| 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. |
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-...