800 Canadian wildfires burning as air quality alerts extend to US
bbc.com44 points by geox 6 hours ago
44 points by geox 6 hours ago
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.
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.
The only good news is it will envelop D.C. today. Fitting to force them to smell their passive dismissal of the global catastrophe of climate change.
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.
The answer is: It's complicated
https://www.wilderness.org/articles/article/5-big-myths-abou...
Ecologically, wildfires are necessary for some biomes. However, not all of them. Many are needlessly destructive due to climate change and over logging of forests.
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 the warm temps + beetles mean they don't come back. ecological change, biome collapse.
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.
This has nothing to do with climate change and everything to do with Canada’s complete and total refusal to conduct proper forest management. I see this sentiment everywhere and it’s just an excuse to throw your hands up and say “shucks, guess doing the bare minimum of conservation effort is pointless.” It is the fault of absolutely no one in DC that Canada can’t do this.
> Canada’s complete and total refusal to conduct proper forest management
Care to say more? Have they been suppressing fires in the forest way out in the middle of nowhere for decades?
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 that region...?
It's one thing to claim that bad forest management and not climate change is responsible, but it's consistent with climate change, and there are many areas in the USA that have adopted better fire and forest management practices in recent years and are still burning like crazy in seasons when they historically did not burn.
They're supposed to go into forests in the middle of nowhere and do controlled burns.
And no, 37degC does not cause wood to spontaneously combust. This is just gross negligence, same thing that happens in California.
It has been pretty bad here in Michigan. Like a heavy smelly fog all day and night. Thick enough to look directly at the sun even. Going outside and not knowing about it would make you think someone was burning a dozen brush heaps next door.
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?
More hybrid war
Wildfires in Spain, France and Canada starting at the same time just days after the NATO summit. 60 arsonists detained in France this year for 11000 French wildfires.
Of the 67 new wildfires today in Canada 24 were known caused by man, 27 by natural causes and 16 undetermined. This means that even with this alert level, arsonists may be still provoking between a 36% and a 60% of the wildfires in Canada. This is wrong. It shouldn't be so easy.
Long-distance wispering to fools on social nets has become too easy and profitable.
While people keeps distracted by the "cleaning forest" myth, we can expect that it will turn worse the closer we go to the end of the Ukraine war.
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/).