California Wildfire Acreage is Well Below Normal With Little Upward Trend: Why is the Media/Climate Activists Not Telling This Story?

This year, wildfire acreage in California has been well below average and are being eclipsed by the lightning-initiated wildfires over the Pacific Northwest.   The nearly fire-free California situation is evident satelite/ fire image from yesterday (active fires shown by the orange dots).

Lots in Washington and Oregon, very little in California.

In fact, according to official CALFIRE statistics (shown below), the total acreage this year is LESS THAN HALF of the five-year average!

The media and climate activists have been quite silent about this.  

Can you imagine if the wildfire acreage was twice the average?   The supposed connection with climate change would be on the front page.

In fact, some media and others are actively pushing the unsupported narrative:

Ready for the Truth?

Let's look at the actual wildfire data for California!  

Consider the actual burned area data for the past 30 years (below).  A period in which global warming has been occurring.

You see a large trend?   I don't.  

There was a short period in the early 2020s when unusual meteorology drove some big fires, but the wildfire numbers have declined since then.

This lack of a long-term trend in California wildfire activity actually occurred during a period of increasing human ignitions of wildfires (e.g., from powerlines, arson, etc.).

In fact, the best estimates are that humans have initiated roughly two-thirds of wildfires in California since 1992 (see below).  I suspect these ignitions have had little to do with global warming.   At the same time there there has been an invasion of non-native flammable grasses.

The bottom line is that there is no rapidly increasing globe-warming-induced wildfire trend in California.  Such claims are demonstrably false.   

Finally, let me note that you can not believe AI inquiries on this topic.

Want proof?  I asked Google Gemini whether California was having a low wildfire year (see below).  Its answer was the OPPOSITE of the truth.   

I then told it was wrong, and it admitted it was fibbing

I wish the Seattle Times, YouTube Channel climate activists, and others would be willing to look at the data and acknowledge they have been providing inaccurate information regarding the climate/wildfire connection.

An Extreme Lightning Event Started the Recent Northwest Wlidfires: Did Global Warming Play a Role?

On July 15/16, a massive lightning storm initiated several major wildfires east of the Cascade crest.

As shown below, this was one of the most extreme lightning events in Northwest history.

This story has escaped the notice of the media.   Furthermore, several media outlets (including KING-5 news and the NY Times) and podcasters/Youtube channels have claimed that Northwest lightning has increased over time due to climate change.  (see example below) 

Actual lightning data show that such claims are demonstrably false.

The data is clear: the major wildfires that occurred during the past month have little to do with climate change, but were associated with a very unusual "lightning storm" of extraordinary intensity.

As I will demonstrate below, there is no upward trend in Northwest lightning, which indicates that global warming is not a major driver of regional lightning frequency.

The Data

There are two major lightning networks that cover our region and beyond: the UW World Wide Lightning Location Network (WWLLN) and the Vaisala National Lightning Detection Network (NLDN).

I first asked UW Professor Robert Holzworth and Scientist Katrina Virts, who run the WWLLN network.

I was amazed to learn that WWLLN detected 5,440 strokes over the PNW on July 16, 2026--the most of any July day in the period of record (since 2013, after which the observing network was stable).

Lightning Strikes on July 15-17.

No wonder there were a lot of fire starts! 

 Many are concerned about global warming, so I asked the WWLLN folks to see a plot of lightning over time.  Katrina made a plot of the number of lightning days per month over the Pacific Northwest (below):

The lightning numbers are DECLINING.  And this is a period of substantial global warming. Global warming is NOT contributing to more lightning over our region!.

To get an independent check on these lightning numbers, UW Research Meteorologist Jeff Baars used a completely different lightning network (NLDN), which goes back until the late 1980s.

For this network, July 16 was the third greatest July lightning day since 2013. And examining a far longer period, we see that there is no increasing trend in regional lightning...in fact, a modest decline.

So what should you take away from all this?     

(1) The July 2026 lightning event was unusually extreme in terms of the number of lightning strikes, greatly increasing the number of fires.

(2)  There is no observational evidence that global warming/climate change is contributing to more lightning strikes (and thus wildfires) over the region.

The latter observational result suggests that some modeling studies, which suggested the opposite, are in error. Clearly, they possess some flaws in their methodology or approach.