El Gato Malo

Forest fires are big, mediagenic events. The pictures are dramatic. The smoke they produce can spread for hundreds, even thousands of miles and can make life downwind unpleasant, even deadly for weeks on end.

They are also widely misunderstood and being used to make outlandish claims in favor of “climate policy” that has nothing whatsoever to do with the matter at hand. As ever, data may be used to illuminate or to obfuscate, and complete pictures and even modicums of perspective are conspicuously absent.

The politicization of this issue has become intense, and as we shall see, there are, in fact, politics at play, but they are not the politics being so widely and recklessly espoused.

Image: geralt @ Pixabay