Wonderful fisking of a paper linking wildfires with global warming. From A Chemist In Langley:
Why Confounding Variables Matter – On that UVic study attributing the 2017 Extreme Fire Season to Climate Change
One of the downsides of my investigation of evidence-based environmental decision-making being a hobby, is my real life often gets in the way. This means I am not always able to comment on every interesting paper when it comes out. One such example is the paper that came out in January from the University of Victoria titled Attribution of the Influence of Human-Induced Climate Change on an Extreme Fire Season. The paper has been a topic of intense conversation but very little critique. It is repeatedly cited by activists who have not read it, but feel the conclusions:
that the event’s high fire weather/behavior metrics were made 2–4 times more likely, and that anthropogenic climate change increased the area burned by a factor of 7–11.
help their political narrative. I keep expecting to read a serious challenge of its results because it has a really obvious flaw that essentially eliminates its usefulness in quantifying anything; but I haven’t seen one to date. I am surprised because once you see how it treats confounding variables it is impossible to take its quantification seriously. In the rest of this blog post I will provide an explanation for this statement.
Much more at the site. ACIL proceeds to name four variables that are key actors in wildfire formation and were ignored in the paper. It is almost like they were trying to cherry-pick their data to fit some narrative. Or something.
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