The National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) has been the keeper of U.S. wildfire data for decades, tracking both the number of wildfires and acreage burned all the way back to 1926. After making the entire dataset public for decades, in a blatant act of cherry-picking, NIFC “disappeared” a vast portion of it. Now, NIFC only shows wildfire data from 1983.

Fortunately, the internet never forgets, which means the entire dataset is preserved on the world wide web. Data prior to 1983 show U.S. wildfires were far worse 100 years ago, both in frequency and total acreage burned, than they are today.

By disappearing all data prior to 1983, which just happens to be the lowest point in the dataset for the number of fires, NIFC data now show a positive slope of worsening wildfire aligning with increased global temperatures. This truncated dataset is convenient for claiming “climate change is making wildfires worse,” but flawed because it lacks the context of the full dataset.

In June 2011 when this data was first made publicly available by NIFC, the agency said, “Figures prior to 1983 may be revised as NIFC verifies historical data.”

In December 2017, I published an article titled “Is climate change REALLY the culprit causing California’s wildfires?” pointing out the federal government’s own data showed wildfires had declined significantly since the early 1900s. Of course, that undermined claims made by the media that climate change was making wildfires more frequent and severe. Curiously, sometime between January 14 and March 7, 2018, shortly after that article appeared, NIFC added a new caveat on its data page.

According to NIFC, “NIFC compiles annual wildland fire statistics for federal and state agencies. This information is provided through Situation Reports, which have been in use for several decades. Prior to 1983, sources of these figures are not known, or cannot be confirmed, and were not derived from the current situation reporting process. As a result, the figures prior to 1983 should not be compared to later data.”

With the Biden administration now in control of NIFC, the agency now says, “Prior to 1983, the federal wildland fire agencies did not track official wildfire data using current reporting processes. As a result, there is no official data prior to 1983 posted on this site.” //

The NIFC decision to declare data prior to 1983 “unreliable” and remove it is not just hiding important wildfire history, but cherry-picking a dataset starting point that is the lowest in the entire record to ensure that an upward trend exists from that point. //

It seems NIFC has caved to political pressure to disappear inconvenient wildfire data. This action is unscientific, dishonest, manipulative, and possibly fraudulent. With this action, NIFC is no longer trustworthy as a source of reliable information on wildfires.

Anthony Watts (awatts@heartland.org) is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute.