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.
> do not have accurate records of forest fires that occurred 800+ years before
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.
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:
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.
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.
My point is that individuals behave wildly differently to the same stimuli, and therefore your belief that "revealed preferences" put the lie to stated beliefs is specious. Individual humans can believe that a broad ecological collapse is coming and still live their day to day lives in ignorance of this belief. Self-assess honestly and you'll find examples in your own life.
>Individual humans can believe that a broad ecological collapse is coming and still live their day to day lives in ignorance of this belief.
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.