Is Australia on fire? Yes and no.

Is Australia on fire? It certainly looks like it from these maps, but they are not showing what your eyes would see.

UPDATE 1/23/2020: NASA recently admitted that "fake fires" were detected in Australia on Jan. 16-17, 2020.

UPDATE 1/22/2020: The first clear day since the fires has allowed and the burn scars are evident (as dark brown splotches) in this satellite comparison image... so while the fires themselves couldn't be seen from space, as discussed below, the burn scars can, and they are some of the biggest we've ever seen. One is over 100 miles long!

UPDATE 1/9/2020: Although the smoke is still clearing, we are starting to get some pictures of the burn scars, which show the areas burned. They can, just barely, be seen on a map of Australia, as shown below.

There will be more seen on satellite in the coming weeks and we'll get a realistic look at how much of the country has burned (estimates have been raised from 20 million to 30 million acres today -- about 1.6% of the country). And it's not over yet.

The scars shown above are from the Kangaroo Island and south of Sydney; the larger Sydney area scar is shown below.

ORIGINAL BLOG POST 1/8/2020: You may have seen maps like this one, showing the country of Australia on fire:

This makes it look like at least half of Australia, a country nearly as large as the United States, is on fire. And while over 20 million acres have burned there, a billion animals have perished and costs will exceed $100 billion in one of the biggest tragedies in modern human times, I still cringe when I see the map above -- and others like it -- being shared on Social Media.

One problem is that you're seeing 48 hours of these fire detection hotspots -- not what's burning right now. But mostly what you're seeing is an icon problem. There are hundreds of fires depicted on this map (which is a 48-hour satellite "hotspot" map as of Monday), but the icons are hundreds of times bigger than the actual fires. Fortunately, in Google Earth, we can reduce the size of the icons, to a certain extent, revealing this map:

Google Earth will only let you reduce the icons to 0.3x their original size, so even with this map the size of the fires is still bigger than reality. This satellite map of Cyclone Blake on Monday, combined with the same satellite hotspot points made even smaller in red, does a better job but still overstates the fire area:

If the dots get any smaller, you can't see them at this zoom level, which means that you can't see the Australia fires if you're looking down on Earth. That also means the "glowy" map is not accurate -- and in fact, it is a month's worth of fire hotspots, not what's burning now.

There is no evidence that wildfires are actually increasing in Australia either, despite what you may have heard from Global Warming proponents. The graph below shows the number of wildfire hotspots in Australia over the last 20 years, which is as far back as the satellite data goes:

The graphs don't show an increase. In fact, there were days with more fire hotspots in 2012. Hotspots may not be the best way to measure fires, as I mentioned in my blog about the Amazon fires, and acres/hectares burned would be better. However, I have not been able to find a graph of yearly records online for Australia.

Although 20 million acres burned sounds terrible (and it's about the size of South Carolina), Australia has seen worse. Data from the AIDR says that 53 billion acres were burned in 2002-2003, with 289 million acres in the 1974-75 fire season.

Fires aren't increasing on a global scale either, at least as of 2015 (and if they are now, three years does not a climate record make), according to a NASA report.

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