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As a Canuck, let me say sorry for having so many trees and not enough firefighters, for a second year in a row... at least we have to huff this stuff in before it gets to you, right?
Canadian here. Sky looked like Breaking Bad in real life. Also, before this week, I'd never seen the weather app show a yellow map before for air quality.
Eastern Canada, perhaps? Because B.C. wildfires have made Washington maps go to "very unhealthy" (AQI 201-300), so I'm sure B.C. was above that. (I'm not sure what "yellow" means where you're at. It's "healthy" according to https://www.airnow.gov/aqi/aqi-basics/ ).
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They don’t. If people actually believed this stuff they’d be learning how to hunt, get good with long guns, filter their own water etc. Revealed preferences always smash headlong into one’s imagination.
Underneath your sneering is a failure to understand how humans tend to act.
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Ffs, just the dumbest comments in this thread. Jumping from “caused by man” to arson is weapons grade stupidity.
Countries use a scale of wildfire risk If there is a clear prohibition to use fire in some location today, because strong winds and low humidity create high risk of wildfires; and somebody still ignores the prohibition and start fire in five different locations in the worse conditions of the year, knowing well that every firefighter is busy yet on one of the other 800 wildfires active, would you still classify that a…
Accidental or even negligent does not automatically mean arson. Jumping to that conclusion is silly.
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What does the middle of nowhere have to do with this? We have technology that allows us to fly. You fly out, conduct controlled burns, cut out bad growth, install firebreaks. This is not an unsolved for process. For whatever reason, it’s not happening and these fires are the result. People really need to stop thinking so one dimensionally about these kinds of problems.
But are they supposed to? For example I have heard it said that in the northeast US (New England, NY, NJ) the forests pretty much evolved around humans (and rarely lightning) burning them periodically to control undergrowth. Is the same true in central Ontario? If not, then nobody is "supposed" to be doing anything? Unless catastrophic massive fire cycles are just a thing that happens every 500 years or whatever in t…
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this is stage 1 of the ecological collapse. it's gonna get a lot worse, and sooner than people think.
How do you know its not stage 0.5 or stage 3? Genuinely want to understand if this is climate change driven or just apart of the cycle of boreal forest fires that have raged in northern Ontario for centuries.
In the past thousand years, we have never seen a single season where 4% of Canada's entire forest area burned down. The 2023 season torched over 15 million hectares, completely shattering the natural baseline. It's entirely unprecedented.
The line about this being normal sounds like the talking points climate skeptic grifters like Bjorn Lomborg use to breed doubt. Claiming global fires of this scale are normal is a totally dishonest stat. He even claims they are decreasing, but that decline is just because African grasslands are disappearing due to agriculture and urbanization.
When you normalize the data and isolate forests, fire-related tree cover loss in boreal forests has been accelerating by an average of 160,100 hectares per year over the last two decades. Globally, forest fires burn twice as much tree cover today as they did 20 years ago.
I'm just mentioning this in case you are only hearing the louder, skeptic side on social media.
I'm no tree hugger. I've started data centers in the telco and crypto space and have provided seed financing for natural resource mining projects, and I will continue to do so knowing that it's a positive for society. But I don't believe in being dishonest about where the data says the planet is headed.
Anyone who grew up in Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, or New York in the 70s, 80s, and 90s knows smelling smoke and seeing red skies in the summer was not common, unless you were out at camp deep in the woods. It just didn't happen. For kids growing up in the 2020s, it's just a normal part of summer in the city.
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And three years ago it was Washington and Oregon fires that were making the air unbreathable in Vancouver
That kind of international cooperation between the US and other countries is something we just don’t see anymore.
Canada normally surpasses the per-capita carbon emissions of the US. Now, they’re setting records ablaze and further cementing their lead.
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In addition to climate change effects, do you think that preventing wildfires for decades contributes at all? My understanding is that managed burns can be useful at preventing the worst fire fires. The fact that some trees only germinate in the presence of wildfires points to wildfires being a very natural and pre-human thing. And recent wildfire management practices are likely a strong factor in recent wildfires.
managed burns have their place in ecosystems where they're common. most of these fires in Canada are because it needs to be -40C for about 2 weeks to kill off the pine beetle . if the beetle doesn't die then it, as the name suggests, infests pine trees and kills them. after a couple seasons you have massive, absolutely immense swaths of dead pine trees, full of flammable pine tar and sap. eventually they burn, and th…
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In addition to climate change effects, do you think that preventing wildfires for decades contributes at all? My understanding is that managed burns can be useful at preventing the worst fire fires. The fact that some trees only germinate in the presence of wildfires points to wildfires being a very natural and pre-human thing. And recent wildfire management practices are likely a strong factor in recent wildfires.
I don't think that's as relevant for these huge regions of remote forest in Canada as it is for the lower 48 of the USA where you have a lot of population density and ranching and farming in the dry areas that historically burned on a regular basis. Maybe someone in rural Ontario knows the full story.
That's something to note : Jack pine which is fire adapted doesn't mature for a pretty long time. The boreal forest is meant to have massive powerful forest fires that clear stands completely but they're supposed to happen on a timeline of like 80+ years.
I'm not as plugged in as I used to be, but I recall some folks worried about more birch taking up space up north bc of how often burns were happening and birch loves to form massive stands when the floor clears.