News reports finally beginning to acknowledge climate in this week’s wildfire/air quality crisis, but disappointed that ABC’s Ginger Zee did not include that in her coverage this morning.
Canada is on fire. On Tuesday there were more than 400 wildfires burning across the country, 238 of them out-of-control. Smoke and unhealthy air quality levels from the conflagration have blanketed multiple Canadian provinces, much of the Great Lakes region and parts of the northeastern United States.
While forest fires are a natural part of the ecosystem of Canada’s boreal forests, the size, ferocity and number of fires this year is decidedly abnormal. Most of the country is expected to be under high to extreme risk for much of the wildfire season, which stretches from May to September.
“Climate change is real and having a huge impact on Canadians right now with forest fires burning across the country,” tweeted Catherine McKenna, Canada’s former climate minister.
“This is a concerning situation given there is so much fire on the landscape already,” said Michael Flannigan, a professor of wildland fire at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia. “You need a lot of rain, at least 2 inches, to really get a handle on the situation or a lot of fire management effort.”
In addition to extreme heat, the fires this week have been fueled by wind from passing cold fronts, underlying drought and a spring landscape that is not yet green. The weather may soon shift, Flannigan said, but another dry cold front would only provide more wind to fan the flames. There are 92 active fires in Alberta and at least 200 in Canada overall.
Flannigan said higher temperatures dry out vegetation but also increase the likelihood of lightning, which can ignite fires. “In Canada, fire area burned has doubled since the early 1970s,” he said. “My colleagues and I attribute this largely to human-caused climate change.” Larger wildfires typically happen in bursts, with 3 percent of fires accounting for 97 percent of the area burned annually.
“It is really the extremes that drive the fire world in Canada and I would argue in the western United States as well,” he said. “Much of this happens on a relatively small number of days during episodes of extreme fire weather like we are seeing right now.”
As heat-driven fires continue to become real-world disasters, there is more evidence pointing to the fuel behind them. A study publishedTuesday in the journal Environmental Research Letters measured the link between forest fires and the fossil fuel emissions, finding that nearly 40 percent of the total forest area burned in the western United States and southwestern Canada between 1986 and 2021 can be attributed to emissions from the largest 88 fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers. That represents about 20 million acres, an area bigger than Ireland.