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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

That’s not really what’s going on, people always complain about the budget but the variability is vastly more than explained by budgets alone. In Alberta 30% more acres burned in 1983 than 2023, while 2020 was one of the lowest years on record.

Wildfires are just highly variable, and 2023 was ideal conditions for them while 2020 wasn’t.

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> while 2020 was one of the lowest years on record

Kind of an interesting data point given that wildfires are often unintentionally started by humans and 2020 was the bulk of the lockdown from COVID.

Except that

1. the vast majority of forest fires in Canada are started by lightning strikes.

2. Canada did not have strict lock-down rules like much of the world; going off in the woods was one of the things you could definitey do

I remember (from videos of VivaFrei, a Canadian citizen) that it was prohibited to walk outside area of few blocks away from your home address. And there were curfews.

If so, going off in the woods was one of the things you could definitey not do.

There was only curfews in Quebec. Really early on when things were more unknown some places put more restrictions on things like going to parks but that lifted pretty fast.

"Lifted pretty fast" is a vague statement. When where these restrictions lifted? Before or after wildfires season?

I was there, and I definitely could do those things.

Actually most are caused by human activity

> Canada did not have strict lock-down rules like much of the world

Canada is big. The covid rules were by province. Quebec in the east had lockdowns, but the fires discussed in the article are in the west.

Highly variable but the trend is increasing. And fires are becoming more costly, evacuations more frequent. More people are living, retiring, in remote places.

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