Barely a month after Canadian wildfire smoke drifted over large swaths of the United States and set off climate alarmism, the panic has crossed the Atlantic.

In France, fires west of Bordeaux forced more than 220,000 people to flee. In Spain, outside Madrid, flames scorched an area twice the size of the Spanish capital and drove nearly 90,000 people from their homes. The victims deserve sympathy — but also much better fire policy. What they got instead was a climate sermon.

Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, called the fires a “painful expression” of climate change. The British and Spanish governments rushed out a joint declaration that climate change is now “a national security emergency” threatening our way of life. While houses still burned, the verdict was already in: The planet is burning worse than ever, and only the end of fossil fuels can put it out.

That’s plain wrong. The planet is not burning worse than ever. It is doing the opposite. Satellite data from the European Union’s fire-monitoring service show that as of Aug. 19, the area burned globally in 2026 is 41 percent below the 2012-25 average for this point in the year. On current trends, 2026 could end with less than 1.5% of the world’s land burned — far below the satellite-era record low of 2.2% in 2022 and probably lower than in any year since 1900.

2026 is on track to be the quietest fire season in a century.

Climate change is a global phenomenon, which means it must be judged by global data. Holding up terrible fires in two countries while ignoring a planet that burns far less is cherry-picking. The politicians are counting only the observations that fit and discarding the rest. If the global burned area was 41% above average, would anyone accept “but Scandinavia is quiet this year” as a rebuttal? Of course not. Yet that is exactly the argument now being made in the other direction.

And Europe itself is not ablaze. There is a quirk in the EU statistics: “Europe” includes all of Russia, including icy Siberia. Climate activists complain that a calm Russian year flattens the continental numbers. But strip Russia out entirely, and Europe has still burned 27% less than its 2012-25 average as of Aug. 19; in nine of the last 14 years, more of the continent had burned by Aug. 19. France is suffering its worst fire season on record, and Spain is suffering a brutal one. However, two bad national seasons do not add up to a burning continent, much less a burning planet.

Americans just watched this play out. When thick Canadian smoke blew across the East Coast in July, the environmentalists reflexively blamed fossil fuels. Yet Canada is having a below-average fire year, and so is the United States. Both North America and South America are experiencing their lowest levels of burning since satellite records began. Africa— by far the world’s most fire-prone continent — is a record 43% below normal. Oceania is 16% below its usual burn, and Asia has burned near record lows. Every single continent is burning less than normal, most of them dramatically less.

So, how does a world where fire is retreating on every continent become convinced it is going up in flames? Because that is what the media coverage tells us. An inferno makes the front page. A record-quiet fire season makes no news at all. When we see reports of every fire and never hear news about the absence of fire, the public will understandably conclude the world is ablaze, even as satellites show the reverse.

Nor is 2026 an outlier. In the early 1900s, nearly 4% of the world’s land burned every year, double today’s rate. In the 1930s, the U.S. burned about five times the area it does now. A century of better agriculture, land management and firefighting has steadily pushed fire back, for the simple reason that people dislike fire and have gotten better at stopping it. The long-term global trend runs ever downward.

None of this means that France and Spain don’t have a real problem. They do: A record June heat wave dried out the landscape, and decades of accumulated fuel did the rest. The remedies are unglamorous and proven — prescribed burns, fuel clearing, fire-resistant building codes and more firefighting muscle.

What will not help is the ritual prescription of net zero. Even if every rich country reached net zero by 2050, at staggering cost, the temperature difference by century’s end would be too small to measurably change fire risk anywhere.

Telling frightened people that fossil fuels burned their homes — and that salvation lies in decades of costly emissions cuts — is not compassion. It is propaganda for hugely expensive policies and an alibi for the policies that really failed them.

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ABOUT THE WRITER

Bjorn Lomborg is the president of the Copenhagen Consensus, a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and author of “False Alarm” and “Best Things First.” He wrote this for InsideSources.com.

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