The graph you linked to is at best extremely flawed. It’s either by a climate denier intentionally trying to trick readers like you or at best it’s by someone who has no idea about fires and fire policy.
While sometimes it can be hard to spot lying by statistics, this instance there was a huge red flag present suggesting that the chart was questionable. The strange long and poorly annoyed extrapolation trend line along with the odd very colloquial phrasing of the label is a big warning sign. If it didn’t raise some doubts for you, pay attention to details like that in the future.
So what is the elephant in the room they are hiding in the hopes of lying with stats to deceive people like you about fires and climate?
Well wonder why there was a drastic reduction in fire size in the early decades? It’s called the 10 am rule and should be known by anyone researching fire behavior over the time span they plot, so they intentionally are ignoring it. Had they marked on the policy changes on the graph then the cause of the reduction would be obvious. And when fire policy is clearly a major impact on fire size, trying to extrapolate another driver of fire behavior change while intentionally ignoring the dominant factor is not a good look.
The actual part where the decayed are more comparable are 1980 onward.
And this acres burned graph is also a misdirection in itself. The main issue with recent fires is the intensity and speed that they explode in size along with the increasingly build out wild land urban interface. And the fire intensity is a product of many factors, hotter weather and droughts leave the forest primed to burn, but also the past fire suppression led to a lot of fuel build up.
While sometimes it can be hard to spot lying by statistics, this instance there was a huge red flag present suggesting that the chart was questionable. The strange long and poorly annoyed extrapolation trend line along with the odd very colloquial phrasing of the label is a big warning sign. If it didn’t raise some doubts for you, pay attention to details like that in the future.
So what is the elephant in the room they are hiding in the hopes of lying with stats to deceive people like you about fires and climate?
Well wonder why there was a drastic reduction in fire size in the early decades? It’s called the 10 am rule and should be known by anyone researching fire behavior over the time span they plot, so they intentionally are ignoring it. Had they marked on the policy changes on the graph then the cause of the reduction would be obvious. And when fire policy is clearly a major impact on fire size, trying to extrapolate another driver of fire behavior change while intentionally ignoring the dominant factor is not a good look.
The actual part where the decayed are more comparable are 1980 onward.
And this acres burned graph is also a misdirection in itself. The main issue with recent fires is the intensity and speed that they explode in size along with the increasingly build out wild land urban interface. And the fire intensity is a product of many factors, hotter weather and droughts leave the forest primed to burn, but also the past fire suppression led to a lot of fuel build up.
The lying with stats graph: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E7nujQWXsAISEKs?format=jpg&name=...