Wildfires Are Getting Worse. Patrick Moore Says Otherwise.

-->

Neotropics

West Indies

Cascadia

Deserts

Desert Southwest

Desert Mexico

Great Basin

Europa

Dry World

More

Shop Prints

Oceania

Great Plains

Tigerlands

Roam Travelogue

Guana Cay Blog

Doors and Windows

About the Site

Contact

Privacy Policy

Roam

Moleskine

Organization

Maps

Wild Things

Preservation

Home<br>Roam

Wildfires Are Getting Worse. Patrick Moore Says Otherwise.

A Forensic Autopsy of Chapter 9 in Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom

Published March 17, 2026

Patrick Moore wants you to believe that wildfires are not getting worse because of climate change. They are getting worse because environmentalists stopped logging trees.

That is the core claim of Chapter 9 of Patrick Moore's Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom, a chapter Moore titles with sarcasm: "Forest Fires: Of Course They Are Caused by Climate Change (Not Trees?)"

Read Moore long enough and the rhetorical pattern becomes familiar. He writes as though consensus itself is evidence of delusion — as though the sheer number of people blaming climate change for wildfires proves they stopped thinking and started following. His counter-explanation (too much wood, not enough management) isn't presented as one factor among several. It's presented as the thing everyone else was too ideologically compromised to say.

But Patrick Moore's entire chapter is profoundly misleading. We will dismantle each part.

Examine the chapter closely — the graphs, the captions, and the silences where inconvenient data should be — and a pattern emerges. Moore isn't building a case so much as running a routine. He takes something true, cuts away the context that limits it, and holds up the remainder as though it disproves everything on the other side. Repeated often enough, the trick starts to look like rigor. The result is an illusion designed to mislead readers without a scientific background.

The First Trick: Redefining "Cause"

Moore begins with what he presents as a straightforward observation: "There are three primary causes of wildfires… lightning, fires caused accidentally by humans… and fires caused on purpose by arsonists or by forest managers using controlled burning."

From this, he moves quickly to a broader conclusion: because lightning and people ignite fires, climate change cannot be responsible for them. This is the central misstep in the chapter.

Portland, Oregon, September 2020. For days, the city recorded some of the worst air quality in the world, with AQI levels reaching "hazardous" and smoke so dense that daylight turned orange. The event was not caused by a single ignition, but by multiple large fires combined with extreme heat, drought, and rare east winds—conditions that allowed smoke and fire behavior to escalate far beyond historical norms.

Moore treats ignition as the whole story. But a spark is only a beginning — what the fire does next depends entirely on what surrounds it. Lightning has always existed. What changes over time is the landscape those sparks encounter.

Wet vegetation resists fire. It burns reluctantly, incompletely, and often not at all. Vegetation dried by heat and months without rain behaves differently — the same spark that would have smoldered and died instead takes hold and runs. Calling ignition the cause of that difference sidesteps what actually changed: the climate those fuels have been sitting in.

Reducing wildfire to ignition is like explaining a flood by pointing to a raindrop.

Moore's False Binary

Strip away the sarcasm and the chapter reduces to a familiar list of drivers:

excessive fuel loads

lack of thinning or logging

suppression of natural fires

expansion into the wildland–urban interface

These are presented as alternatives to climate explanations. In reality, they operate together.

Fuel load tells you what's available. Climate tells you how dangerous that availability actually is on any given day. In dry, fire-adapted forests of the western United States, decades of fire suppression have increased surface fuels. In some of these systems, reducing those fuels can lower fire severity at a local scale—but it does not explain the regional increase in fire size and intensity.

It is also worth noting that the environmental movement Moore is arguing against has not stood still. Early fire suppression policies, shaped by a mix of public attitudes, agency priorities, and mid-century conservation thinking, did contribute to fuel buildup in some fire-adapted forests. That is now widely recognized. Over the past several decades, ecologists, land managers, and Indigenous practitioners have pushed fire science toward prescribed burning, managed wildfire, and more nuanced approaches to fuel treatment.

Moore's argument depends on treating those earlier views as if they still define environmental thinking today. They do not. The science evolved. The policies followed. Moore did not.

Researchers...