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]]>“We’re now stuck living with air pollution concentrations that are the dangerous ghost of the fossil fuels burned since the Industrial Revolution. Even countries that have earnestly spent decades cleaning up their air can’t escape these ghosts and the shorter and sicker lives that they deliver.”
The smoky skies stretched across North America, dipping deep into the United States. Where I live by Lake Ontario, smoke appeared as a fog bank over the water, obscuring the far shore and lake freighters plying its waters.
My allergies, not usually severe, spiked. I couldn’t shake off a nagging cough that worsened as the day progressed. At night, I was constantly clearing my throat. I had never experienced anything like it, even in previous fire season summers when you could smell and taste the smoke in the air.
Environment and Climate Change Canada, in a July news release, described how climate scientists had started using an extreme weather event attribution system to differentiate extreme weather events. Here are four 2025 examples from collected Canadian data:
The Canadian site stated that extreme climate-related weather events were becoming more frequent, severe, and costly in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023, ranking in the top 10 years based on insurance claims, surpassed only by the 2016 Fort McMurray fires, the 2013 flooding in Calgary and Toronto, and the 1998 Quebec ice storm.
In another study from World Weather Attribution, Climate Central and the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center, human-causes were attributed to an increasing number of global heatwaves in the period from May 1, 2024, to May 1, 2025. The report’s key findings include:
Four billion people representing almost half the world’s population saw at least 30 days of extreme heat, hotter than 90% of temperatures observed in their locations when compared to the period from 1991 to 2020.
195 countries or territories reported double the number of extreme heat days when compared to the previous period described in the previous point.
All of the 67 extreme heat events described that included record-breaking temperatures were attributed to human-caused climate change.
But it is the wildfires that stand out even more, attributed largely to the drying out of the North American continent and rising atmospheric temperatures. While wildfires have always been with us, those we experienced this summer have been growing in size, ferocity and spread.
Where 2020 was the worst year for wildfires in California, the Palisades and Eaton Fires in January 2025 brought back vivid memories of what happened in Paradise five years earlier. The 2025 fires happened within the perimeter of Greater Los Angeles, leading to the evacuation of more than 200,000, 440 excess deaths, and 18,0000 structures consumed by the flames. These were historically high numbers in every respect. California in 2025 wasn’t alone. Wildfires burned vast areas of Oregon, Washington and Colorado as well.
The extreme heat events felt in Canada didn’t quite compare to what parts of California experienced, with the entire state experiencing temperatures 1.66 °C (3 °F) higher than the average for the past century and Death Valley, the nation’s hot spot, reaching highs of 54°C (130 °F).
In Texas, Austin saw a heatwave lasting several days with temperatures of 37.8 °C (100 °F). Houston added an extra month to its calendar with temperatures exceeding 35°C (95 °F).
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), the keepers of the Doomsday Clock, predicted a significant increase in heat waves and excessive heat events throughout the rest of the century. In a recent comment, UCS scientists stated that “This summer could very well be the coolest of the rest of our lives,” noting that global average temperatures based on current human-caused heating will raise atmospheric temperatures from 2 to over 3 °C (3.6 to 5.4 °F) by 2100.
Although 2 and 3 sound like small incremental changes, across the planet, the implications of these types of temperature increases will disrupt the natural world, causing:
The ghosts of Christmas future lie ahead if we cannot address the human causes of climate change in the present. It matters little that the Trump administration is lifting the requirements for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to collect emissions data from carbon polluters. Putting on environmental blinders won’t change the outcome.
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]]>Manitoba isn’t alone in facing drought-induced wildfires. Northern Saskatchewan is ablaze. Northern Alberta is on fire while parts of the interior of Northern British Columbia are facing similar conflagrations.
For climate change skeptics, wildfire is seen as a normal occurrence. The truth, however, is far different. These latest fires are a growing trend, and climate change is seen as the key driver.
How so? Climate change in the Western half of North America has led to higher temperatures and long dry spell periods, even droughts. As each above-normal warm season follows another, we are witnessing temperatures creeping upward. Parts of Manitoba and Saskatchewan have recently experienced temperatures 6.6 to 13.5 Celsius (11.8 to 24.3 Fahrenheit) higher than normal. Northern Manitoba recorded a daytime high of 33 degrees Celsius (over 91 degrees Fahrenheit) at the end of this month, an unprecedented temperature. Climatologists link this increased heat to climate change, stating it is five times more likely because of anthropogenically caused warming.
Warming temperatures increase evapotranspiration (accelerated evaporation and transpiration from forests, soil and other vegetation). The governments of Saskatchewan and Manitoba have currently defined conditions across the two provinces as abnormally dry or in moderate drought.
Weather isn’t the same as climate change, but its patterns certainly exacerbate the current conditions. The two provinces have been locked into the heat by a persistent high-pressure system that stalled over Central Canada, preventing rain and cooler temperatures from moving in. Along with the heat and lack of rain have come high winds to add to the wildfire threat. Add to this thunderstorms with no rain but lots of lightning, and the fire threat gets even worse.
As in California and other parts of the Southwestern United States, the wildfire season in Western Canada is coming earlier each year and lasting longer. These conditions reflect an overall drying out of the western half of North America while the eastern half is getting wetter.
The health consequences of these wildfires cannot be understated. The effect on people includes exposure to fine particulate matter, carbon monoxide, and volatile organic compounds that get inhaled, contributing to rising levels of asthma, bronchitis, COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease), cardiovascular disease, including heart attacks and strokes, and premature deaths.
Other health effects from wildfire smoke include reproductive and developmental impacts, with low birth weights associated with exposure. As for mental health impacts, wildfires can be devastating, with depression and suicidal thoughts rising in populations exposed to them months and years later, a manifestation of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder).
Humans aren’t the only life that suffer from wildfire smoke. Livestock and pets exhibit the same health effects. Wildlife isn’t just a victim of wildfire smoke. There is also the loss of habitat.
Other than reacting to these wildfire outbreaks, what can we do? Here are suggestions:
Various provinces operate their own FireSmart programs. FireSmart Canada is the national version that first started in 1993. It offers communities prone to wildfire threats, hazard assessment audits, mitigation plans, and teaches how to live with wildfire risk. Yet even with all the education, workshops and guidelines, humans remain unprepared when wildfires break out. Some stay and others flee. Every year there are needless deaths.
Climate change scientists talk about being a frog in a pot of water slowly being heated on a stovetop. The frog can jump out before the water gets too hot, or boil to death. Our wildfire experiences to date make it seem like we are no smarter than that boiled frog.
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]]>The post Why Petrochemical Dependency Is Making Our Houses Burn Down appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>The British Columbia Wildfire Service has published a guide for homeowners. It was created because the Canadian province, like California, has endured increasingly long fire seasons. Wildland-urban fires are more frequent today than ever before because municipalities are encroaching on wildlands.
The BC recommendations talk about removing combustible materials from around the perimeter of homes establishing a fire break of 1.5 metres (5 feet) that is free of both non-vegetation and vegetation combustibles. It doesn’t talk about what is in the house or even about the car and the clothes you wear.
In the most recent Los Angeles area wildfire-urban conflagrations, over 12,000 structures including thousands of homes have burned to the ground. One key reason for the destruction can be found in materials used within and around the buildings.
Our combustibility is not limited to where and in what we live. I did an inventory of what I was wearing two days ago. I had on underwear and a sweatshirt with tags that warned me not to get too close to a flame.
That’s right!
Why? Because my clothes were made from petroleum and other synthetics. I concluded I was as likely to go up in smoke as some of the furnishings in my apartment if a fire were to erupt.
You see, today, modern homes are toxic plastic firetraps. Plastic and synthetics ignite faster and burn hotter than natural materials like wood, cotton and wool. Most plastics ignite between 300 and 500 Celsius (572 to 932 Fahrenheit). Synthetic materials like nylon ignite at temperatures slightly higher than plastic.
The smoke that plastic and synthetics produce contains toxic chemicals. For example, when PVC pipe used for plumbing in modern homes instead of copper ignites at around 420 Celsius, it releases a combination of hydrogen chloride (an irritant), carbon monoxide (an asphyxiant), chlorine-based gasses (poisonous), benzene, formaldehyde and many other dangerous chemicals.
Studies show that homes containing lots of these combustible materials are susceptible to flashover fires that burn six times faster than homes made and furnished using traditional natural materials.
Another reason why our homes are susceptible to burning to the ground is municipal zoning. Zoning rules for buildings contribute to firestorms like the ones Los Angeles has seen in its higher-density neighbourhoods in the last month.
Proximity facilitates rapid fire spread. When one structure catches fire, nearby ones overheat. The radiant heat from one causes combustible materials in the next house to ignite. No spark or ember is needed. Plastics and synthetics have without a spark or ember. Vegetation planted around the house that is not fire-resistant becomes a combustion source.
The intrusion of homes into wild areas called wildland-urban interfaces (WUIs) makes them more susceptible to wildfires particularly when you add all that plastic and petroleum-based ignitables.
The WUI in both Canada and the United continues to grow.
A U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service 2018 report stated the WUI grew 41% between 1990 and 2010 with the number of new houses from 30.8 to 43.4 million and 33% in land area from 581,000 to 770,000 square kilometres. Within the perimeter of wildfires that broke out in the U.S. between 1990 and 2015, there were 286,000 houses in 2010 versus 177,000 in 1990. These numbers continue to rise making even more houses susceptible to WUI wildfires.
In Canada, the 2016 wildfire that enveloped Fort McMurray, a city that largely is located in a WUI, destroyed nearly 1,600 structures and forced the evacuation of 80,000 residents. In 2021, the town of Lytton, BC, burned down within minutes a wildfire swept through it. The 2023 wildfire season was described as the most destructive the country had ever seen with fires burning out smaller urban centres located within WUIs. The town of Jasper, a picturesque tourist destination, witnessed a wildfire in 2024 that destroyed much of it. Jasper is located in the middle of a national park which is the definition of a WUI.
The National Research Council of Canada has published a guide for WUI fires and through an infrastructure initiative has developed climate-resilient building guidelines. When I saw guidelines for building homes in a WUI zone I was taken aback. Nevertheless, these guidelines provide building standards and a code for construction within proximity to a WUI. What’s included are exterior and foundation walls, roofing materials, doors, windows, decks, balconies and exterior additions. What the guidelines don’t tell you is what to do on the inside. The life safety tips section of the guidelines doesn’t talk about couches covered in synthetic materials, deck chairs and backyard decks made from plastic-looking wood materials.
We need to pay attention to wildfires more than ever as the planet sees atmospheric median temperatures continue to rise. Climate change in the 21st century has its own rules. Climate extremes like droughts that cause wildfires to proliferate are becoming the norm.
The people of Los Angeles have been through a hellish experience. Even then they will rebuild just as are the people in Fort McMurray, Lytton and Jasper. Will they be more aware of the stuff they have and their surroundings and the contribution each has made to their losses?
The lives lost are a tragedy. The stuff lost can be replaced but please, if you don’t have to, don’t build near or within a WUI and make the effort to end your petroleum addiction or you and your house could go up in smoke once again.
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]]>California has not been alone when facing devastating wildfires. Every year the state has a fire season. Similar wildfire events have happened in Canada in recent years, first in Fort McMurray, Alberta in 2016 with much of the city burned out, and then in Lytton, British Columbia in 2021 where a town burned down in minutes. Both examples are fires associated with climate change-created conditions and forewarning for what we are witnessing in LA right now.
LA is the perfect storm for wildfires. It is located in California’s dry climate zone, an area that has a Mediterranean climate, dry hot summers, and mild wet winters. LA’s recent weather history shows it experienced before May 2024, a period of precipitation well above normal which caused flooding. Since then the city has experienced drought recording only 4.1 millimetres (0.16 inches) of rain over 8 months. The period of heavy rain caused the hills around LA to grow green largely because of chaparral which is native to Southern Oregon, California and Baja California.
Chaparral is an evergreen shrub that features waxy and resinous leaves. It easily burns and is well-adapted to fire which doesn’t kill it. Chaparral is well adapted to California’s natural fire cycles of between 30 and 150 years. Recent decades have seen the intervals between chaparral fires get shorter with hotter and drier summers to blame along with many human factors including:
Just how much of this human activity is to blame? A 2017 research article that appeared in Biological Sciences, a journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, noted then that,
“Humans have vastly expanded the spatial and seasonal “fire niche” in the…United States, accounting for 84% of all wildfires and 44% of total area burned.”
California is no exception with chaparral, human-aided fires erupting. A Washington Post article, appearing on January 11, 2025, notes that “more than 70% of the burned areas in Los Angeles County fell in zones the state determined had a very high fire risk.” And yet these were heavily built-up urban areas.
The burning of LA has occurred despite efforts by the city and state to build the resources needed to stop wildfires before they get out of control. It has occurred despite the state’s requirements and regulations for houses built in high-fire risk zones to create combustible vegetation buffers around them. It has happened despite the billions the state and city have spent to clear out dead wood and debris from hillsides and forests. It has happened despite California having the largest firefighting force of any state in the United States.
Humans never seem to learn. The desire to move closer to nature produced the conditions for the 2018, Paradise, California wildfire that burned that community to the ground. Eugene Linden, a writer for The Guardian, in March 2022 wrote Americans have not learned from events like the Paradise fire, noting that “since the climate risks surfaced, millions of people have moved into wildfire zones in the US west.”
Either the lessons aren’t being taught or the students haven’t learned. Encroachment into nature is a smoking gun that leads to the type of wildfire destruction we are seeing in LA right now. This fire likely originated in chaparral-covered hills near homes built to be close to nature. It may have started when Santa Ana winds blew down a utility pole causing the wires to spark and begin a fire that soon found lots of stuff to fuel it to the LA suburbs of Altadena and Pacific Palisades and in the process destroying thousands of structures and killing 24 to date.
Fire risk in California isn’t lessening according to research. A letter that appeared in the October 24, 2024 edition of the Journal Environmental Research describes these hotter and longer droughts as critical drivers in accelerating burned areas throughout the Western U.S. including California. Not only will there be more of them but they will be even more intense. California is a “fire regime” that is identifiable through historical records. These are zones where communities should be a “no-go.” Yet after a wildfire occurs in one of them humans return to rebuild. This is insane group behaviour that will continue to make managing wildfires in Southern California difficult in the 21st century.
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]]>Conspiracy theorists looking at the wildfires that have broken out across Canada raise suspicions about the timing of these outbreaks. They spout similar statements to those made by politicians like the two Premiers mentioned above.
Climatologists have a very different explanation. Much of Canada’s north this spring has experienced higher-than-normal temperatures. Warmer air with temperatures closer to what we see in mid to late summer leads to drier conditions. Drier conditions feed wildfires.
The link between climate change and wildfire outbreaks is well established. That’s why every summer we see headlines in Canada that describe fires burning tens of thousands of hectares of forest, threatening mostly adjacent remote and suburban communities. The fires that swept through Fort McMurray, Alberta, a few years ago are a case in point.
Wildfires accelerate climate change when they release megatons of carbon into the atmosphere coming from burned trees, forest-floor tinder, and dried-out peat deposits. It is nature’s equivalent to our burning of fossil fuels and the amount entering the atmosphere this spring will endure for decades into the future. We are stuck with it.
Get used to the term described above. The Canadian Forest Service concluded after a recent study that “the future is smoky.” Fire seasons will get longer, start earlier, and contribute more to global warming than in the past. The combination of warmer weather, drier conditions, and tinder-dry forests represent a triple threat.
Smokier air is unhealthy air. Here in Eastern North America over the last few days, we have all been exposed to the reality of fire weather. In Toronto schools, outdoor activities have been curtailed. Children in daycare, rather than playing outside, are being confined indoors. When I went out yesterday to run errands, I wore a mask, something I seldom resorted to outdoors during the height of COVID-19’s spread. This is a bizarre reversal of behaviours and conditions during the pandemic of the last three-plus years.
Other studies by the Canadian Forest Service predict a 50% increase in fire weather conditions in Western Canada in the coming decades and a 200 to 300% increase in Eastern Canada. Fire weather is expected to burn twice the average area burned in recent years by the end of this century. For Canadians who have always been proud of our pristine natural landscapes, these predictions may come as a shock.
Unfortunately, the country is not alone in experiencing fire weather. Australia, the United States, Russia, and the European Union are all seeing warmer temperatures, both day and night, with drier summers which means an expanded fire weather season, already in the present, will be worse in the future.
What this all means is that mitigating climate change will be that much harder as nature adds to the human contributions responsible for global warming. As of a little more than a week ago, the latest measurement of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had reached 424.64 parts per million, an increase of 50% over values obtained from samplings trapped in Antarctic ice cores dating back to pre-Industrial Age times.
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]]>What began more than a decade ago as an effort to enjoy living downtown after we sold our suburban home, has turned out not to be our Eden. The city today is congested, noisy, and increasingly showing signs that it is losing its way. Condominium developers are running roughshod over neighbourhoods as provincial oversight interferes with local urban planning. Instead of 15-storey-limited multi-unit residential buildings, Toronto is sprouting Manhattan-style 40 and 50-storey structures.
Green space, fought so hard for, is vanishing. Condos are replacing single-family, semi-detached and row housing. For-rent apartments are being rezoned to allow developers to tear them down, evict tenants, and erect condominiums in their stead. The cost of homes and rent is getting out of reach for an increasing number.
The construction is everywhere with sky cranes dominating the landscape. Noise and dust are everywhere joined with the pollution from increasing street-level traffic. The city’s roads are crumbling under the volume. Public transit is inadequate. New mass transit is delayed and over budget.
So we are escaping to a town called Oakville, about 50 kilometres (31 miles) to the west. But even Oakville, which sits on the shores of Lake Ontario, one of the five Great Lakes of North America, cannot escape the reality of climate change impacts.
Wildfires over this spring are burning the forests of Canada by the thousands of square kilometres. And the smoke from them in this enormous country of ours is seeping into urban areas and casting a pall over the Great Lakes region and even further south to New York City (see EarthCam image below).
Toronto’s air is yellow-brown. Today, the sun is fighting to get through the smokey layer of pollution hanging above us. In the town of Oakville where we were yesterday, it reeked of wood smoke. It was so pervasive that it crept into our new building halls. The only way to escape the smell was to seal ourselves in our soon-to-be new home while running the air conditioning.
What has this onset of smoke to do with climate change? Everything say climate scientists who have warned of this in their past forecasts.
The condition of Canada’s boreal forest is increasingly being subjected to rising atmospheric temperatures with unabated warming causing soil and forest litter to dry out. Rainfall is less predictable with long periods of drought followed by deluges putting trees under increasing environmental stress. Non-native insects continue to move poleward from temperate latitudes into northern forests bringing with them infestations that lead to massive tree die-offs. The dead trees add to the tinder-dry forest debris and soil to create perfect conditions for wildfires. It’s as if California, which experienced its hellish series of wildfires in recent years, has moved north of the American border into Canada.
Today, while walking outside wearing a mask, something I did only indoors during the COVID-19 pandemic, the air seemed unnaturally cooler than normal. It made me think about those who want to inject aerosols into the atmosphere as a geoengineering experiment to drive the thermometer down. Well, what we are witnessing is nature’s version with megatons of carbon particulate matter and other aerosols filling Canadian skies. Maybe the temperature today felt cooler than normal because the sun couldn’t cut through the yellowish haze to warm temperatures at ground level. Or maybe it’s because a cold front has moved down from the Arctic to temporarily lower local thermostats, but one thing is for sure, some consequences go beyond burned-out forests and tainted air.
The smoke represents an increased risk for asthma in young and old, lung and heart disease, and cancer. Millions are being subjected to anthropogenic climate change coming to us in fiery reds and smoggy yellows. The smoke is even affecting the unborn because the particles are so tiny they can cross the placental barrier.
In the past few weeks as the pandemic alerts were lifted, I had stopped wearing masks of which I have a considerable number still in boxes. Now I’m going back to them, not to protect me when I go into crowded venues, but rather to keep smoke from getting into my lungs. It is hard not to see the irony in the reversal of what may become another new normal for people.
Yesterday, a Toronto Star article headline read, “With wildfire smoke in the forecast for Toronto, is it time to bring back masks?” Air quality statements issued by Environment Canada warned that these conditions are to remain with us for at least this week, and based on long-term predictions of unabated wildfire conditions, become a feature of our existence for the foreseeable future. Today’s Washington Post states that the most vulnerable citizens of New York City are being urged to wear high-quality masks should they venture outside with smoke having reached them and further to the south into South Carolina.
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]]>The post Frozen Land on Fire is a Consequence of Global Warming and Altering the Arctic Landscape appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>What is he talking about? Permafrost in the frozen Arctic is increasingly being destabilized as polar atmospheric temperatures rise. The result is changes to the Arctic landscape as thawing leads to a phenomenon described as thermokarst acceleration. What does that mean?
Thermokarst describes a landscape found in the Arctic that features pothole lakes of meltwater, and small hummocks of vegetation lying over partially frozen subsurfaces. What accompanies thermokarst acceleration is atmospheric warming.
A study published in One Earth this month describes the spread of thermokarst landscapes in the Alaskan Arctic stating it has accelerated 60% since 1950. And along with the landscape change is accompanying wildfire outbreaks further contributing to thermokarst acceleration. The trend has been ongoing for the past seventy years and is speeding up.
Global climate models show us that what happens with anthropogenic climate change in the mid-latitudes gets exaggerated further as we move poleward. This is particularly true in the Northern Hemisphere with its large landmasses surrounding the small largely ice-covered Arctic Ocean.
The latest IPCC report tells us that global mean temperatures have risen 1.1 Celsius since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. That increase, however, is not uniform across the planet. Over oceans, the mean rise has been 0.8 Celsius. Over continents, it is surpassing 1.5. Here in Toronto at 43.6 degrees latitude and not quite halfway to the North Pole, we have warmed 1.8 degrees. In the Arctic, that rise is threefold greater.
Alaska, the Yukon, Northwest Territories, Nunavut, the Scandinavian countries, and Siberia have all been seeing record warmth and subsequently have been witnessing permafrost melt acceleration with the spread of thermokarst landscapes featuring ground subsidence, meltwater pothole lakes, slightly elevated areas covered by peat, small bushes and stunted trees (see the image at the top of this article). Underlying the landscape is partially melted permafrost, a semi-frozen mix of soil and rock containing vast amounts of biomass.
This partially thawed biomass is turning out to be a perfect breeding ground for microbes. And where there are microbes there is outgassing. In this case, lots of methane, the same gas SpaceX uses as fuel for its Falcon 9 rockets. Methane releases from microbe exhalations accelerate local atmospheric warming. And with the highly inflammable gas in proximity to tinder-dry surface vegetation, it is no wonder that wildfire outbreaks are on the rise in the Arctic with long-term consequences for the landscape that contribute to its increasing thermokarst appearance.
The One Earth published study is just another example of what climatologists have been saying for several decades. Two years ago, a University of Alaska Fairbanks research study that appeared in Geophysical Research Letters stated that Canadian Arctic permafrost was thawing 70 years earlier than predicted, describing it as a canary in the climate change coal mine.
When permafrost melt accelerates, climate scientists describe it as a potential tipping point for climate change. The heat-trapping methane gas when released into the atmosphere causes short-term spikes in temperature that can last a few decades. That’s because methane breaks down in the atmosphere in eight to twelve years. But while it is around it is 80 times more potent in trapping heat than carbon dioxide (CO2). And unlike CO2, methane is inflammable which makes it fuel for wildfires. Methane, along with atmospheric lightning strikes and human carelessness is a recipe for Arctic wildfires and they are happening in increasing amounts.
Just how impactful are the fires in the Arctic? This year saw record-breaking outbreaks in Siberia. One June event alone covered more than 50,000 square kilometres (19,300 square miles) and consumed both boreal forest and wetlands lying atop permafrost. The plumes of smoke from this one fire contributed 188 megatons of CO2 and particulate matter to the atmosphere, depositing sooty residue on nearby sea ice accelerating its melting. This one fire would have been tragedy enough, but Siberia experienced others over two-and-a-half months of spring and summer with the total amount of emitted CO2 greater than that produced by Germany in a year, the sixth most polluting country on the planet. And one thing more, a characteristic of Arctic fires that invade drying peat wetlands is they often don’t go out and continue to burn through the biomass below the surface. When gone, they leave a scar on the land that can take hundreds of years to heal. If that’s not a description that sets off alarms, I don’t know what is.
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]]>The post When it Comes to Weather and Climate Change Black Swan Events are Happening Almost Every Week appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>In Europe, during the Middle Ages, Black Swans were unknown. It wasn’t until Europeans started sailing beyond the continent that these creatures were discovered, no longer mythological but real. Before the discovery finding this species of bird indeed would have been rare to impossible giving birth to the notion of events so rare they could go by the name, Black Swan.
The term persists today describing something rare and unusual, an outlier from the norm. But it turns out Black Swans aren’t all that rare. There are an estimated half-million alive today largely found in the Southern Hemisphere.
Lately, extreme weather occurrences have been deemed Black Swan events. What are we talking about?
It is not just that these events have all happened this year, but that in many cases these are a repeat of what is becoming persistent. For example, we have witnessed the growing megadrought in the U.S. Southwest with consequent firestorms that have engulfed California towns and valleys over the past few years. Similar wildfires have driven Australians out of their towns and homes as that continent continues to dry out. To therefore call what is happening rare is inconsistent. But you can refer to them as Black Swan events because they are not rare and the reference may make people pay attention.
There is an ongoing debate in the public place about weather and climate. Is what we are seeing just variable weather, or is it evidence of anthropogenic climate change.
Where that debate appears to be coming to an end is among global political leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel who recently toured areas of Germany inundated by abnormal flooding with more than 100 Germans dying, and later stated, “We have to get faster in the fight against climate change. The sum of all events that we are witnessing in Germany and the forces with which they occur all suggest that it has something to do with [it].”
A similar observation from Aaditya Thackeray, an Indian state Environment Minister, in response to witnessing massive amounts of rain in Mumbai that caused 30 deaths, stated “We have been talking about climate change and it is happening.”
Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, in a recent Globe and Mail interview, noted that the fires and June heatwave, that set 1,200 new temperature records across North America, are a reflection of climate change. He added further, that witnessing these events was an incentive to speed up the government’s mitigation and adaptation agendas. “We simply have to be even more aggressive…Those [referring to climate change policies] are things we are doing now that we can accelerate.”
And President Joe Biden, in a departure from the previous U.S. administration, named climate change as the “number one issue facing humanity.”
Papers like The Globe and Mail and The Guardian acknowledge Black Swan events, in weather, are directly linked to climate change. But other members of the Fifth Estate are far more reluctant to forge that link.
In Akshat Rathi’s July 20, 2021, Bloomberg Green Daily he writes about this reluctance from British media’s recent coverage of Germany’s floods and Western North America’s heat dome and unprecedented wildfires, noting that neither the BBC nor SkyNews in reporting these stories mentions global warming. And if they do they raise the variable weather versus climate change debate.
Similarly, in U.S. coverage of wildfires and record heat in California and Oregon, local media outlets, states The Guardian, have never linked the events to climate change.
Yet we know our planet’s atmosphere has heated up since the Industrial Revolution with the increase already at 1.2 Celsius (2.16 Fahrenheit) above mid-19th century levels. And we know that with the number already this high it is likely we will blow past the Paris Climate Agreement lower target number of an increase of 1.5 Celsius (2.4 Fahrenheit).
In a recent interview with Mother Jones, Jennifer Atkinson, Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Washington, in speaking about the reality of climate change and recent U.S. weather events, stated “It’s no longer a vague concern about things happening in the future.” In other words, we are living with climate change now.
Climate scientist, Ed Hawkins, at the University of Reading, UK, reinforces Atkinson’s viewpoint in a recent tweet which states, “The science has moved on and it would be great to see that reflected in the news coverage of extreme weather events, rather than the current inaccurate stock phrase.”
And speaking of Black Swans and climate change extreme weather as Black Swan events, it should be noted that so much of global warming’s daily impacts remain unreported in the media because they are not deemed newsworthy. For example, here in Toronto, we are seeing an uptick in overnight low temperatures. But who other than the weather page reports higher than normal lows that no longer give plants and animals relief from daytime heat. And who then states that these record high nighttime temperatures are indicators of global warming and an even more significant sign of climate change than Toronto daytime highs exceeding 30 Celsius (86 Fahrenheit) in record numbers.
Rathi of Bloomberg notes that there is a danger in shifting baselines when changes to daily weather are incremental and subtle so that they effectively are ignored. I can think of some Southern Ontario and Toronto examples such as:
These are the shifting baselines of incremental global warming that go unreported often, and make it more likely that the average person starts accepting these subtle changes as normal without recognizing they are living through climate change.
And a final word about Black Swan events. Knowing that these swans are not as rare as early European explorers thought, I’m fine in calling all of the above Black Swan events because they aren’t rare, and if that increases public awareness through the use of the phrase, that’s great.
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]]>The post Wildfires, Australia and the Face of a Planet’s Changing Climate appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>But anytime the calendar turns from a nine to a ten or a nineteen to a twenty, we tend to make a big deal of it. This is a commons mistake and one with which we can live, unlike mistakes being made by many nations around the world when it comes to taking climate change action.
It doesn’t take much more than casual observation to see a cause and effect correlation happening around our planet when talking about climate.
Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenage climate activist, points out that “people are already suffering and dying from the climate.”
From a decade of record-breaking global temperatures, outbreaks of unprecedented wildfires in North America and Australia, hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons that are increasingly ferocious and unpredictable in behaviour, massive ice sheet melts in Greenland and Antarctica, blobs of unprecedented ocean surface heating in areas of the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Oceans causing massive fish kills and deoxygenation events, and reinsurance industry reports that show the cost of climate disasters reaching new all-time highs, there is plenty of evidence that our Earth’s climate is changing.
A single event in today’s headlines brings all of this new reality home. In the town of Mallacoota, near Sydney, Australia, it is being reported that people are seeking refuge in the Tasman Sea because of an approaching wildfire that threatens their community. The picture below of a glowing and smoky red sky says it all. The radiant heat from blazing bushfires combined with temperatures that have hit the 40+ Celsius (over 104 Fahrenheit) has led to emergency workers and the Australian media advising people to seek shelter in the water.
Australia is the canary continent in the coalmine when it comes to envisioning our global future. There are currently 100 wildfires burning, threatening many of the country’s cities across the southern half of the continent. The fires are so widespread they are creating their own weather. And while the Australian government has remained reticent about acting to combat climate change, an independent crowd-funded Climate Council, formed because of a previous climate-change denying government, defunded government environmental climate studies, has issued a report describing the fires as “not normal.”
The report ties climate change to the worsening state of bushfires in the country pointing to significant changes in precipitation patterns and temperatures since the mid-1990s and the drying out of the continent’s southern half.
It key findings can be summarized in the illustration below and include:
What is even more frightening about Australia’s plight is that peak fire season has yet to be reached. That comes in the next two months. So far, however, millions of hectares of bushland have burned or are on fire making the California wildfires of 2018 seem like minor incidents.
The collateral environmental damage cannot be underestimated with 500 million animals already dead including 30% of the country’s Koala population. Koala feed on Eucalyptus trees which are predominant in many of the areas where wildfires have or are occurring. And as has been shown in other parts of the world where this Australian native tree has been planted (Portugal, Spain, and California), Eucalyptus is a fire-prone species that becomes perfect kindling for wildfires.
In an article appearing in Scientific American today, entitled, “Australia’s Angry Summer: This Is What Climate Change Looks Like,” it describes Australia as “the most fire-prone of all of Earth’s continents.” It points out that the continent has seen a mean temperature increase of more than one Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit) in the past one-hundred years. That the southern half, in particular, has been drying out over that same period of time. And that anthropogenic forces are affecting wind circulation in the Southern Ocean beneath the continent impacting Australia’s southern half negatively as rain-bearing fronts pass to its south.
When you see words like “never been seen before in the historical record” when describing growing drought conditions in Australia, it is no wonder that wildfires on the continent are no longer behaving “normally.” And what has Australia’s Climate Council so upset, is that the data and evidence it has collected on climate change made all of this so predictable while government leaders fiddled and the country burned.
So although we haven’t yet officially turned the decade over (see my opening comments) it is time for global efforts to treat 2020 and the years that follow with a degree of urgency through enacting policy and programs that will mitigate the worst effects of climate change in the coming decade and beyond and maybe save Koalas in the process.
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]]>There are so many things wrong with this insensitive, less-than-presidential reaction to the disastrous reoccurrence of wildfires in California. Let’s parse the content.
“There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires…..”
Let me suggest one very big reason.
Climate change. California has been experiencing severe drought conditions. An agency of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS), monitors the intensity of drought across the country. On November 6, 2018 the map for California showed the entire state as abnormally dry to exceptional drought. Trump doesn’t seem to know that during the previous six-year drought in California, almost 130 million trees died because of the abnormally dry conditions. Clearing dead wood and dry brush has become an important aspect of forest management. But the trees keep dying and keeping up doing ground clearance to limit what could become kindling is an arduous task.
The map below is the first exhibit that should have been shown to the President before he started tweeting. But I guess there was no time to put in his briefing book.
“in California…..”
Trump is not a great fan of this west coast state. It didn’t vote for him in the presidential election, and in the mid-terms it returned far more Democrats than Republicans to both the U.S. Congress and to the state legislature. If the state had been a Wisconsin, Kansas, or one of the Dakotas I wonder if this tweet would have been similarly composed.
“forest management is so poor….“
On the U.S. Department of Agriculture website, you can find a portal to the California’s Forest Management Plan including conservation planning, ecological studies, land use data, maps and analysis and more. The document template located here is designed for local counties and forest resource managers to submit their ground practices related to land management. In every case fire management is covered with a degree of thoroughness that exceeds most other state standards. From air quality to soil to plant materials, the coverage is comprehensive. The plan includes maps, satellite and air photo imagery, and a resource database. If this is poor, then what is rich.
“gross mismanagement of the forests…..”
There are few places that manage forests better than California considering the contribution the trees make to the state’s image. Giant Redwoods and Sequoias are among the most iconic symbols of California’s conservation efforts.
The reality is that California draws people to it and more and more are moving to the edge of urban centres where they are building homes next to the natural wilderness. It is this urban sprawl that has made wildfires far more dangerous than in the past. The California Department of Insurance has published a map that defines the urban-wilderness interface and it correlates directly to where wildfires naturally or human created happen.
In a recent study by the University of Colorado, it reported that humans were responsible for starting 84% of wildfires in California over the last 20 years with the top 10 causes listed below:
Only 34 cases out of 2,032, (1.7%) represent activities attributable to those in forestry management. The remaining 98% the study linked directly to human-forest interaction which encroachment on the wilderness enables.
Trump may not know it but an old standard practice for forestry management almost universal to North America does play a part. Referred to as the Smokey the Bear policy, wildfires in public forests are subjected to too much interference in trying to contain or prevent natural burns. Natural burns create open spaces that form fire breaks. By suppressing small fires, a common practice in California and elsewhere, we interfere with the natural fire cycle. By preserving trees that normally would we leave forests more congested and trees competing for a finite amount of water. Add drought to the mix and we exacerbate conditions for wildfire outbreaks. And finally, by preserving trees in close proximity to each other it makes them far more susceptible to invasive insects that end up killing whole stands of forest and turning trees into potential kindling.
“so many lives lost…”
The lives lost reference is buried in the President’s tweet when, in my opinion, it should have been the centerpiece of his response. The death toll stands at 31 with more than 200 still missing.
U.S. Congress takes a different approach to tweet threats. Congress continues to provide some funding to fight against wildfires although the greatest amount from state budgets. In March of this year, the federal government set up a $2 billion annual fund for wildfires. In 2017, California’s wildfire fighting budget exceeded that number and by the look of the latest wildfire outbreaks will exceed it again in 2018. California Governor, Jerry Brown, has requested that the President take time from his tweets to declare the state is facing a major disaster.
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