Writing in the Daily Telegraph last July, Suzanne Moore reported that the “world is on fire – and we can’t ignore it any longer”. She was noting the usual outbreaks of summer wildfires in southern Europe and suggested a retreat by cautious holiday makers in Rhodes away from one conflagration was “what climate refugees look like”. The Guardian was in similar hysterical mode observing that the lesson from Greece was “the climate crisis is coming for us all”. Such was the level of Thermogeddon interest last summer it is curious that final figures for areas burnt during the year are missing from mainstream media. In the five largest southern European countries for which the EU provides separate data – Portugal, Spain, France, Italy and Greece – 2023 was only the 20th highest in the modern satellite burnt acreage record going back to 1980.

This is perhaps not surprising. Fire ‘weather’ is a potent tool in stoking up general climate anxiety and helps promote the need for a collectivist Net Zero political solution. The Guardian used video footage of tourists moving away from one wildfire last year to claim “survival mode” could easily pass for a “TV climate crisis awareness raising campaign”. An Agence France-Presse report in the Guardian quoted EU spokesman Balazs Ujvari as stating that fires are getting more severe. “If you look at the figures every year in the past years, we are seeing trends which are not necessarily favourable.”

Let us look at some of the figures, starting first with the graph below compiled by the investigative climate writer Paul Homewood.

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