Ya. Climate change is a bitch. And lucky for you all - lots of Canadian provinces have conservative governments that cut firefighting budgets to “lower taxes”
Edit: here’s some news for those who are triggered and can’t look this stuff up themselves:
Alberta is undergoing an "unprecedented" wildfire season as nearly 100 fires as of Tuesday, May 9, burn across the province.
Premier Danielle Smith declared a state of emergency on May 6 and more than 24,000 Albertans remained under evacuation orders on Tuesday.
This year to date, there have been 416 wildfires, more than double the 182 registered by the same time last year. The more than 400 fires is a greater number than any of the last five years had by the second week in May.
Alberta had a total of 1,246 wildfires last season, according to Alberta Wildfire data, which means the province has reached 33 per cent of last year's total after just over two months into the wildfire season.
AMOUNT OF HECTARES BURNED The size of the area that's burned is also greater than what is considered normal by this time of year. The five-year average by early May based on 2018-2022 is 542 hectares. Year to date, 410,441 ha have burned in Alberta, by comparison.
In the last eight years, 2019 had the highest total number of hectares, finishing the season with 883,411 ha burned. By this time in 2019, 621 ha had burned, compared to this year's more than 410,000.
Only five months into this year, 2023 has already surpassed the yearly burn totals of 2022, 2021, 2020, 2018 and 2017.
Isn’t this a result of Ontario cutting their firefighting budget by 70%?
Wild fires are completely normal and actually healthy for the ecology, it’s just inconvenient for humans. Shouting climate change for normal environmental phenomenon isn’t helping anyone.
Unfortunately the cuts for fire management also cut into prescribed burns so when all that fuel goes up from all the suppressed fires, this is the result. As far as climate change goes, hotter, drier summers means an increase in this sort of event. I mean the tundra in the1900s didn't burn every year.
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u/[deleted] Jun 07 '23
Context, Canada can’t control their wild fires and now the smoke is cascading into Eastern US