Wildfires are raging in Australia. We’re going to get an earful about global warming again because Australia has never been hot or prone to wildfires until Donald Trump won the 2016 election, but that’s a separate matter. ABC News peddled some straight fake news about the natural disaster, superimposing the entire continent onto the United States to show the scale of the disaster. The problem is that it’s not accurate. As some, like Washington Free Beacon reporter Alex Griswold, noted this claim is contradicted in the ABC News article [emphasis mine]:
The raging fires in Australia have burned over 12.35 million acres of land -- with at least 24 people killed and more than 2,000 homes destroyed by the blazes, officials said.
The size of the fires across the country are twice as large as the state of Maryland and bigger than several other states, including Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and New Jersey.
ABC News getting dragged for this insane map they made up is your moment of zen pic.twitter.com/KgziUlqVr7
— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) January 7, 2020
What's funny is this map is contradicted by the actual piece, which says the wildfires are about the size of Maryland https://t.co/JOOPqaGfmn
— Alex Griswold (@HashtagGriswold) January 7, 2020
Can someone mount this map on the under barrel of that AR-15? https://t.co/p4pqhtBaPx
— Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) January 7, 2020
This is a very...fake and bad map. https://t.co/psesEY3oR4
— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) January 7, 2020
LMFAO. Ummmmm the fires are absolutely horrendous but that much of Australia is definitely ***not*** on fire, you idiots. Where’s that CNN disinformation specialist dude who was pissed off at the Babylon Bee satire articles? https://t.co/ximZB7DizJ
— JERRY DUNLEAVY (@JerryDunleavy) January 7, 2020
Yeah, that map is garbage. And once again, we have another reason to doubt the talking points about global warming peddled by closet communists masquerading as environmentalists: they make stuff up—like this map. NBC News even had to add the global warming spin in its segment but also torpedoed the claim that the entire nation is on fire. It’s not. But some 500 million animals have been killed as well from these fires, which is also tragic.