Canadian wildfires fueled by climate change, study shows | Hacker News Reader

Canadian wildfires fueled by climate change, study shows

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31 pointsBrajeshwar34 comments

ABC the Australian broadcaster did an interesting in-depth report on the Canadian wildfires: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrDi0AXASMc

DW the German broadcaster did an interesting in-depth report on wildfires generally: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bynf2UHbdA

Both worth watching.

Sigh.

Giant forest fires are caused by invasive humans and neglecting forests. Climate change plays a minor role by modification of seasons, but the primary cause is overwhelmingly humans tampering with the ecosystem. Don't kid yourself. It's human interference in the ecosystem.

The solution is "all the above". Yes, producing less co2 is important. But what will make an immediate and far reaching impact is proper forest management. Fire is a natural part of an ecosystem but humans tend to interfere with that.

Prescribed fires at chokepoints to create firebreaks is the easiest and most effective way to create healthy forests. Logging cuts can create firebreaks and benefit local economies.

Unfortunately this isn't the narrative told in the news.

Have you ever looked at Canada on a map? It’s impossibly big, Quebec alone is 3X the size of France, only the southern edge has significant population, and the rest is mostly wild (unmanaged) forest. And how the heck do you propose managing that?

You let the logging industry in and do sustainable cutting. A popular trope in the 70s-90s was how the logging industry was going to cut down all the worlds trees and we must stop them. If these forests are indeed as vast as you claim I would not worry about it if the logging was done with sustainability in mind.

First you would have to shut down the softwood lumber dispute from the USA. Then you'd have to start rebuilding the forestry infrastructure that was mostly bought out and moved to the USA decades ago... What's happening now is sustainable, where it's still happening - just a pale shadow of what used to happen. And then there's huge spaces that are entirely inaccessible (no roads, no flight access, and hostile weather). Not saying it's not doable, just that there are a lot of barriers. (note : I just live here, but the forestry I remember being involved in everything - good and bad yes - as a child has been gone since the USA started vacuuming all the companies doing it up. So largely have the jobs gone, too).

https://environment-review.yale.edu/amounts-burned-areas-hav...

" Yet, the overall trend is a striking. There is a 25-percent decrease in burned areas globally. "

It's going to be fine.

That article is from 2018.

The existence of cap and trade and emissions trading schemes prove there's greater interest in profiting off climate change than mitigating the effects.

Acid rain was so-mitigated, was it not?

The irony is that fixing the acid rain situation actually started to make the planet hotter with less sulfur in the upper atmosphere.

Paradoxically, a refusal to "put a monetary value on life" means that life is often undervalued. Ross Shachter relates an experience with a government agency that commissioned a study on removing asbestos from schools. The decision analysts performing the study assumed a particular dollar value for the life of a school-age child, and argued that the rational choice under that assumption was to remove the asbestos. The agency, morally outraged at the idea of setting the value of a life, rejected the report out of hand. It then decided against asbestos removal — implicitly asserting a lower value for the life of a child than that assigned by the analysts.

-- Russell and Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, 4th US ed.

Removing schemes like cap and trade or Pigouvian carbon taxes because money is involved is a great way to end up doing nothing about carbon emissions.

It is absolutely amazing to see just how far the smoke goes from these fires still: https://firesmoke.ca/forecasts/current/

taking this at face value as true for sake of the argument:

what possible natural factors could cause this to happen nearly exclusively in Canada?

Same conditions exist in Russia. Canada is (largely) a colder climate than most other places in the world otherwise. Note that Alaska is going through wildfires too. Equivalent zones exist in South America too - possible link at end.

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/event/151021/south-...

.. because it is not exclusive to Canada?

parts of Australia, parts of Greece, the US Sierra Mountains, the US Rocky Mountains, German forests, extensively in the global Far North.. for the last decade.

I've never experienced the level of wildfire smoke that we've had in the past few years, in my lifetime, in South Dakota. the cause of the smoke is wildfires in Canada, and, to a lesser extent, eastern Washington. why aren't Montana or North Dakota (or South Dakota, for that matter) similarly on fire?

its not good news - you are not alone

San Francisco Bay Area in 2017 had the worst air quality in the entire world for a few days.. the Sun was not completely visible through the dark reddish orange haze. There are many pictures of it. Its not over, sorry to say.

okay but why is Canada seemingly perpetually on fire yet these other neighboring states I mentioned aren't? as a layperson I would expect this phenomenon to refuse to respect man-made borders.

Forest fires are hard to sustain in states without significant forests.

South Dakota ranks pretty low on the list of US states by forest cover %, but the Black Hills is still a pretty significantly forested area, and South Dakota is a pretty large state—Montana is similar. I guess we're just lucky that our forests aren't burning, and it's just Canada that's having all the trouble.

South Dakota is 77,000 square miles with about 3,000 square miles of forest. (~4% forested)

British Columbia is 364,000 square miles. Bigger than France and Germany put together. It has around 235,000 square miles of forest. (~65% forested, 78x as much as SD... or approximately "one France of forest")

Quebec is nearly 600,000 square miles with about 350,000 square miles of forest. (~60% forested, 117x as much as SD... or approximately "one Venezuela of forest")

Not to leave all the other provinces that are on fire out… Overall, Canada has nearly 1,500,000 square miles of forest (500x as much as SD... or about "one half of an Australia of forest"). About 10% of all the world’s forest, and third most behind only Russia and Brazil.

Given most places the majority of wildfires start by what is effectively random chance (I.e., lightning), you’re basically pondering “why does it seem like people in California and Florida win the lottery more than South Dakota?”.

And that's without even getting in to how remote an inaccessible most of it is up here. Fires have a _much_ greater opportunity to start and grow before they're even detected, and even once they're detected it's not like you can just drive out there and put water on them... they might only be accessible by plane and hours away from the nearest airport. This is approximately where one of the major fires is right now: https://goo.gl/maps/Gmiqa8kKwUva14obA Definitely suggest zooming out and looking around. If you take a look at a fire map approximately _all_ of the NWT + Yukon are on fire. Combined they're about 2.5x the size of Texas with a population of around 80,000 people.

Hawaii is on fire right now.

"fueled by climate change" is just plain incorrect.

Fueled by dry trees and brush due to drought with fires started by lightning strikes is a little closer to the literal truth.

An average temperature rise of 1.5C over the last 50 or 100 years is climate change.

A regional drought lasting 5 or 10 years is...a drought.

Climate change changed the odds of such a drought from 1 in 100,000 to 1 in 25.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/acbce8#...

edit: a paper discussing the connection between vapour pressure (drought) and oil and gas usage.

Ever heard of pine beetles? Looked into what causes them to survive winters that used to control the population?

Seen the effects they have on tree populations and the health of forests?

Yes. Yes.

Yes.

The relatively warm winters that allowed pine beetles to survive (I think it takes 10 days at -20C to kill them; ymmv) lasted a few years. It may still be going on.

The pine beetle is one of the supporting arguments for climate change---irrespective of arguments about cause. And it is not about drought.

So I conclude your comment is not relevant to mine.

I really don't see how this is important, the beirut explosion, the turkish earthquake, just those two things are objectively worse for humanity than climate change has been in the last 100 years.

heat doesn't kill as much as cold does

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254251962...

In fact, excess deaths with additional carbon might lessen deaths overall for humans.

In Europe. World-wide is a very different story.

Heat kills twice as many people as cold in the US, and the US is colder than average. Include Africa and India in your stats and you'll find heat deaths vastly outnumber cold deaths.

There are about 20,000 hypothermia--related deaths a year in Britain, about 25,000--in the USA, 8,000 deaths a year in Canada. There are suggestions that the unofficial number of hypothermia--related deaths is substantially higher, particularity in the elderly.

Some statistical approaches estimate that more than 1,300 deaths per year in the United States are due to extreme heat, compared with about 600 deaths per year in the “underlying and contributing causes” data set shown in Figure 1.

Now do India or Africa, which each contain 1/6th of the world's population.

Just a heads up for anyone thinking of replying, this is a just bait, no point in trying to use reason, it will be ineffective, you're just wasting your time replying.

Contrary to the NOAA, the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics Compressed Mortality Database, which is based on actual death certificates, indicates that roughly twice as many people die of cold in a given year than of heat.

imagine not knowing

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