One of the things you get accustomed to living in the Midwest is that things can go on for days, weeks, or months here and it barely receives a mention in the national news. However, if something happens that affects New York or Los Angeles, it becomes front page news. Today’s example of this is the smoke cloud from the Canadian wildfires. Here’s a snippet of a report by Dylan Stableford, Rebecca Corey and Caitlin Dickson at Yahoo:
Smoke from Canadian wildfires continues to trigger air quality alerts in U.S. states, with health officials warning people, especially those in sensitive groups, such as children, the elderly or with respiratory conditions, to limit their time outdoors.
The Federal Aviation Administration issued a ground stop Thursday on all flights bound for New York City’s LaGuardia airport due to poor visibility. The Air Quality Index spiked to “hazardous” levels in Philadelphia, where everyone was urged to stay inside.
Here in Illinois we’ve been experiencing this for weeks. Reuters, the New York Times, the Washington Post and many other outlets have reported it. I’m just linking to Yahoo because it was the first one I found and it’s not gated.
Some are attributing the Canadian wildfires to anthropogenic climate change. If that’s the case it’s pretty far down the chain of causality. Smoke clouds are caused by fires which are caused by human action (setting the fires, for example) and natural causes, e.g. lightning strikes. There have been forest fires as long as there have been forests and there will continue to be forest fires as long as there are forests.
In this particular instance a factor contributing to the fires may be land management which brings me to the topic of this post. Environmentalists come in multiple flavors. One sort of environmentalist believes in action, sometimes drastic action—rebuilding everything, to head off environmental cataclysm caused by human action. Another sort believes in leaving as much of the natural environment pristine as possible. If it’s not obvious that those two flavors are at cross purposes, let me give you an example. It has been estimated that the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere by the Canadian wildfires to date this year exceed the amount released by jet aircraft in the U. S. in a year. The first sort would argue in favor of managing forests better to reduce the amount of undergrowth and thereby reduce wildfire spread. The second sort would oppose such stewardship.
At present the problem is that both of those two flavors are winning and the result is worse than if either view prevailed.
Management is probably the key factor with climate change second. Have been reading on this for a while and I think no one is actually certain what approach to forest management is best. You have different risks with different management styles. It also costs a lot of money and reading Canadian sources it sounds like no one wants to spend enough money. Not many people live where the big fires are happening. (There have always been fires, the issue is very large, out of control fires.)
Canada has been having longer and hotter summers. That means more dead and dry wood.
Steve
steve: Canada has been having longer and hotter summers. That means more dead and dry wood.
An increase in average temperatures of 1°C is estimated to increase the fire hazard and extent of wildfires by about 20%.