[alexk307]

> 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-...

[pvaldes]

> 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.

[alexk307]

Right - and that data does not suggest anything close to what OP was saying.

[1] https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/10.1139/cjfr-2024-0216 [2] https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecs2...

[aurelius_v]

They actually do. You just don't know how to read the data properly.

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.