Smoke Gets In Your Eyes (From The Political Spin Reaction To Canadian Wildfires)

Wildfire smoke from Canada casts a brassy hue on 
St. Albans Bay, Vermont on June 5. Wildfire smoke
from Canada has also gotten political.

 Wildfire smoke from basically all of Canada's provinces continues to drift through much of that nation and the United States, though the fumes are noticeably thinner than the choking pollution we saw in the Northeast last week. 

Now, inevitably, we're choking on the political and climate debate/unpleasantness in the wake of the smoke attack. 

Social media and the "news" stations we deal with amplify and distort what's going on with the fires. 

First of all, few people are saying that climate change "caused" the big fires in Canada, but you'd have a solid argument in saying a warming world made the conditions that created those fires much more likely. 

And no, climate activists or governments or other bad actors didn't spend the first Saturday in June setting the Quebec fires to fuel their anti-fossil fuel activism and supposed contempt for the general population. 

Yes, that conspiracy theory has been going around, along with more outlandish ones like heat causing missiles, or, I don't know, Jewish space lasers setting Quebec ablaze in early June. 

I'll never convince the hard core conspiracy theorists that their creative ideas are wrong, but let's get some of the facts straight on what's been happening.  Yes, some of this is my opinion, some of the facts and causes are open to a little interpretation and second guessing, but the basics are pretty clear.

QUEBEC FIRES

Although fires have been burning in much of Canada all spring and spreading smoke into the United States since at least early May, the thick smoke this month really got people's attention.  Especially since the worst of it hit the nation's media, political and government epicenters, namely New York and Washington DC.

The suddenness of the fires and the severity of the pollution really had people talking. And guessing wrong. 

The Quebec fires really did seem to erupt suddenly, giving rise to those conspiracy theories. One Facebook page that said the Quebec fires were a terrorist attack had more than one million views.  

For the most part, the "terrorist" in Quebec was lightning. 

A strong, but relatively dry cold front swept southward through Quebec on June 2.  This cold front generated lots of thunderstorms.  The downpours associated with the storms were very localized, and really didn't produce all that much rain. Many areas in dry Quebec saw no rain, or only a trace.

But those lightning strikes set countless small fires in trees and underbrush throughout central and western Quebec.

Those fires smoldered overnight Friday.  Then on Saturday, a big gush of very dry, strong north winds swept through Quebec. Those little smoldering fires quickly became raging blazes.

Conspiracy theorists focused on the satellite loop in this link, showing fires seemingly erupting simultaneously in Quebec, as if in a coordinated attack.  But the loop is speeded up, covering nearly a 12 hour period. That's plenty of time for fires to spread and grow. 

This might not be visible on some devices, but here's the loop. If you can't see the image, click on the above link. Then I have more after this. 

IS IT CLIMATE?

The endless debate on what climate had to do with this mess is full of distortions and oversimplifications. 

Climate skeptics note that Canada sees fewer fire starts in recent decades than it did earlier in the 20th century. 

That's actually true. 

According to CBC, the 1980s saw more than 80,000 wildfires start in Canada. Since then, the number each decade has declined, to about 60,000 between 2010 and 2019.

But note we're talking about fire starts, not the size of the blazes. I think the decline is due mainly to public service warnings. We'll never know how many fires didn't begin because somebody made sure all the embers were cold as they left their campsite, or decided not to set their brush pile alight, or concluded it was too dry and windy to set off fireworks. 

The problem is, the fires that are starting tend to be larger. The CBC report notes that acreage burned in Canadian wildfires has slowly increased since the 1970s. 

A warmer world is often a drier world. Sure, there's more intense rain storms. But when the rain stops, evaporation is usually more efficient when it's hotter out. Things dry out more quickly, leading to the conditions that can create out of control wildfires. 

Haze from Canadian wildfire smoke on May 23 obscures a 
Lake Champlain view from South Burlington, Vermont.

Canadian environmental officials also say that climate change is leading to more lightning strikes across much of that nation. That's precisely the problem that started the chaos this month that originated in Quebec. 

Climate change skeptics also point out there used to be epic fires -  much bigger than current blazes - in Canada and the U.S. a century ago. That's also true. But a century ago, you didn't have armies of firefighters and flocks of planes and helicopters dropping tons of water and fire retardant on those wildfires.

To repeat: Climate change did not directly cause the onslaught of fires in Canada. Lightning, human error and probably a few arsonists started the blazes.  There probably would have been a bunch of wildfires in Canada this year with or without climate change.

But the warming world probably made a hot, dry Canadian spring hotter and drier than it otherwise would have been. Which means the fires were probably worse than they otherwise would have been.

It's pretty much impossible to measure how much worse the fires became because of climate change. But the trend line is bad, since we're only going to get hotter. And weather extremes will keep getting more extreme.

ATTENTION GRABBER

As noted, the smoke really captured a lot of attention. It was the first time in memory that so much of the eastern United States was choking on smoke. 

The Washington Post went with this in a June 10 article:

"The East Coast, along with the rest of the planet, has entered a new fire era or - a Stephen Pyne, an emeritus professor at Arizona State University calls it - the "Pyrocene."

That assessment is a little melodramatic, in my opinion. But it does point to the fact that different parts of the nation - and the world for that matter - have increasingly seen a lot more of these smoky days in recent years. 

With Canadian fires not expected to end until at least this fall, we can look forward to more smoky days, too.

But will this change anything? 

I doubt it. 

That millions of people in the eastern U.S. endured dangerous wildfire smoke was the talk of the town. And probably made climate change hit home for more people. But politics is stalemated in a way I can't recall in my 60 years.

It's tribal. It's the "religion" on one side to stop climate change now, or at least mitigate it, by, I don't know, walking out onto highways and blocking traffic. The "religion" on the other side is that climate change activists and experts are trying to take away all our "freedoms," whatever that means. 

The sensible group is probably the minority. We do need to shift away from fossil fuel consumption now if not sooner. If only entrenched interests and lobbyists in certain industries, oil and gas chief among them would get out of the way, we could probably make more progress.

But we don't live in that world, unfortunately.  Which leaves for the younger generation a worse future than there needs to be.