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800 Canadian wildfires burning as air quality alerts extend to US

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Re: 800 Canadian wildfires burning as air quality alerts extend to US

#41

Post by pvaldes »

rjrjrjrj wrote: post #34
pvaldes wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are many parts of Canada under no fire restrictions at the moment. Accidental or even negligent does not automatically mean arson. Jumping to that conclusion is silly.

Are this areas burning?

Accidents are rare, and the fires in clusters and other common patterns are typical

One alleged arsonist detained in Galicia (Spain), with a bag full of stuff. After several wildfires stated to appear near his village in the last two weeks he was watched a morning moving into two locations that soon started to burn. Near houses of course. Why not?

Re: 800 Canadian wildfires burning as air quality alerts extend to US

#42

Post by edawg88 »

BigGreenJorts wrote: post #40
gwerbin wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, the boreal forests super rural/unpopulated bc they're mostly up north and on the shield where it's hard to build. That's said, there is quite a bit of logging lands where the age, arrangement and species makeup think we have fires more often than they're supposed to happen. 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 massiv…

Thank you for sharing!

Re: 800 Canadian wildfires burning as air quality alerts extend to US

#43

Post by alexk307 »

aurelius_v wrote: post #37
Makeitmakesense wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Its definitely not part of forest fires that have raged 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 us…

> In the past thousand years, we have never seen a single season where 4% of Canada's entire forest area burned down

You cannot possibly know this, you do not have accurate records of forrest fires that occurred 800+ years before Canada was even founded. Wildfires abide by power law distributions [1][2] meaning that enormous outliers like the one in 2023 (and maybe even this year) are not unexpected with a long fat tail distribution. Wildfires in Canada have been trending down in terms of number of fires, but the fires are burning more area [3].

> When you normalize the data and isolate forests

Here's the past two decades of forrest fires globally [4], very hard to spot a significant trend. I'm not arguing that there isn't a problem here and that climate change isn't playing at least some role in it, but to attribute this entirely to climate change is misguided and not supported by literature.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law [2] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0500880102 [3] https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/en/fire-history [4] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/area-burned-wildfires-by-...

Re: 800 Canadian wildfires burning as air quality alerts extend to US

#44

Post by tencentshill »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #18
segmondy wrote: post #13

700 miles away and we have the worse air quality in US. something something about everyone thinks they are safe on climate change until it shows up on your doorstep.

this is stage 1 of the ecological collapse. it's gonna get a lot worse, and sooner than people think.

Well the smoke issue is going to get better, because the trees burn down once, and may not be able to grow again in the new environment.

Re: 800 Canadian wildfires burning as air quality alerts extend to US

#46

Post by rjrjrjrj »

pvaldes wrote: post #41
rjrjrjrj wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many parts of Canada under no fire restrictions at the moment. Accidental or even negligent does not automatically mean arson. Jumping to that conclusion is silly.

Are this areas burning? Accidents are rare, and the fires in clusters and other common patterns are typical One alleged arsonist detained in Galicia (Spain), with a bag full of stuff. After several wildfires stated to appear near his village in the last two weeks he was watched a morning moving into two locations that soon started to burn. Near houses of course. Why not?

https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/en/interactive-map?selectedDat...

Re: 800 Canadian wildfires burning as air quality alerts extend to US

#47

Post by gwerbin »

remarkEon wrote: post #35
gwerbin wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes. A mature society manages its natural resources for the betterment of its people. It doesn't throw its hands up and say "well shit, guess it's that 500 year cycle again". As a meta comment, climate change is this very odd thing on this website. On the one hand, more or less everyone agrees that a vast amount of time and effort should be spent on renewable energy generation (though transmission infrastructure does…

What in the world are you talking about? This gets discussed all the time. The impact is not making it even worse at this point. And you talk as if posting on HN was equivalent to starting a coal-fired power plant in your backyard.

Re: 800 Canadian wildfires burning as air quality alerts extend to US

#48

Post by everdrive »

I have a stupid question about seasonal wildfires. I was under the impression that a lot of wildfires occurred because too much brush had built up and natural burns had been foolishly prevented by firefighters. However in the past 10 years, it seems that there are many, yearly, huge wildfires in the same areas.

Why doesn't the brush get burned down? ie, why is there not a Canadian wildfire every 5-10 years? Why yearly? Is it different locations? Does dry bush just accumulate that quickly? I'm aware that global warming is a factor, but if there's less to burn I'd think that warmer temperatures eventually hit a wall.

Re: 800 Canadian wildfires burning as air quality alerts extend to US

#49

Post by remarkEon »

gwerbin wrote: post #47
remarkEon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. A mature society manages its natural resources for the betterment of its people. It doesn't throw its hands up and say "well shit, guess it's that 500 year cycle again". As a meta comment, climate change is this very odd thing on this website. On the one hand, more or less everyone agrees that a vast amount of time and effort should be spent on renewable energy generation (though transmission infrastructure does…

What in the world are you talking about? This gets discussed all the time. The impact is not making it even worse at this point. And you talk as if posting on HN was equivalent to starting a coal-fired power plant in your backyard.

Yeah great example of what I’m talking about. Technology people on the technology website don’t seem interested in figuring out how to use technology to mitigate any effects of a changing climate. All they care about is “carbon number go down”, as if turning off power plants magically reduces the amount of fires.

Re: 800 Canadian wildfires burning as air quality alerts extend to US

#50

Post by rjrjrjrj »

everdrive wrote: post #48

I have a stupid question about seasonal wildfires. I was under the impression that a lot of wildfires occurred because too much brush had built up and natural burns had been foolishly prevented by firefighters. However in the past 10 years, it seems that there are many, yearly, huge wildfires in the same areas. Why doesn't the brush get burned down? ie, why is there not a Canadian wildfire every 5-10 years? Why yearl…

What do you mean by same area?

Canada has millions of sq km of forest. Lytton is 700km west of Jasper, which is 2000km west of Thunder Bay.

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