Sounds like the idiot started a debate, that’s for sure. I’ve been removed from reading academic papers for many years, but I can say that when I used to review papers, there was almost always a section where the researchers would put their thoughts about weaknesses in their study. This really seems like a lot of ado about nothing. Unless you’re some anti-science right-wing wacko, in which case your glasses make you see what you want to. Whether it’s there or not.

Articles submitted to Nature are obliged to be relatively short, concise, globally significant and accessible to a less-specialised scientific community. The advantage is that it reaches many, and publishes (relatively) fast. So it makes sense that to fit those criteria they focused on fewer factors, but the same authors could presumably re-do this analysis with more factors and publish a longer article with more complex conclusions elsewhere, later. The more popular version could help draw attention to the more nuanced one. Regarding wildfires, of course there are diverse factors driving trends, it can be both true that climate made it significantly worse, and also true that more could be done to reduce other factors. What bugs me, is when certain politicians and media always seek to find some individual ‘arsonist’, to fit their ‘tough on crime’ worldview, ignoring trends in the underlying combustability.