For anyone getting an emotional response and willing to blame climate change deniers, here's some dry government statistics on Canadian forest fires [0].
The number of fires over the past 4 decades is trending down. The numbers for area burned looks like each time there's a peak, it burns out enough fuel to make subsequent years easier. There were a couple of peaks in 1980s/1990s, but nothing that big recently.
Also, notably, the area burnt is lowest during recession years and COVID lockdown year. So when people could not afford to go camping/ATVing, the amount of fires was drastically less. Climate change probably does play some role here, but so does the 20% population increase in BC over the last 2 decades.
So, the correct question to ask is "what can we do as a reasonable trade-off to reduce the number of fires in the future without compromising the quality of life?". And the correct answer is "educate people on how to spot hazardous terrain and contain the fires they accidentally started". Requiring fire extinguishers at campsites/ATVs could help. Doing some training would help. Doing controlled burns would help. Renaming Environment Canada to "Environment and Climate Change Canada| and closing down local production in favor of Chinese imports won't.
The graph shown in the link ends at 2021, with was apparently a somewhat bad year but not horrible, with 4 million hectares burned. Clearly, there were worse years in the past, like 1989 or 1995, when more then 7 million hectares were burned.
Since 1996 no year had more than 5M hectares burned, and the graph (if you squint enough) does look like it's slightly trending down.
Except, enter 2023 [1]:
> As of August 17, 5,765 fires had burned 13,749,167 hectares (33,974,932 acres), about four percent of the entire forest area of Canada and more than five times the long-term average of 2.38 million ha (5.9 million acres) for that time of the year.
Want to see what an updated graph looks like? Found one here [2] - scroll down to the bottom.
It seems misleading to cite a graph ending at 2021 when we're seeing the graph shooting off the chart right in front of us.
2023 is a first El Niño year after a long streak of La Niña years [0]. Which means, drier-than-usual summer after multiple wetter-than-usual summers. If we assume that wetter years accumulate the fuel, and drier years burn it, it would explain a single peak in 2023 followed by lower-than-average years later.
Except that the very graph in your link shows 2023 as an unremarkable year. "El Niño after a few years of La Niña" practically happens every decade or so. Similar thing happened in 2002 and 2009: 2002 was an average fire year and 2009 was close to minimal fire.
"There are complex reasons for our dire wildfires, but scientists say climate change plays key role" [0]
"Our forest management practices, they've been like this since about the '80s. So why is it we're seeing the bad fire seasons now? It's because the weather has gotten more extreme."
> The number of fires over the past 4 decades is trending down. The numbers for area burned looks like each time there's a peak, it burns out enough fuel to make subsequent years easier. There were a couple of peaks in 1980s/1990s, but nothing that big recently.
I think this is a misleading interpretation of two (pretty vague) statistics.
How have the mitigation strategies for fire changed over the last 30 years? The area burnt may not increase but the fires may be more fierce/more difficult to control, and the lack of change in these stats may be because of control techniques being different. The same can apply for the amount of preparatory work being done (/money spent) before fire season.
> So, the correct question to ask is "what can we do as a reasonable trade-off to reduce the number of fires in the future without compromising the quality of life?". And the correct answer is "educate people on how to spot hazardous terrain and contain the fires they accidentally started". Requiring fire extinguishers at campsites/ATVs could help. Doing some training would help. Doing controlled burns would help. Renaming Environment Canada to "Environment and Climate Change Canada| and closing down local production in favor of Chinese imports won't.
This is such a wild false dichotomy.
Unless you're saying climate change has nothing to do with it, or is making fires better, it's a strange thing to play devil's advocate about -- especially pre-emptively.
I accept the scientific consensus that climate change is making a lot of these natural disasters worse/different and more frequent, so addressing climate change and teaching people how to survive novel natural disasters are both important on different time scales.
Hmm. Do you have any more info about 2020? This is an interesting theory. I note a few things though
1. The number of fires is trending down, but
2. The area burned is trending up
3. The number of fires in 2020 wasn’t noticeably different. Down but on trend. But area burned was very low
Idly I wonder if some of the worst fires are started by humans through carelessness or on purpose, and this number of fires was down in 2020? Could also be a coincidence. Some years in the past had a very low area burned with a normal number of fires.
Provincial parks were outright closed for some time. And people in general were too spooked to go grilling on a forest campsite with the entire extended family.
Here is a gif of all of the years in sequence. If you look at https://firesmoke.ca, or https://smokebuddy.app, you can see the fire perimeter polygons for 2023 so far. I'm not sure about perimeters for 2022, but I think there was less burned than this year and 2021.
You know this is the same sort of fallacious reasoning the deniers make when they say it's been usually cold and snowy in their part of the world? You need to show there's a link between the lack of rain and the province being on fire. Is there historical precedence for these kinds of dry periods and fires?
There is simple physics: warmer air holds more moisture, pulling it from the ground and holding it longer. Explains drier conditions and more extreme rainfalls when they do occur
I wish the hyperbolic phrase "X is in fire" would stop.
The entirety of BC is not currently on fire (obviously). And if "BC is on fire" right now, then it would also be "on fire" when there is one single forest fire burning in the province.
Most of the major cities are inundated with smoke, and almost all of the cities are flooded with people fleeing the fires. The two major interior cities are completely surrounded by fire and subject to rolling evacuations.
warmer air holds more moisture, pulling it from the ground and holding it longer. Explains drier conditions and more extreme rainfalls when they do finally occur
A majority of the comments people leave on this site only make sense in the context of a room full of people in actionable positions. And of course no such room exists.
People love to act as though they were woken up at 4am by their chief of staff, and they’ve just been led to the war room where their invaluable expertise is needed, stat, for the good of humanity.
“Simple. We just need to change the behavior of every single person on the planet.” they say with a tinge of annoyance. “Are we done here?”
> I don't understand your goal. Why are you doing this sort of comment? Taking the time to dull peoples minds against whats happening to the world?
> Is it for yourself? Are you scared and it makes you feel better to try and control other peoples' perceptions and reactions? Do you believe you're doing a service and creating a nuanced worldview that helps people make better decisions? You're not. I don't understand you.
> Are you in a position that this com
ment is useful? Is this a place where it is useful? If it's not, is the purpose of the article to solicit the sort of response you've provided?
> You are going to die asking stupid questions in meetings.
“Of all the offspring of Time, Error is the most ancient, and is so old and familiar an acquaintance, that Truth, when discovered, comes upon most of us like an intruder, and meets the intruder's welcome.”
On the contrary, to be critical of what the media tells them, quantify problems, rank solutions and check for conflicts of interest.
This won't work though. The critical thinking in the U.S. culture has been replaced by obedience, and we are back to hunting heretics in the name of holy symbols. It's a stable societal structure - look a poor Muslim countries, for example. They are busy blaming infidels for all their misfortunes, and will never attribute their poverty to the power structures on top of them. Threads like this, though, are good for gauging the speed of the societal decline and deciding when to emigrate forward.
If you yourself haven't lived in a country where "greater good" was used to swiftly destroy the then-emerging middle class, you won't recognize the patterns, so you can ignore the whole thing.
I was born almost fifty years ago in Oregon. Growing up I never remember another event like the fires of 2020. Is this just me misremembering? Is there something fundamentally different about the smoke now compared to then? Was it all heightened three years ago because of social media and wouldn't have been as impactful in the newspaper era? Do any other Pacific Northwest natives recall smoke like there is lately? I'm reading a lot of the comments and believe that this isn't the worst of the last forty years but my memory tells me differently and I'm wondering how I could be so off.
I've lived in Seattle for 25-30 years, and I think prior to the last ~5 years, the smoke from wildfires making it to the city was a much more rare event. Maybe once every few years, rather than every year. And it didn't last nearly as long, nor was there as much smoke.
Native Portlander here. It was sometime in the mid 2010s that we started to have the orange haze from forest fires here. However that week in the summer of 2020 was definitely the worst I have ever seen it here. There is a building about fifty feet away from mine and I could not see it because the smoke was that thick.
I was born in B.C. over 50 years ago. I don't remember having to live with intense forest fire smoke until 2003. We've had heavy smoke almost every summer since 2018 in the Southern interior. So something has definitely changed.
I don't think we've had anything like the 2020 fires in a long time (though the 2017 Gorge fire was pretty bad). Maybe the Tillamook burn was comparable?
Field burning used to be a more common thing though, so it was a regular annual occurrence that you'd have a lot of smoke in the air during field burning season.
I lived in Eugene, OR in 1976-1984 and have lived in Seattle since 1989 and I don't remember wildfire smoke events at all before something like 2017? Maybe a little hazy and nice sunsets, but not to the point where you could literally taste it.
I was in Nelson BC for the past couple of days. AQI was in the 200’s most of the time, the red was shining a reddish hue. Kelowna is in great danger and US side was worse, with the city of Medical Lake having been completely destroyed today. The interstate is closed and lots of ranch animals had to be let loose and are wandering about.
I am in between a few of the fires in southern bc. My friends are mostly evacuated with a few on alert. Yesterday was scary because of high winds, houses have been lost. Today the air quality is terrible, my deck furniture was covered in ash this morning.
Fire here has always been common, the most common pine tree requires fire to open it's pine cones. Fires starting here always sparks climate change battles. The reality is that there has and will always be fire here.
"OKANOGAN COUNTY, Wash. — The Crater Creek fire, that has burned an estimated 54,000 acres in British Columbia, has entered into Okanogan County."
https://inx.lv/mi5t
I am a logger that actually did fuel management in these specific areas, it is a very important thing that politics has made a mess of. That being said it has nothing to do with what is happening here right now.
Some of the places burning are places fuel management has been done and some of these places already burned up a few times over the last 10 years.
Also helicopters are not our problem heavy winds was grounding them anyways.
What do you think of the Stop the Spray BC movement? Sounds like they’ve been using herbicides to kill broadleaf trees which are important for fire breaks.
To keep this short: I think a balance between what we do and what stop the spray wants to do is ok.
Trees that excel on wet ground will be better fire breaks because their fuel is higher in the tree and the ground is wet. Yeah that helps as a fire break but it is not some super power. In my area you will naturally get small clumps of large aspens and then a lot of small aspen bushes. Those smaller trees/bushes burn up like anything else and they help guide the fires to their more resistant big brothers.
The fires happening around my city blew through a place I know well, it has a lot of aspen and swamps. The fire destroyed it all, maybe the aspen helped but not in a meaningful way. When the smoke clears maybe the picture will be different.
It is not realistic to assume that if we let aspen do what it wishes that it will make fire breaks that are of real value. Aspen is like a weed and if you cut all the trees down in an area the aspen bushes start to take over. That being said, a diverse forest is always going to be a better forest.
Appreciate your comment. At the moment wind is wreaking havoc but these fires were small for several days before they grew this large. A quick reaction would have saved so much effort and expense and grief.
I am not sure of which fires you are speaking of specifically, but the fires around my city were taken seriously right away. The ground type, location, wind and night are what escalated things.
On another note, fire is a natural part of a forests life. If we rush to put out everything which is not near cities or buildings, we are just pushing things back until the next fire in the area is even worse. It is better for the forest to burn a bit.
Scientists start to discover that the Earth is warming "Maybe they're wrong."
Scientists develop sophisticated models that show the dangers of global warming "We'll deal with it before it becomes a problem."
The catastrophic consequences are now being felt on a regular basis "Okay, it's definitely time for gradual, market-based solutions to global warming."
The catastrophic consequences are now being felt on a regular basis "Okay, it's definitely happening, but it’s too late to do anything about it, so let’s just live it up until extinction."
From my own anecdotal observations, it sure seems like that the worse it gets the more mainstream denialism becomes. I'm also seeing a rise of cartoonishly absurd conspiracy theories that look loosely something like: "the commie democrats are using secret weather machines to push their radical agenda!" Not sure how we're supposed to fix any of this in our lifetimes when reality itself is so easily trampled by culture war nonsense.
To be fair, blaming these wildfires on global warming when proper forest management techniques aren't being used and resources are being cut sort of contributes to this phenomenon...doesn't it?
Orchards and the like need to be managed. Forests shouldn't really. It's a mistake to think the entire planet needs to be treated like a private garden/agricultural resource. While forest management can help by reducing the amount of bush etc., it can't mitigate the large scale effect of vegetation simply drying out. This 'forest management' concept doesn't include watering the trees, after all.
I'm a little sour on this term because it acts (consciously or unconsciously) to deflect from the actual problem of large-scale desiccation. Every time I hear it makes me think of someone saying 'Mars never has forest fires, because the vegetation has been cleared properly.'
Forests naturally burn. In California (at least) trees have features specifically evolved to fit into an environment with periodic natural fires. There are written reports of fires in North America going back many hundreds of years, and I believe the natives experienced fires before that as well, as evidenced by cultural practices and oral history.
So you can either not manage the forests and avoid building into areas that would be affected by natural fires, or you can build into those areas but you do need to manage the forests.
Where do you get the idea that forests don’t need to be managed if we are to live in and around them? It seems like magical thinking to me.
Note that this is orthogonal to the effect a warming earth has on severity. Qualitatively, you needed to manage forests in North America 1,000 years ago, and you still need to manage them today.
So you can either not manage the forests and avoid building into areas that would be affected by natural fires
Yes, this is what I have in mind. If you want to live in a forest you need to assume you'll be on your own in the case of natural disasters and have some survival/escape plan. Building into/exploiting all available primeval land seems like a Bad Thing to me.
> it can't mitigate the large scale effect of vegetation simply drying out.
it goes well beyond that, the bark beetles have killed a lot of pine trees, which is just standing dead timber. now dry that out and you have dead forests full of kindling.
There is aloooot of forest in Canada. You can properly manage some of it near populated places, but it is simply infeasible to directly or indirectly manage even most of it.
The Cascades didn't always consist of endless acres of Douglas Fir and sword ferns. As the glaciers receded, the indigenous tribes and the natural fire ecology maintained oak savanna where there is now dense forest and fuel buildup. I agree with your point, but just wanted to point out that the land was manageable before we allowed most of it to turn into forest.
"things people got away with before" are now no longer optional.. as if the extra-safety cushions have been used up and are gone.. seems very predictable, and not either-or at all..
This is fair, where there are historically poorly managed forests. But a lot of socal that burns isn't forest at all, for example. Same in Eastern Oregon. Or Santa Rosa.
A large portion of BC is completely inaccessible by any means - which doesn't help. Lots of huge mountain ranges!
But the problem turns out to be climate change, oil usage and the BC Conservatives deciding that the pine beetle could be stopped by normal winters (after "normal" winters were already fading ... but this is hindsight ...). Ok they were called the "BC liberal party" but they were a hard-right conservative party and still are ... but I'm not sure if the large-scale pine beetle caused dead forests are still a factor... my last trip through one of the areas currently on fire (a couple of weeks ago) - I didn't see the characteristic red/dead pine trees that time and while I'm just an inhabitant, I was looking. (Banff through Kelowna area to Vancouver, as my usual Kamloops route was already being evacuated in parts then).
> For example, the Canadian politicians who focus the most on that subject, and who impose onerous "carbon taxes" on everyone, spend a lot of time in planes flying all over the country, and even overseas. Most of this travel is unnecessary and pointless.
Do you have data indicating that the politicians who don’t focus on the subject are more modest with their travel?
To make a comparison that Canadian politicians who impose taxes jet travel more are harming the environment more, we need a comparison between controlled variable and the tested variable like the amount of jet travel Canadian politicians who don't impose taxes do.
> Last fiscal year, the Trump family took more trips that required Secret Service protection than the Obama family took in seven, according to a budget document released by the Treasury Department. On average, Obama’s family took 133.3 protected trips per year, while the Trump family has taken an average of 1,625 annually.
There's one (non-Canadian) datapoint.
Before anyone shouts "but Trump's family is bigger!": read the link.
The point is, if they honestly believed in climate change, their actions would reflect a state of emergency. Instead, they act as if nothing is wrong, except when it comes time to impose limits on others, and then they remember it's all justified by the need to save the planet. So comparing to other politicians is pointless, it's their actions in relation to their policies that is at issue, not how it compares to other politicians.
I don’t see that as a problem. The problem is brainwashing (mostly well meaning progressives) into doom culture, it’s an easy way to justify extremely totalitarianism.
We already went through that in the 70’s with nuclear power. Humanity would be far better off if it weren’t for 70’s progressives and their anti-nuclear agenda. It’s the same but worse this time: welcome our new climate tyrants.
Climate change is a cult with religious qualities. I haven’t seen anyone rebutting that.
I don’t give a shit if people use private jets for whatever reason.
Maybe it has to do with the US having double the per capita carbon footprint, and double the cumulative total amount of CO2 of China, and many multiples of India:
There's far more room for improvement when per capita is high than there is when per capita is low.
And the climate certainly does care about cumulative CO2.
Would have, could have, should have. But didn't. Trying to hold others accountable without getting one's own house in order just comes off as the blatant hypocrisy it actually is. Until we do better ourselves, we are in no position to call others out.
> Scientists develop sophisticated models that show the dangers of global warming
Scientists treat their jobs as sinecure, benefit from unpublished data and closed-source code while receiving public funding
Nothing to see here, people, get that Believe Science t-shirt and move on.
> The catastrophic consequences are now being felt on a regular basis "Okay, it's definitely time for gradual, market-based solutions to global warming."
I guess you disagree with economists who won the most prestigious award in their field and who also build sophisticated models? Pick your own dismal science to root for! Being a science believer have never been so exciting, now you can treat it like football or politics!
About half of Washington has an AQI over 300. The coast is mostly clear, but it will depend on how the wind trends. These latest south central BC fires only really grew in the last 48 hours too.
Seattle has an AQI of 109 ATM, much if Washington lives in that region. Spokane in contrast is at 289 ATM. If forests are burning primarily in Eastern BC, the mountains couod save us.
I'm in Spokane, and on the PurpleAir website there are readings >500 all around, even in the city, which is not (yet) burning. The air outside is subjectively awful, the worst I can recall in 20 years living here. I'll be holing-up today with fans/filters running, not that it will do much good.
What's burning, at least nearby, is not forests AFAIK, it's grasslands.
I used aqicn, so maybe its dataset isn’t as accurate. But anything close to 300 is going to feel uncomfortable, 500 unbearable. I’ve been exposed to 1000 in Beijing before that really sucked.
Thanks. I'm fortunate not to live in Medical Lake or nearby, where the most destructive fires (in terms of $damage$ anyway) are still ongoing.
I know little about these air quality sites, how accurate they are, or if they are all measuring the same things in a normalized way. I just latched on to the PurpleAir info, as I'd at least once seen the site favorably mentioned here on HN and the UI is pretty tolerable to me. If the world is going to burn around me I should probably study-up on such things rather than, oh, on the latest Scala db access lib. :-) The local media is referencing aqi.in as a source, not sure if this is related to your aqicn one:
"SPOKANE, Wash. - Five of the top ten cities with the worst air quality in the world are in the Spokane Metro area, according to aqi.in.
Mead sits at number one with an AQI of 502.
Spokane is number four with an AQI of 444.
Airway Heights is ranked sixth with an AQI of 426.
Spokane Valley sits at number eight with an AQI 392.
Cheney is sitting at number ten with an AQI of 370."
https://inx.lv/mi5K [khq.com]
The outside light this afternoon was truly dim due to the haze - I could see smoke in the air less than 50' away. Eyes watering, awful smell ... I can't imagine what that AQI=1000 Beijing experience would have been like ... almost seems non-survivable, at least if it's the same sort of pollutants. We're getting organic ash (yes, we paid xtra for it!) from grass/trees/shrubbery &etc but also getting the combustion products from hundreds of houses+vehicles that have gone up in flames over the past few days. All kinds of plastics and rubber and electronics ingredients I would think.
I haven't heard if all this is going to blow towards Seattle or PDX but if it does they're not gonna be happy. We'll have to figure out how to blame it on Canadians if it does cross the Cascades.
I live in Seattle but just started a two week trip to Tokyo, so hopefully it’s all done when we get back. I have lots of family in Spokane, and my cousin was posting a fire evacuation map on Facebook from around near where he lives.
An AQI of 1000 typically means a dust storm in Beijing blowing in from the Gobi desert, or, conversely, very stagnant air with almost no wind. It’s a weird experience, but survivable.
I don't know what source you're looking at but I'm seeing AQI in the 30s for Seattle right now, and ~300 east of the cascades. The wind is blowing out of the east and Seattle's air will get a lot worse this evening, but it isn't 110 yet.
It's not the worst ever in central Oregon, but it's between bad and really bad. Today's an improvement from yesterday, when I drove 45 minutes north to walk the dog someplace with an AQI under 200.
Yeah, so far it's been good this year in the Portland area... but there's still another month+ of fire season to go. IIRC the 2020 fires flared up in September and we had terrible air quality for at least a week.
Yup, and 2020 was downright apocalyptic, with AQI readings so hazardous they basically went off the charts. Also worth noting that last year the bad air quality in Portland didn't really start until October and stopped during the final days of it, so we can reasonably expect a solid 2 months left of smoke season still.
Canada:
BC Wildfire Service's Wildfire Map: https://wildfiresituation.nrs.gov.bc.ca/map
BC Air Quality Health Index: https://www.env.gov.bc.ca/epd/bcairquality/readings/find-sta...
NWT Live Fire Map: https://www.gov.nt.ca/ecc/en/services/wildland-fire-update/n...
Alberta Wildfire Map: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/3ffcc2d0ef3e4e0999b0c...
USA:
WA & OR Fire Map: https://gacc.nifc.gov/nwcc/firemap.php
ID Fire Map: https://idfg.idaho.gov/ifwis/maps/realtime/fire/