We’ve been swallowing wildfire smoke all summer, and not for the first time.  One day I was driving home from work, windows up, and could still taste the smoke, and it gave me a headache.  As bad as it sounds, times have been worse when it comes to fires.  The Danish writer Bjorn Lomborg has been tracking the numbers for years.  He’s described on the left as a climate denier, but that’s not true.  He admits climate changes, but he also debunks the worst claims of the tree-hugging left.  This week, he wrote in the Wall Street Journal that wildfires are about half of what they were 125 years ago.  If the story is blocked by a paywall, I’ll include a short video below this story.

He has the numbers to back his claims, so why does it look like the planet is burning to a cinder?  Because we’re saturated in media coverage.  Pictures that aired for a couple of minutes 50 years ago now get repeated on multiple platforms 24 to 48 times a day.  More people are walking around with phones that double as cameras, and if a fire burns near a major media center, it gets more attention.

Lomborg has long advocated for cheaper solutions to rising seas, air quality, and energy use, but none of these require radical political and cultural change, which would seem to be what the crunchies are actually pursuing.  You could say they’re putting up their own smoke screen by attempting to frighten you.  It’s not working.