Why So Many in Politics Deny What We Are Witnessing Has Anything to do with Climate Change

In the last week, the Premier of Ontario, Canada, told reporters that campfires and lightning were the reason for this unusually early occurrence of wildfires. In Alberta, its newly elected Premier speculated that arson was responsible for wildfires in her province.

Conspiracy theorists looking at the wildfires that have broken out across Canada raise suspicions about the timing of these outbreaks. They spout similar statements to those made by politicians like the two Premiers mentioned above.

Climatologists have a very different explanation. Much of Canada’s north this spring has experienced higher-than-normal temperatures. Warmer air with temperatures closer to what we see in mid to late summer leads to drier conditions. Drier conditions feed wildfires.

The link between climate change and wildfire outbreaks is well established. That’s why every summer we see headlines in Canada that describe fires burning tens of thousands of hectares of forest, threatening mostly adjacent remote and suburban communities. The fires that swept through Fort McMurray, Alberta, a few years ago are a case in point.

Wildfires accelerate climate change when they release megatons of carbon into the atmosphere coming from burned trees, forest-floor tinder, and dried-out peat deposits. It is nature’s equivalent to our burning of fossil fuels and the amount entering the atmosphere this spring will endure for decades into the future. We are stuck with it.

Fire Weather

Get used to the term described above. The Canadian Forest Service concluded after a recent study that “the future is smoky.” Fire seasons will get longer, start earlier, and contribute more to global warming than in the past. The combination of warmer weather, drier conditions, and tinder-dry forests represent a triple threat.

Smokier air is unhealthy air. Here in Eastern North America over the last few days, we have all been exposed to the reality of fire weather. In Toronto schools, outdoor activities have been curtailed. Children in daycare, rather than playing outside, are being confined indoors. When I went out yesterday to run errands, I wore a mask, something I seldom resorted to outdoors during the height of COVID-19’s spread. This is a bizarre reversal of behaviours and conditions during the pandemic of the last three-plus years.

Canada’s Forest Fire Future

Other studies by the Canadian Forest Service predict a 50% increase in fire weather conditions in Western Canada in the coming decades and a 200 to 300% increase in Eastern Canada. Fire weather is expected to burn twice the average area burned in recent years by the end of this century. For Canadians who have always been proud of our pristine natural landscapes, these predictions may come as a shock.

Is Canada Alone?

Unfortunately, the country is not alone in experiencing fire weather. Australia, the United States, Russia, and the European Union are all seeing warmer temperatures, both day and night, with drier summers which means an expanded fire weather season, already in the present, will be worse in the future.

What this all means is that mitigating climate change will be that much harder as nature adds to the human contributions responsible for global warming. As of a little more than a week ago, the latest measurement of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had reached 424.64 parts per million, an increase of 50% over values obtained from samplings trapped in Antarctic ice cores dating back to pre-Industrial Age times.