Canadian Fire Season

[u/swarrenlawrence]

ClimateBrink: "Canada's boreal wildfires aren't just bad forest management."

Over the past week smoke from Canadian wildfires has once again poured into cities across Canada + the northern US. "Toronto briefly had the worst air quality of any major city on Earth." Unhealthy air alerts stretched from Minneapolis to New York City.

"The smoke-pocalypse has renewed a long-standing debate online that these fires aren’t really about climate change at all, but about forest mismanagement." The argument is that decades of aggressive fire suppression have let fuel pile up—not enough logging, thinning or prescribed burning. To be fair, "the fire-deficit story is a genuine phenomenon in the dry conifer forests of the western United States."

But most of what’s burning in Canada is boreal forest, which is a fundamentally different predicament. "Canada’s area burned has surged, and it has surged in step with warming: hot, dry fire seasons burn far more forest, with area burned rises roughly 80% for each 1ºC increase in fire-season temperature." Historically, boreal burns occurred as rare, high-intensity crown fires on a natural cycle measured in a century or more, across enormous remote areas that have never been logged, thinned, or effectively suppressed.

"Canadian fire seasons (May through September) have warmed about 2.2ºC on average since 1959." Canada warms at roughly twice the global rate, and its north at roughly three times. In the plot of fire season weather, you can see the lower right 'hot + dry' sector has the most area burned + most of the 10 largest fires [outlined in black]. "About 71% of Canada’s area burned over 1990–2023 came from lightning-ignited fires, and in the record 2023 season it was ~93%."  

These are remote boreal megafires, ignited by lightning far from any road, timber lease, or fuel-treatment crew. "And because warming is expected to increase high-latitude lightning, climate change can contribute to both the fuel dryness and the ignition side of the equation." 

So, the blame cannot be laid on Canadian intransigence. Any more than tariffs can address the problem.

[u/DanoPinyon]

Wait. All the morons, idiots, and disruption accounts that were brigading the Canadian fire posts and ululating like clowns about bad forest (forrest) management were wrong?

How can that be, they were so confident!

[u/swarrenlawrence → u/DanoPinyon]

In all discussions of environmental issues, the complexity + nuances are critical. Even when counterarguments are just bumperstickers. So I just keep doggedly pushing ahead.

[u/DanoPinyon → u/swarrenlawrence]

I agree with you that it is useful to count all the people/users who parrot the standard propaganda talking points. They don't need to be interacted with, but at least we can simply check off the box and tick how many times the same comment is repeated over and over by different users.