In addition to climate change effects, do you think that preventing wildfires for decades contributes at all? My understanding is that managed burns can be useful at preventing the worst fire fires.
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.
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.
managed burns have their place in ecosystems where they're common.
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.
Mountain pine beetles are more of a BC issue. They don't really exist in Ontario. There are native beetles that target eastern white and red pine, but not with such massive pine die offs.
I don't think that's as relevant for these huge regions of remote forest in Canada as it is for the lower 48 of the USA where you have a lot of population density and ranching and farming in the dry areas that historically burned on a regular basis. Maybe someone in rural Ontario knows the full story.
Yeah, the boreal forests super rural/unpopulated bc they're mostly up north and on the shield where it's hard to build. That's said, there is quite a bit of logging lands where the age, arrangement and species makeup think we have fires more often than they're supposed to happen.
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.
What does the middle of nowhere have to do with this? We have technology that allows us to fly. You fly out, conduct controlled burns, cut out bad growth, install firebreaks. This is not an unsolved for process. For whatever reason, it’s not happening and these fires are the result. People really need to stop thinking so one dimensionally about these kinds of problems.
But are they supposed to? For example I have heard it said that in the northeast US (New England, NY, NJ) the forests pretty much evolved around humans (and rarely lightning) burning them periodically to control undergrowth. Is the same true in central Ontario? If not, then nobody is "supposed" to be doing anything? Unless catastrophic massive fire cycles are just a thing that happens every 500 years or whatever in that region...?
It's one thing to claim that bad forest management and not climate change is responsible, but it's consistent with climate change, and there are many areas in the USA that have adopted better fire and forest management practices in recent years and are still burning like crazy in seasons when they historically did not burn.
Yes. A mature society manages its natural resources for the betterment of its people. It doesn't throw its hands up and say "well shit, guess it's that 500 year cycle again". As a meta comment, climate change is this very odd thing on this website. On the one hand, more or less everyone agrees that a vast amount of time and effort should be spent on renewable energy generation (though transmission infrastructure doesn't get mentioned enough) to "combat" climate change. On the other, almost no one thinks about the 2nd and 3rd order effects of climate change and whether or not dropping carbon emissions actually does anything on a timescale that matters. Suppose we did this. Do we think the impact is immediate? Probably not! Therefore, more time should be spent on technologies and means to manage what changes in the climate are already "baked in", so to speak. That's part of why climate change discourse is so tiresome to me. So many people will tell you the end of the world is around the corner, but they sure as hell don't act like it.
What in the world are you talking about? This gets discussed all the time. The impact is not making it even worse at this point. And you talk as if posting on HN was equivalent to starting a coal-fired power plant in your backyard.
Yeah great example of what I’m talking about. Technology people on the technology website don’t seem interested in figuring out how to use technology to mitigate any effects of a changing climate. All they care about is “carbon number go down”, as if turning off power plants magically reduces the amount of fires.
I have a stupid question about seasonal wildfires. I was under the impression that a lot of wildfires occurred because too much brush had built up and natural burns had been foolishly prevented by firefighters. However in the past 10 years, it seems that there are many, yearly, huge wildfires in the same areas.
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.
700 miles away and we have the worse air quality in US. something something about everyone thinks they are safe on climate change until it shows up on your doorstep.
How do you know its not stage 0.5 or stage 3? Genuinely want to understand if this is climate change driven or just apart of the cycle of boreal forest fires that have raged in northern Ontario for centuries.
Its definitely not part of forest fires that have raged for centuries.
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.
> In the past thousand years, we have never seen a single season where 4% of Canada's entire forest area burned down
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.
They don’t. If people actually believed this stuff they’d be learning how to hunt, get good with long guns, filter their own water etc. Revealed preferences always smash headlong into one’s imagination.
I don’t follow. If I believed the global climate was going to collapse imminently (it’s not) I would have a very specific to do list and would be spending every hour of my free time preparing for this event. Is your point that people performatively engage in catastrophizing? In which case, I agree.
It has been pretty bad here in Michigan. Like a heavy smelly fog all day and night. Thick enough to look directly at the sun even. Going outside and not knowing about it would make you think someone was burning a dozen brush heaps next door.
Minneapolis is about 190nm south of the fires going on in the BWCA - with help of the Canadian fires just North of Ely. Smoke had visibility at our local (KFCM) airfield at 1 mile this morning from the smoke. IFR. I got to wonder if this is going to impact the Oshkosh airshow next week... as what we would travel up is not up for that type of visibility.
In BC when they were at their worst the sky was dark yellow and the sun was a very dark blood red. It was like something I’d never seen before. Think the light level in Seattle during an extremely overcast day with a low ceiling, but everything you look at has been coloured yellow by the sunlight passing through the smoke. It looks a lot like photos from the various Mars missions.
As a Canuck, let me say sorry for having so many trees and not enough firefighters, for a second year in a row... at least we have to huff this stuff in before it gets to you, right?
Many of these fires are not effectively manageable by people when they get out of control (which can happen easily since they are in very remote areas), and there are a lot of them. They are also spread out over a huge geographical area. The scale is unimaginable so it isn’t a staffing problem.
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.
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.
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?
The only good news is it will envelop D.C. today. Fitting to force them to smell their passive dismissal of the global catastrophe of climate change.
In addition to climate change effects, do you think that preventing wildfires for decades contributes at all? My understanding is that managed burns can be useful at preventing the worst fire fires.
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.
The answer is: It's complicated
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.
managed burns have their place in ecosystems where they're common.
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.
Mountain pine beetles are more of a BC issue. They don't really exist in Ontario. There are native beetles that target eastern white and red pine, but not with such massive pine die offs.
I don't think that's as relevant for these huge regions of remote forest in Canada as it is for the lower 48 of the USA where you have a lot of population density and ranching and farming in the dry areas that historically burned on a regular basis. Maybe someone in rural Ontario knows the full story.
Yeah, the boreal forests super rural/unpopulated bc they're mostly up north and on the shield where it's hard to build. That's said, there is quite a bit of logging lands where the age, arrangement and species makeup think we have fires more often than they're supposed to happen.
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.
Thank you for sharing!
Let us each examine and repair our own, personal bond with Nature.
[flagged]
Your post has nothing to do with reality.
Not your reality, clearly.
> Canada’s complete and total refusal to conduct proper forest management
Care to say more? Have they been suppressing fires in the forest way out in the middle of nowhere for decades?
What does the middle of nowhere have to do with this? We have technology that allows us to fly. You fly out, conduct controlled burns, cut out bad growth, install firebreaks. This is not an unsolved for process. For whatever reason, it’s not happening and these fires are the result. People really need to stop thinking so one dimensionally about these kinds of problems.
But are they supposed to? For example I have heard it said that in the northeast US (New England, NY, NJ) the forests pretty much evolved around humans (and rarely lightning) burning them periodically to control undergrowth. Is the same true in central Ontario? If not, then nobody is "supposed" to be doing anything? Unless catastrophic massive fire cycles are just a thing that happens every 500 years or whatever in that region...?
It's one thing to claim that bad forest management and not climate change is responsible, but it's consistent with climate change, and there are many areas in the USA that have adopted better fire and forest management practices in recent years and are still burning like crazy in seasons when they historically did not burn.
Yes. A mature society manages its natural resources for the betterment of its people. It doesn't throw its hands up and say "well shit, guess it's that 500 year cycle again". As a meta comment, climate change is this very odd thing on this website. On the one hand, more or less everyone agrees that a vast amount of time and effort should be spent on renewable energy generation (though transmission infrastructure doesn't get mentioned enough) to "combat" climate change. On the other, almost no one thinks about the 2nd and 3rd order effects of climate change and whether or not dropping carbon emissions actually does anything on a timescale that matters. Suppose we did this. Do we think the impact is immediate? Probably not! Therefore, more time should be spent on technologies and means to manage what changes in the climate are already "baked in", so to speak. That's part of why climate change discourse is so tiresome to me. So many people will tell you the end of the world is around the corner, but they sure as hell don't act like it.
What in the world are you talking about? This gets discussed all the time. The impact is not making it even worse at this point. And you talk as if posting on HN was equivalent to starting a coal-fired power plant in your backyard.
Yeah great example of what I’m talking about. Technology people on the technology website don’t seem interested in figuring out how to use technology to mitigate any effects of a changing climate. All they care about is “carbon number go down”, as if turning off power plants magically reduces the amount of fires.
They're supposed to go into forests in the middle of nowhere and do controlled burns.
And no, 37degC does not cause wood to spontaneously combust. This is just gross negligence, same thing that happens in California.
I have a stupid question about seasonal wildfires. I was under the impression that a lot of wildfires occurred because too much brush had built up and natural burns had been foolishly prevented by firefighters. However in the past 10 years, it seems that there are many, yearly, huge wildfires in the same areas.
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.
What do you mean by same area?
Canada has millions of sq km of forest. Lytton is 700km west of Jasper, which is 2000km west of Thunder Bay.
700 miles away and we have the worse air quality in US. something something about everyone thinks they are safe on climate change until it shows up on your doorstep.
this is stage 1 of the ecological collapse.
it's gonna get a lot worse, and sooner than people think.
Well the smoke issue is going to get better, because the trees burn down once, and may not be able to grow again in the new environment.
How do you know its not stage 0.5 or stage 3? Genuinely want to understand if this is climate change driven or just apart of the cycle of boreal forest fires that have raged in northern Ontario for centuries.
Its definitely not part of forest fires that have raged for centuries.
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.
> In the past thousand years, we have never seen a single season where 4% of Canada's entire forest area burned down
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-...
They don’t. If people actually believed this stuff they’d be learning how to hunt, get good with long guns, filter their own water etc. Revealed preferences always smash headlong into one’s imagination.
Underneath your sneering is a failure to understand how humans tend to act.
I don’t follow. If I believed the global climate was going to collapse imminently (it’s not) I would have a very specific to do list and would be spending every hour of my free time preparing for this event. Is your point that people performatively engage in catastrophizing? In which case, I agree.
It has been pretty bad here in Michigan. Like a heavy smelly fog all day and night. Thick enough to look directly at the sun even. Going outside and not knowing about it would make you think someone was burning a dozen brush heaps next door.
Minneapolis is about 190nm south of the fires going on in the BWCA - with help of the Canadian fires just North of Ely. Smoke had visibility at our local (KFCM) airfield at 1 mile this morning from the smoke. IFR. I got to wonder if this is going to impact the Oshkosh airshow next week... as what we would travel up is not up for that type of visibility.
Canadian here. Sky looked like Breaking Bad in real life.
Also, before this week, I'd never seen the weather app show a yellow map before for air quality.
Eastern Canada, perhaps? Because B.C. wildfires have made Washington maps go to "very unhealthy" (AQI 201-300), so I'm sure B.C. was above that.
(I'm not sure what "yellow" means where you're at. It's "healthy" according to https://www.airnow.gov/aqi/aqi-basics/).
In BC when they were at their worst the sky was dark yellow and the sun was a very dark blood red. It was like something I’d never seen before. Think the light level in Seattle during an extremely overcast day with a low ceiling, but everything you look at has been coloured yellow by the sunlight passing through the smoke. It looks a lot like photos from the various Mars missions.
And three years ago it was Washington and Oregon fires that were making the air unbreathable in Vancouver
That kind of international cooperation between the US and other countries is something we just don’t see anymore.
Also competition at the same time.
Canada normally surpasses the per-capita carbon emissions of the US. Now, they’re setting records ablaze and further cementing their lead.
As a Canuck, let me say sorry for having so many trees and not enough firefighters, for a second year in a row... at least we have to huff this stuff in before it gets to you, right?
Many of these fires are not effectively manageable by people when they get out of control (which can happen easily since they are in very remote areas), and there are a lot of them. They are also spread out over a huge geographical area. The scale is unimaginable so it isn’t a staffing problem.
dont debase yourself. that is not something to apologize for
[dead]
More hybrid war
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.
Ffs, just the dumbest comments in this thread.
Jumping from “caused by man” to arson is weapons grade stupidity.
Countries use a scale of wildfire risk
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.
There are many parts of Canada under no fire restrictions at the moment.
Accidental or even negligent does not automatically mean arson. Jumping to that conclusion is silly.
Are this areas burning?
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?
https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/en/interactive-map?selectedDat...