martz also provided some data contradicting the notion global warming is the cause.
The drought and heat wave indices are where climatic effects would show up. Yes there are recent spikes, but also numerous precedents in the past. In neither case do the patterns reflect rising CO2, let alone human hydrocarbon use. In fact there is a significant decrease in the worst of the drought categories despite the spike in 2023–24.
Recently, it has felt like we had reached a new dawn on energy and climate policy with energy Jedi winning the argument against the Net Zero by 2050 target. Reform fought the election on a policy of abandoning Net Zero.
Recently, it has felt like we had reached a new dawn on energy and climate policy with energy Jedi winning the argument against the Net Zero by 2050 target. Reform fought the election on a policy of abandoning Net Zero. More recently, the Tories have followed suit by abandoning the 2050 target, setting out their own cheap power plan and beginning to purge the party of Net Zero zealots like Gavin Barwell.
But the green empire is striking back with a new article (no paywall version here) in the Telegraph from Tim Stanley and Greg Jackson has also weighed in, cheering on Stanley’s article. Even DV himself has weighed in to support Tim Stanley. The trouble with Tim Stanley’s argument, in common with many Net Zero supporters, is that it is based on vibes and emotion, not analysis of actual data.
Time to dive in to see what Tim Stanley and Greg Jackson got so wrong.
Tim Stanley’s claims
Stanley claimed the wildfires of Europe are “pitiless and persistent” and made “infinitely worse” by the long, hot summer. He also claimed the UK has endured the three worst harvests on record in the past six years and warned that one third of Bangladesh’s agricultural GDP is expected to disappear by 2050. He also stated Pakistan is enjoying a solar boom and said it was ridiculous that Britain was reluctant to follow suit. Stanley also claimed developing countries are more worried about climate change than we are. Finally, he characterised Net Zero sceptics of the online right as “talking itself into corners of angry irrelevance”, as having “misplaced sympathy for the devil” and lacking compassion or charm. However, he became incoherent by claiming he was not arguing for an ideological commitment to decarbonisation and said Kemi Badenoch is correct to abandon the dogma of targets.
Greg Jackson thought Tim Stanley’s article was “superbly written” and that renewables solutions are “increasingly economically better than the fossil fuel alternatives”. According to Jackson, solar is the cheapest power on the planet and onshore wind is “bonkers cheap”. He thinks a freer market in electricity could use renewables to drive down energy costs.
Stanley’s article was illustrated by an apocalyptic image of raging wildfires in Europe (see Figure 1). Whilst fires like these must be terrifying for those affected, policy should be set by reference to facts, not emotive images.
Figure 1 – Tim Stanley claims wildfires have become infinitely worse
This image was used to support Stanley’s claim that wildfires in Europe are pitiless and persistent and made infinitely worse by long hot summers. We can test this claim against data produced by Our World in Data (OWID) as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2 – Cumulative area burnt by wildfires by week
This shows that far from becoming infinitely worse, wildfires in Europe are running at the lowest rate on record. We should note that OWID’s definition of Europe includes the whole of Russia. But even if the geographical scope of the chart is limited to the EU27, 2026 year-to-date is the sixth worst year on record, with area burned running at just 42% of the worst year in 2012. The data undermines the whole premise of Stanley’s article.
Tim Stanley might also note that many of these fires in France are manmade, just not in the way he thinks – because 162 people have been arrested in France on suspicion of wildfire arson.
Worst UK harvests?
Tim Stanley also claimed the UK has endured the three worst harvests on record in the past six years. Although data from OWID only goes to 2024, we can see the claim is false as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3 – UK Index of cereal production yield and land use
Recent levels of production and yield have not been unusual compared to the last 30 years. Peak production came in 1984, with cereal production around 174% higher than the 1961 baseline, but then there was nearly 32% more land dedicated to cereal production. In 2024, there was twice as much cereal production and 106% better yields than in 1961, despite using 3.1% less land. It certainly looks like those evil fossil-fuel derived fertilisers have helped us to feed ourselves. What is more worrying is the land dedicated to cereal crops looks to have begun a downtrend. Maybe carpeting prime farmland with solar panels is not such a good idea after all.
Bangladesh agriculture under threat?
Stanley’s claim that one third of agricultural GDP in Bangladesh is at risk appears to come from a 2022 report by the World Bank. Again, OWID has data to show that fear is at best misplaced, see Figure 4.
Figure 4 – Bangladesh agricultural output dollars
Agricultural GDP in Bangladesh is soaring and the 13.3 million climate migrants expected by the World Bank are probably not going to materialise, because deaths from natural disasters in that country have plummeted from a one-off peak of 1.9 million in 1943, due to drought, to just 28 in 2025 – with 10 of those from earthquakes, which are of course unrelated to climate.
Bangladesh also seems more concerned with economic development than climate change because energy consumption is soaring and almost all of it comes from hydrocarbons – coal, oil and gas – see Figure 5.
Figure 5 – Bangladesh energy consumption by source
This contradicts Stanley’s claim that developing countries are more concerned about climate change than we are.
Pakistan solar boom?
Tim Stanley’s article also claimed:
Contemporary Pakistan is enjoying a solar boom. How? Because millions of peasants, sick of high utility prices inflated by corruption, have bought cheap solar panels from the Chinese and hung them from their roofs and balconies.
He went on to chide Britain for not following suit. It is true that Pakistan now generates nearly 19% of its electricity from solar and the solar share has been growing rapidly. Britain’s solar share is 6.6% of electricity generation. Despite this disparity in solar penetration, the carbon intensity of Pakistan’s energy is higher than the UK’s, see Figure 6.
Figure 6 – UK and Pakistan CO2 per unit of energy
By international standards, Pakistan generates very little electricity, producing just 764kWh per person, compared to the world average of 3,860kWh, the UK’s 4,203kWh and China’s 7,474kWh per person. A big part of the reason remote regions of Pakistan are turning to solar power is because less than 55% of households are connected to the grid. For them, access to some solar is better than no power at all. Another reason Pakistan is more suited to solar power is latitude. Pakistan lies between 23 degrees and 37 degrees north, where it is sunnier than Britain, which is much further north. This is why the World Bank rated Pakistan in roughly the top quartile of countries for practical solar power potential and the UK second bottom, just above Ireland.
Poor countries worried?
As shown above, Bangladesh does not appear to be overly concerned about climate change, in contradiction to Tim Stanley’s claim that poor countries are more worried than we are. OWID also produces data to show carbon dioxide emissions by income group, see Figure 7.
Figure 7 – Annual CO2 emissions by income group
Even though emissions from high-income countries like Britain are falling, emissions from upper-middle and lower-middle income countries are rising sharply. Emissions from low-income countries are low and rising slowly. High-income countries will become poorer and be overtaken by upper-middle income countries who want to become more prosperous.
There is growing demand for oil and gas in Africa. For example, a farmer in Kenya, Jusper Machogu, campaigns for fossil fuels for Africa because he wants to Just Stop Toil. He is getting angry that Greenpeace is acting like a neo-colonialist, blocking a new oil refinery in his country. Another strike against Tim Stanley’s evidence-free tirade.
Renewables increasingly economically better?
Let us turn now to Greg Jackson’s claims that renewables are “increasingly economically better” and a freer market for renewables would bring down energy costs. As we have discussed before and as shown in Figure 8, the UK already has the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world and domestic prices are also among the highest.
Figure 8 – International Industrial Electricity Prices (p per kWh)
The term of contracts for difference (CfDs) has been extended to 20 years and the prices awarded in AR7 for offshore wind and onshore wind rose in AR7. Prices for solar dipped slightly, but on a like-for-like 15-year contract basis prices rose. There is no evidence that the base cost of renewables is falling.
The news gets worse, because the cost of integrating intermittent renewables into the grid is soaring, with balancing, backup and grid expansion costs set to triple from 2024/25 levels by 2030/31, as shown in Figure 9.
Figure 9 – Forecast for grid integration costs (£bn)
Far from becoming “increasingly economically better”, intermittent renewables are getting increasingly expensive. If we were to make the electricity market freer – by, for instance, cutting carbon taxes on gas-fired electricity, eliminating renewables subsidies and making them pay for their grid integration costs – then most renewables projects would fail and there would be little new spending. Greg Jackson is wrong on both his main points.
Who Lacks Compassion?
Tim Stanley’s most emotive line was when he accused Net Zero sceptics of having misplaced sympathy for the devil and lacking compassion. We may ask what is compassionate about making electricity so expensive that families have to choose between heating and eating. Where is the compassion for oil and gas workers in Aberdeen losing 1,000 jobs per month? Is there an ounce of sympathy for Port Talbot steelworkers, Grangemouth refinery workers or the thousands more losing their jobs in other energy-intensive industries such as petrochemicals, chemicals, ceramics and glass? Isn’t it simply unconscionable to deprive the developing world of cheap, abundant hydrocarbons needed to support their economic and social development?
We know the energy Jedi are winning the argument when the green empire has to resort to emotive pictures and mendacious invective to make their point. None of Tim Stanley’s arguments stand up to close scrutiny, and the cheerleading Greg Jackson is reduced to making entirely false claims to stop his Octopus Energy business from collapsing into further losses.
The trouble is that lies travel halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on, so the green empire striking back can be temporarily effective. But be in no doubt: the energy Jedi will return, and economic and physical reality will prevail.
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