800 Canadian wildfires burning as air quality alerts extend to US
bbc.com
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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.
That's something to note : Jack pine which is fire adapted doesn't mature for a pretty long time. The boreal forest is meant to have massive powerful forest fires that clear stands completely but they're supposed to happen on a timeline of like 80+ years.
I'm not as plugged in as I used to be, but I recall some folks worried about more birch taking up space up north bc of how often burns were happening and birch loves to form massive stands when the floor clears.
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.
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’m not an expert in forestry. It it doesn’t seem feasible that Canada was every really doing any large scale forest fire prevention simply due to the scale of the country and forests within it.
it's gonna get a lot worse, and sooner than people think.
This sentence is contradictory. How could one believe a particular thing, and then intentionally live in ignorance of this thing?
>Self-assess honestly and you'll find examples in your own life.
Okay. I did the assessment. I found that when I have deeply held beliefs I live my life according to those beliefs. For example, I strongly believe that learning new languages is the most efficient way to maintain neuroplasticity, for a number of reasons. Therefore, I spend 30-60 minutes each day studying languages. Do you have examples in your own life where you believe something to be true, but then intentionally don't live your life as if that thing were true?
In the past thousand years, we have never seen a single season where 4% of Canada's entire forest area burned down. The 2023 season torched over 15 million hectares, completely shattering the natural baseline. It's entirely unprecedented.
The line about this being normal sounds like the talking points climate skeptic grifters like Bjorn Lomborg use to breed doubt. Claiming global fires of this scale are normal is a totally dishonest stat. He even claims they are decreasing, but that decline is just because African grasslands are disappearing due to agriculture and urbanization.
When you normalize the data and isolate forests, fire-related tree cover loss in boreal forests has been accelerating by an average of 160,100 hectares per year over the last two decades. Globally, forest fires burn twice as much tree cover today as they did 20 years ago.
I'm just mentioning this in case you are only hearing the louder, skeptic side on social media.
I'm no tree hugger. I've started data centers in the telco and crypto space and have provided seed financing for natural resource mining projects, and I will continue to do so knowing that it's a positive for society. But I don't believe in being dishonest about where the data says the planet is headed.
Anyone who grew up in Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, or New York in the 70s, 80s, and 90s knows smelling smoke and seeing red skies in the summer was not common, unless you were out at camp deep in the woods. It just didn't happen. For kids growing up in the 2020s, it's just a normal part of summer in the city.
You cannot possibly know this, you do not have accurate records of forrest fires that occurred 800+ years before Canada was even founded. Wildfires abide by power law distributions [1][2] meaning that enormous outliers like the one in 2023 (and maybe even this year) are not unexpected with a long fat tail distribution. Wildfires in Canada have been trending down in terms of number of fires, but the fires are burning more area [3].
> When you normalize the data and isolate forests
Here's the past two decades of forrest fires globally [4], very hard to spot a significant trend. I'm not arguing that there isn't a problem here and that climate change isn't playing at least some role in it, but to attribute this entirely to climate change is misguided and not supported by literature.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law [2] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0500880102 [3] https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/en/fire-history [4] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/area-burned-wildfires-by-...
In fact we have incomplete, but detailed, records since 7000 years ago. The remains of 2000 Yo trunks can be found on swamps and peat bogs. Ancient wildfires left marks on the grow rings, that had been read for scientists since generations.
Dendrochronology and dendroclimatology, two entire science fields, had been created around this.
[1] https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/10.1139/cjfr-2024-0216 [2] https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecs2...
Here are some papers that might help you understand it better:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1305069110 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38934256/
BTW, the researcher you quoted, Justin Waito, explicitly warns against reading his historical data to mean modern fires are normal. He concluded that modern temperature increases are driving fire frequency to levels higher than anything seen in the last two millennia. Here is one of his papers on that:
https://winnspace.uwinnipeg.ca/handle/10680/1749
You can believe the consensus of the vast majority of scientists (99%) who have collectively spent 10's of millions of hours researching this space, or you can pretend you know better.
Also, before this week, I'd never seen the weather app show a yellow map before for air quality.
(I'm not sure what "yellow" means where you're at. It's "healthy" according to https://www.airnow.gov/aqi/aqi-basics/).
Canada normally surpasses the per-capita carbon emissions of the US. Now, they’re setting records ablaze and further cementing their lead.
Why doesn't the brush get burned down? ie, why is there not a Canadian wildfire every 5-10 years? Why yearly? Is it different locations? Does dry bush just accumulate that quickly? I'm aware that global warming is a factor, but if there's less to burn I'd think that warmer temperatures eventually hit a wall.
Canada has millions of sq km of forest. Lytton is 700km west of Jasper, which is 2000km west of Thunder Bay.
1) People promoting the cattle invading natural areas as a solution, often omit that this means the slow death of the forest.
When the cattle is allowed to enter in a forest, from this point on, no tree sapling will survive. The ecological regeneration is permanently damaged and the forest recedes and turns into an open area with a few isolated trees. With the climate change accelerating, and each new tree counting, this is bad news for us.
2) They also ignore that wild herbivores and insects also eat (a lot of) dry plants.
Biologists have discovered than, under some circumstances, the role of ants in that sense can be more relevant than the role of deer.
3) They forget also that brush is removed by fungus all the time, turning woody stuff into a spongy matter that accumulates water.
A healthy forest can sustain more Kg of soil roundworms than Kg of deer. Most people ignore this and follow only the loudest voices
TV programs invariably, each single time, will show somebody bitterly claiming that "the evil ecologists don't allow locals to remove dead wood". This programs are basically justifying the arsonists. They feed on drama, and never, ever, no way, will interview anybody calmly explaining that there is a good reason for that: After a while, dead wood means fertile soil (= CO2 storage) and water storage. This protects us from both wildfires and climate change.
Both problems should have priority over the desire of farmers to increase its patrimony in 50 sheep plus, by invading natural areas and stealing its plants.
About the fires starting to burn yearly, take in mind that the use of the soil has changed. This is not a forest anymore. Farmers are known to use fire routinely to "regenerate" pastures. When they earn rights to manage new place as they please, the frequency of wildfires will typically increase, even if they are less serious. Is a vicious circle.
Same pattern as in France or Greece, with a wildfire starting at just 50 Km of Oslo, but with the smoke aiming directly to choke the capital, like in Paris, or Athens in recent years.
Meanwhile Russian is growing desperate after Ukraine has been targeting its oil tankers one by one in the last month. Germany, Finland, Swedden or Poland should be extra careful in the next weeks.
July 6 2026 provoked wildfire in Dorsey UK.
July 7 2026 Prime Minister Carney announced military assistance for Ukraine, including $475 million for the purchase of ammunition, nearly $400 million to build 35 Canadian-made armoured vehicles, and $50 million to provide critical technology and engineering equipment.
July 10 2026 Several wildfires in UK that week. Arsonist woman detained later. Zelensky meets Graham and US implement sanctions against Russia.
July 11 2026. Lindsey Graham dies.
July 12 2026. Large wildfire starts in Ontario. One of the biggest recorded in the area. In two days there will be 180 wildfires active in Ontario.
July 13 2026. Macron meets Zelensky. A 19 Yo arsonist starts a wildfire in Fontainebleu forest near Paris the same day (It has reignited several times since that). July 14 2026. France will allow Ukraine to produce French-made cruise missiles, precision guided bombs and air defense interceptor missiles
July 15 2026. Norway will join the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine. Holding Russia accountable for crimes committed against Ukraine is a key priority for the Norwegian Government. Two days later: Largest Wildfire in the modern history of Norway starts near Oslo
July 16 2026. Starmer meets Zelensky. Wildfire in Scotland.
Wildfires starting or active in: California, Minnesota, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Texas and Florida between July 7 and July 18.
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.
Jumping from “caused by man” to arson is weapons grade stupidity.
If there is a clear prohibition to use fire in some location today, because strong winds and low humidity create high risk of wildfires; and somebody still ignores the prohibition and start fire in five different locations in the worse conditions of the year, knowing well that every firefighter is busy yet on one of the other 800 wildfires active, would you still classify that as "accidental"?
Sometimes things are exactly what they seem to be. One barbecue that goes rogue with green level is an accident. With red level conditions, is a crime.
Accidental or even negligent does not automatically mean arson. Jumping to that conclusion is silly.
Accidents are rare, and the fires in clusters and other common patterns are typical
One alleged arsonist detained in Galicia (Spain), with a bag full of stuff. After several wildfires stated to appear near his village in the last two weeks he was watched a morning moving into two locations that soon started to burn. Near houses of course. Why not?