The National Interagency Fire Center stats for fire suppression costs paint a completely different picture [1]. While the total number of fires has decreased by about 10-20% since 1985, the size of the fires in acres and the amount of money spent has skyrocketed. The annual average from 1985 to 1989 is ~2.9 million acres while from 2013-2017 the average was over twice that at ~6.7 million acres. Furthermore, inflation adjusted expenditures have increased over five fold, meaning that we're spending significantly more resources on fighting fires and yet, the number of acres on fire continues growing.

This data suggests that our houses are built with better standards, fewer people are smoking, and our appliances are safer so there are fewer fires but it's pretty clear that our problems have grown much worse overall.

[1] https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/fireInfo_documents/SuppCosts.p...

The increasing cost of a service has nothing to do with climate change. The cost of everything has gone up since 1985.

According to Google, after adjusting for inflation, the average price of a new car in 1985 was $21-28k in today's dollars, and the average new car costs $30-40k today. The price of a Big mac: $1.17 in 1985, $3.50 today. Gasoline: $1.50-2/gal, today: $3-4/gal.

We now spend over 5 times as much on fire suppression at the federal level than we did 30 years ago after adjusting for inflation. This growth outpaces cost of living, healthcare, and inflation significantly.

The estimates that I've read say that up to 90% of modern wildfires are started by man, rather than being started by natural causes such as lightning. Subtract out much of that 90% from the current numbers and what do you get?

Entirely agree that many of our opinions are often not based on much in the way of facts.

But to try to do do better: what's your source on fires?

People also sometimes cherry-pick or carve up data so that they can find a "surprising" result, to use one of ~pg's favorite adjectives.

Your coworker had the impression that wildfires are becoming larger and more damaging, and that climate change is a principal cause of this, due to widespread coverage to that effect (examples: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]). (Which I suppose was your point.)

And many of those journalists are repeating each other, but eventually you find that a lot of those statements originate from the National Interagency Fire Center [7]. There, the raw numbers pretty clearly show an upward overall trend from, oh, about 1953 or so. Before 1953, the numbers look a lot different, and if someone were to just casually plug all those values into a graph, they could make the point that wildfires aren't getting worse after all. That person would be completely ignoring the massive increase in wildfire suppression efforts over that same period, of course, but they wouldn't want that to get in the way of their surprising finding.

Further investigation into the subject would start to reveal all kinds of neat subtleties that would be missed from a quick glance at numbers, both from non-climate-related factors like increased habitation in the wildland-urban interface areas [8], as well as climate-related factors like the massive number of dead trees in western forests as a result of increased bark beetle activity [9] [10].

And then someone might begin to be in a position to have a more interesting discussion on the subject. :-)

[1]: https://www.usnews.com/news/data-mine/articles/2018-08-01/wi...

[2]: http://www.climatecentral.org/western-wildfire-trends

[3]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/08/14/wildfires...

[4]: https://www.npr.org/2018/07/31/634369281/wildfires-could-be-...

[5]: https://www.vox.com/2018/8/7/17661096/california-wildfires-2...

[6]: https://theconversation.com/wildfires-in-west-have-gotten-bi...

[7]: https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/fireInfo_stats_totalFires.html

[8]: https://www.wildfirex.com/2013/07/25/population-climbs-in-wi...

[9]: https://www.fs.fed.us/research/invasive-species/insects/bark...

[10]: http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-sierra-dead-tr...

I also used the NIFC data. I mis-spoke on a couple of points.

First, I only used data from 1983 and later (not the 1960s as I said, and certainly not prior to the 1950s as you assert that some people do) because their footnote said that the sources for data prior to 1983 are not known or can't be confirmed.

Second, I graphed the data since 1983 and there was somewhat of a trend upwards (not no trend like I said). But it didn't look significant to me. Especially not in climate terms. And especially given that realiable data only covers 35 years. And especially given that the numbers swing wildly with how we manage fires. That is, a trend in either direction could easily be created by increasing or decreasing budgets to keep them from starting and/or fighting them, like the swings you reference prior to the 1950s.

But in any case, as I said, I not saying that wildland fires are not somehow affected by climate change. Only that people tend to accept narratives that are repeated over and over without critically questioning them.

> Only that people tend to accept narratives that are repeated over and over without critically questioning them.

Sure, but the challenge is that critically questioning a common narrative takes significantly more effort than a quick review of a single dataset, especially when that narrative is coming from a fairly large body of professional researchers in multiple fields.

This is a big problem right now in the politics surrounding several different fields. A lot of interested laymen now have the tools to do some quick analysis on datasets, and then they draw conclusions from that that are contrary to the accepted science in that field. It's especially common in climate science because it's always been such a politically charged topic.

People accepting common narratives is essentially "epistemic learned helplessness" (http://web.archive.org/web/20130111103623/http://squid314.li..., one of my favorite essays), and that's a good thing. It's an immune response to bad ideas like being opposed to vaccination.

There is certainly room for asking questions about accepted ideas. Any time something doesn't make sense in some subject, absolutely go searching for an answer. You may even get to be one of the fortunate and talented few who find a significant question or even a flaw in some field. But, there's a fine line between asking questions, and drawing conclusions from a brief review and then indicting other people for not "critically" examining the subject.

I didn’t draw a conclusion. This is now the third time that I’ve pointed that out. It seems like you badly need me to do that to make your point somehow. Is this causing you to not see it when I write it?

Secondly I’m not sure I’m “indicting” anyone. Only observing that there was absolutely zero knowledge about facts behind the situation and no ability to respond to my two minute gathering of facts. This isn’t an indication of a lack of critical thinking. It’s an indication of a lack of thinking of any kind whatsoever.

From your first comment:

> Without getting in to a lot of detail, the source I found was very reliable and did not show any upward (or downward) trend in either count of fires or total acreage on an annual basis since the 1960s. I pointed this out - not as proof that climate change did not affect fires - but as a simple data point that didn't seem to match his assertion.

That is called a "conclusion", no matter how many weasel-words you salt it with or how many times you say, "no, really, I wasn't drawing a conclusion". You've since walked it back to, "oh, I meant there wasn't a significant trend", and I shrugged and accepted that and replied solely to your criticism of other people.

Which was:

> Only that people tend to accept narratives that are repeated over and over without critically questioning them.

And now, you're choosing to expand from "people aren't critically questioning things" to, "oh, actually, I meant that they aren't thinking at all". Before you do that, you might want to think a little bit more about epistemic learned helplessness.

> Only observing that there was absolutely zero knowledge about facts behind the situation and no ability to respond to my two minute gathering of facts.

Nice, you're doubling down. Well, your "two minute gathering of facts", first, was erroneous, and second, your "observation" was either obvious, or wrong, pick your flavor. Obviously, people accept any manner of statements without personally verifying them. Nobody has the resources to become an expert on every bit of news coming from legions of researchers or journalists, and further, if they spend just two minutes attempting to verify a single factoid in something, they may well get it wrong, as you did.

Instead, people rely on other people to develop the specialized knowledge required to gather and synthesize the facts of a subject, and then other people still to report on that. It's imperfect, and sometimes (often) somebody somewhere in that chain gets something wrong, but it's still a better approach than armchairing everything you read, which has a far greater chance of leading you to the wrong ... well, "question", I guess, instead of "conclusion".

By the way, re-framing conclusions as questions is such a well-known tactic that it has a name: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions

He said, "Too bad climate change is causing more fires" I said, "I just looked at this data and don't see a big trend. Even if there was a trend, how do you know it's climate change?" He said, "I have no idea, I just assumed that from what I heard"

I didn't have a conclusion then, and I don't have one now. If you take out two 3-year clusters in the last decade there is no trend at all. And 35 years of reliable data seems a little light to me. One would think we'd need several centuries to get real confidence.

But what I really question, are variables that would affect the numbers and size of fires such as how many were created by people, and the amount of effort put towards fighting them. The data we're looking at is not an observation of just nature. But it seems to be treated as if it is.

> If you take out two 3-year clusters in the last decade there is no trend at all.

I would love to address each of your statements point by point, but it's been an interminably long week and I don't have the time. But this one I can knock out pretty fast.

I pulled the 1983 - 2017 series data from NIFC and created four different data sets from it, and charted each one. Each chart shows the values in red, the simple linear regression from 1983 to 2017 as a single red line, and a 5-year-running average in blue.

First, the raw data: https://ibb.co/iNQi8U ... there's a negligible change to the running average from 1983 to 1997, but from 1997 to 2009 there is a visually obvious increasing trend. The linear regression shows a 400% increase in acreage burned per year from 1983 to 2017.

Now, there are three different ways someone might "take out" 6 of the last 10 years. I think it's completely absurd to make any kind of argument by just deleting 60% of the data you don't like until the result looks the way you want it to look, but I'll play along. For each of the following charts, I just edited the same 6-highest years from 2007 to 2017.

One way to do this is to simply delete the years from the dataset. You pretend they didn't happen, and see what the overall data looks like then. And here it is: https://ibb.co/gRuzhp ... so here we see that there's still a clear upward trend, even with those years removed. The trend has been reduced to a mere 300% increase from 1983 to 2017, but there it is. You can see the obvious change in the data in the sharp decrease in the 5-year running average line.

A slightly more correct way to handle this is to decide that there's something wrong with the data for those years, and replace those years with approximate average values for the time period. This is occasionally done in climate science by people much smarter than me in cases where it's discovered that, say, a weather station sensor malfunctioned for a period of time. This chart looks like this: https://ibb.co/fvr1v9 ... it's fairly identical to the previous one.

Now, the other way we can do it, the most dishonest way we can do it, is to replace the values for each of those years with "0". As in, for that entire year, we subtract all wildfire activity, and pretend that the year went by with nary a spark. What does it look like then? https://ibb.co/hEWehp Ah! Now we finally get the flat trend we wanted. You can see the really obvious negative forcing on the 5-year running average when those years are left in the dataset but with "0" values.

There are answers to your other questions. The neat thing about news articles on this subject is that most of them can be traced back to some study, expert statement, or research paper. So if you're really interested in getting your questions answered, it shouldn't take more than a few hours' effort.

For example, one of my earlier links, https://theconversation.com/wildfires-in-west-have-gotten-bi..., included a nice graph of federal funds spent on fire suppression. At the bottom of that graph is a link to the NIFC data it was sourced from. So, there's a reasonable answer for "the amount of effort put towards fighting them".

And then you could look at that graph, and then look back at the increase-in-acreage graphs, and imagine what they would look like if federal spending on wildfire suppression were mostly flat, maybe just tracking with inflation.