By CO2 Science
In the Gospel According to Gore, i.e., his book An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore writes that “wildfires are becoming much more common as hotter temperatures dry out the soil and the leaves,” and to support this claim he presents a bar graph which, as he describes it, “shows the steady increase in major wildfires in North and South America over the last five decades,” noting that “the same pattern is found on every other continent as well.”
How correct are these claims?
As shown in this summary, although one can readily identify specific parts of the planet that have experienced both significant increases and decreases in land area burned over the last two to three decades of the 20th century, as we have done in the materials reviewed above, for the globe as a whole there was absolutely no relationship between global warming and total area burned over this latter period, when climate alarmists claim the world warmed at a rate and to a degree that were both unprecedented over the past several millennia. As a result, it should be abundantly clear there is simply no truth to the contention of Al Gore that the pattern of increasing wildfires over the last three decades of the 20th century, which he plots for North and South America, “is found on every other continent as well.” To reprise a portion of a favorite quote of his (An Inconvenient Truth, p. 20-21), it just ain’t so.