An Explanation for the Canadian Wildfires from an American…
0 reactions
An Explanation for the Canadian Wildfires from an American Climate Scientist's Substack
Just wanted to post this as I came across it this morning & it's the best explanation I've seen so far.
Original Article by Zeke Hausfather, American Climate Scientist
# Canada's boreal wildfires aren't just bad forest management https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/canadas-boreal-wildfires-arent-just
tl;dr (my analysis)
**1 - the massive area where these fires are occurring simply are impossible to manage**
**2 - there is a direct relationship between increasing temps due to climate change and these remote forest fires**
**3 - the only real impact of trying to manage these fires is to protect local towns & infrastructure; it will do nothing to impact the smoke pollution currently being experienced**
Bottom line: we better get used to it.
From the article's summary:
First, the forest-mismanagement explanation is borrowed from the wrong forest. Its a real problem in the frequent-fire dry forests of the western US, but the Canadian boreal is a rare-crown-fire system, mostly unmanaged and unsuppressed, where only about a fifth of the burned area is even on managed land and where the fire scientists themselves say landscape-scale fuel treatments can’t scale or stop the megafires.
Second, the surge in Canadian burning tracks temperature with striking consistency, and hotter, drier fire seasons burn far more forest (+80% per 1C), the biggest fire years are almost universally hotter and drier, over 90% of the record 2023 burn was remote lightning fire, and the attribution studies tie these extremes to a warmer atmosphere without needing to invoke forest management at all.
And third, where management does matter like for the forests ringing communities it’s a genuine and worthy fix. But here it just protects towns; it doesn’t solve the underlying factors driving area burned or wildfire smoke pollution.
#science
source
Just wanted to post this as I came across it this morning & it's the best explanation I've seen so far.
Original Article by Zeke Hausfather, American Climate Scientist
# Canada's boreal wildfires aren't just bad forest management https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/canadas-boreal-wildfires-arent-just
tl;dr (my analysis)
**1 - the massive area where these fires are occurring simply are impossible to manage**
**2 - there is a direct relationship between increasing temps due to climate change and these remote forest fires**
**3 - the only real impact of trying to manage these fires is to protect local towns & infrastructure; it will do nothing to impact the smoke pollution currently being experienced**
Bottom line: we better get used to it.
From the article's summary:
First, the forest-mismanagement explanation is borrowed from the wrong forest. Its a real problem in the frequent-fire dry forests of the western US, but the Canadian boreal is a rare-crown-fire system, mostly unmanaged and unsuppressed, where only about a fifth of the burned area is even on managed land and where the fire scientists themselves say landscape-scale fuel treatments can’t scale or stop the megafires.
Second, the surge in Canadian burning tracks temperature with striking consistency, and hotter, drier fire seasons burn far more forest (+80% per 1C), the biggest fire years are almost universally hotter and drier, over 90% of the record 2023 burn was remote lightning fire, and the attribution studies tie these extremes to a warmer atmosphere without needing to invoke forest management at all.
And third, where management does matter like for the forests ringing communities it’s a genuine and worthy fix. But here it just protects towns; it doesn’t solve the underlying factors driving area burned or wildfire smoke pollution.
#science
source
| 1,000 mlx | |
| 2 | |
| 0 |