False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet

by Bjørn Lomborg

Perhaps because images of fire are so frightening, or because fire can leap up with apparent randomness, or because (particularly in California) flames have subsumed the homes of the very affluent, wildfires have become one of the most potent political symbols of global temperatures run amok.18 The real story bears little resemblance to such alarmist storytelling. To begin with, over the past 150 years our exposure to fire has dropped dramatically. The examination of sedimentary charcoal records spanning six continents and two millennia shows that in fact global burning has declined sharply since 1870. To a large extent, this is because of the so-called pyric transition when humans largely stopped burning wood at home and started burning fossil fuels in power plants and cars.