For a coarse wildlife estimate like this, the range of uncertainty is probably about two orders of magnitude. So from 500 million "affected", the true range is 5-500 million or 50 million-5 billion, depending on who decided to truncate the range of uncertainty.
The conversion factor for "affected" to "killed"... I have no idea what it is, and there is contradictory intuition for its magnitude, so I don't want to trust any number until I see someone actually doing studies of wildfire mortality.
This is my primary point. The margin of error is two orders of magnitude. It's a bit absurd to throw a statistic around when it's such a huge unknown. I guess I'd be happier if margins of error were included with statistics at all times. Otherwise people think they are all equally certain
The conversion factor for "affected" to "killed"... I have no idea what it is, and there is contradictory intuition for its magnitude, so I don't want to trust any number until I see someone actually doing studies of wildfire mortality.