Is climate change to blame for Canadian wildfires?

I was reading a New York Post article today about how the current Canadian wildfires are evidence of just how wrong environmentalists have climate change, and how "climate warriors" are unjustifiably rushing in to blame climate change for the smoke and toxic air afflicting much of eastern Canada and the USA. (Yes, I do read such articles, if only to assess just how much I disagree with them.) So, of course, I wondered just how much truth there was in their claims. Conclusion? Not much.

The annual Canadian wildfire season so far has been nothing short of unprecedented (that word again). Around 2,300 wildfires in 9 of Canada's 13 provinces and territories have burned nearly 43,000 square kilometres already, and we are only in early June. This is about 15 times the 10-year average for this time of year. 

Quebec and eastern Canada in particular has been hard hit this year, in addition to the usual conflagration in Western Canada, and much of the smoke from these eastern fires has been blown into the heavily-populated northeast of America, which is unaccustomed to this particular kind of air pollution. New York City, for example, seems to have been harder hit by the smoke than most Canadian cities, including here in Toronto, where the effects have been quite minimal, despite the media hang-wringing. This has clearly been quite an eye-opener for millions of Americans, who have never seen this kind of concrete evidence of our changing climate before.

Understandably, all of this has ignited strong passions on both sides of the divide (yes, there is a divide - everything is divided these days). Environmentalists and most educated people see this as a salient and much-needed wake-up call that we are not doing enough to tackle climate change, and that this is perhaps an early vision of a grim future. 

But there is always an opposite reaction in politics, even if not an equal one, and there are many on the right who refuse to believe this is in any way related to climate change (which, after all, does not exist, right?) Just as an example of this point of view, Republican Representative Marc Molinario opined on Fox News that: "There is little question that Canada obviously needs to focus on forest management, but this isn't the moment to start lecturing people about the science of climate change". Predictably, Fox News also got in on the act, blaming forest management and increasing population, and asserting that wildfires are not really getting worse anyway.

The New York Post editorial I mentioned at the beginning baldly states, without going into any particulars or, you know, evidence, that "there's zero evidence climate change sparked any of the more than 400 fires ranging across Canada's forest". Well. So, what does the NYP believe caused this unprecedented fire season? Merely "forest mismanagement in the name of environmentalism". It then goes off on a tangential, broad-level rant against environmentalism and wokeness in all its forms.

So, does the NYP have a point? Well, to get an alternative viewpoint, I consulted an article on the subject by CarbonBrief, a scientific outlet whose opinion I trust more strongly than a New York Post editor, and their take is of course diametrically opposite to the above-mentioned conclusions, and also comes with details and attributions. 

Specific attribution studies on this fire season are not yet available. "Attribution" is the scientific method of analyzing real world data and climate models in order to establish whether a particular extreme weather event could have happened in a world without the current global warming. Events such as the Siberian heatwave of 2020, the Pacific Northwest heatwave of 2021, the Northern Hemisphere drought of 2022, the Horn of Africa drought of 2020-23, the Mediterranean heatwave of 2023, and the extreme heat in Southeast Asia of 2023, have all been attributed to climate change in this way. 

But above average, and often record, late spring/early summer temperatures across much of the country, and the driest April on record in eastern Canada, have clearly resulted in ideal conditions for lightning-sparked forest fires to run out of control. Arguably, fire suppression policies in many provinces may have added to the severity of fires, but can not be blamed for the main cause. 

Anyway, in a huge country where forests cover almost a third of the land area, forest management can only scratch at the surface of the problem. And it's not like forest management practices have suddenly changed, making wildfires more likely. What HAS changed - and this is undeniable - is the climate and the weather. The federal and provincial governments keep pumping more and more money into forest management, prescribed burns, etc, but these efforts are a drop in the ocean compared to what is needed to deal with the increased risks generated by climate change.

Incidentally, there is apparently a whole subset of posts doing the rounds of social media claiming that it is the Canadian government, or possibly "green terrorists", that is deliberately setting these wildfires! These posts come with a video showing planes pouring fire, not water, onto vast stretches if virgin forest. It turns out, though, that the videos are old videos of fire-seeding operations for prescribed burns, or "planned ignitions" as a firefighting tool, and do not relate to the current crop of new wildfires at all.

The other elephant in the room is the claim by many on the left that forest fires are increasing drastically, and that this is all due to climate change. Those on the right claim that the official record shows that wildfires in Canada actually peaked in the 1980s and has been going down ever since. 

There is some truth on either side here. The number of wildfires has indeed been going down since the 1990s - although this year's figures may buck that trend - largely due to better firefighting, strict campfire bans and improved public education. But the severity of the fires has worsened, with greater areas burned and more people displaced by them. So, there are indeed more "disastrous wildfires" than there were, in spite of the improved firefighting and education. But it's true that politicians need to watch their language a little, and be wary of making unjustifiable claims.

Be all that as it may, there is already a wide body of evidence linking climate change with extreme weather events and forest fires in many parts of the world, including studies by the UN, the IPCC, and many universities. The CarbonBrief article goes into much more detail on these, and many others can be found online.

So, all in all, it seems to me that this is EXACTLY the moment to start lecturing people about the science of climate change.