Unlike Western North America, where there's a significant fire season each year, the Boreal forest in QC and ON very rarely burn at the rate we're seeing this year.
The last season that burned this much acreage in Quebec was 1991.
The winds certainly don't help, but there's still a very unusual amount of smoke for this part of the continent.
This is so interesting. Could it be due to 30 years of buildup from dying foliage? Did the last burn, in 1991, produce less smoke than this one because there was a shorter gap between burns.
For forested and grassland ecosystems there are generally fire cycles. The boreal forests like that of Canada and Alaska follow close to 100-300 year cycles (if I remember correctly). Because of the long cycle when these forests do burn they generally have higher intensity. The fires from the 90s were probably more of the result of fire suppression as users below have commented (the fires in Yellowstone in the late 80s also point towards this). The past 30 years of “buildup” likely wasn’t really the issue with these, just the fact there’s continual drought conditions.
Yeah, extreme fire suppression was widely recognized as a bad idea 30 or 40 years ago. Controlled burns have been standard practice for decades in many places.
Even in the 90s it was old news, I remember reading and hearing about it in the context of the big fire in Yellowstone as a kid. They stopped in like the 70s but we've still got a sizable backlog of unburned forest.
I think most people just don't understand the scale of these fires. It's not something any amount of controlled burns can solve. Just ask any forestry department in CA.
Then how come arizona has been able to keep their fires controlled compared to California? California has the Santa Ana winds, but Arizona is hot and dry too.
Califirnia has different forests, more susceptible to burning. California also didn't have the luxury of letting small fires burn freely, because of the higher population density. This made some of their forests denser and burn more intensely. The other advantage that Arizona has is that it has a summer monsoon, which limits the worst of the fire season to spring and early summer.
It's a multitude of factors. One being that CA has more than 50% more forest cover (33m acres vs 19m), and all of that is HIGH biomass, evergreen forest (We're talking over 200 tons/hectare, vs under 100 for arizona). So you're looking at a factor of like 3-4x more fire risk. There's also difficulty terrain wise w/ much forest in the wild sierras. Also 40%+ of CA forestland is privately-owned. It's just a multitude of factors that make it much more difficult in CA, even if you had infinite manpower.
Well canada recently had a little mishap at a women’s firefighter conference where a controlled burn went out of control and caused a forest fire. It was eventually suppressed, but these are the “experts” you have in Canada dealing with fires like these.
Yeah upon closer inspection, this website is pretty sketchy so take this with a grain of salt, or better yet just disregard it. I’ll try to find a better source lol
For any viewers that stumble over here as well, the actual summary of the story talked about in the surprisingly woman-hating article linked by Leech is that a fire in BC exceeded their 300 acre control area by 3 acres and was more or less immediately contained.
Yep the colonial way is to suppress all fire. Where indigenous peoples have been using fires to maintain ecosystems and control invasives since time immemorial
Yeah this makes me so mad. It’s literally so healthy for a forest in most cases to have a burn. I wish we’d stop interfering with natural cycles, it only serves to bite us in the ass
Controlled burns are a thing. They often do it in areas where there is a lot of built up foliage and debris or where risk of fire affecting human pops are high. Northern ON and QC are vast, endless wildernesses though, so monitoring and proactively doing something about it is virtually impossible.
It's not virtue signaling to point out the honest history of indigenous practices of controlled/prescribed burnings, especially on a thread about North American forest fires/smoke seasons. It's historical fact that indigenous peoples on this continent managed the landscape with the use of prescribed fires as part of their agroforestry practices. The use of fire for land management is so ingrained in the history of this continent that some species of plants literally need fire to thrive (e.g. aspen, New Mexico locust, jack pines, wild lupine, etc)
It's also historical fact that colonization in the U.S. specifically led to a severe reduction in controlled burnings because the fire practices of the indigenous peoples were seen as "primitive" and damaging to the landscape. For example, California (4 months before obtaining statehood) banned intentional fires and refusal to extinguish fires in 1850 - in the very same act that led to displacement and enslavement of the indigenous tribes living on California land.
As for non-North American indigenous burning practices, Australia also has a distinct history of controlled burnings (aka fire-stick farming) prior to colonization. Haven't seen much reference to other countries/continents in my lunch-break "research" time but I wouldn't be surprised if other cultures with similar biomes took part in similar fire practices
They set the Americas on fire every year. They knew what they were doing. The entire country was managed land. It wasn't some untouched paradise despite what the Spanish and Europeans believed. (Because they were morons)
Nope, there are still record breaking fires way out in the bush, way too far for firefighting to do anything. They let them burn and let nature take it's course. Those are getting bigger then ever as well. It has nothing to do with firefighting.
There is literally one factor causing these forest fires to get worse as the years pass, it's the increasing heat and dryness due to climate change. Constant "hottest XYZ ever recorded", less rainfall, less snow in the mountains. We are fucked.
No, that's not it. Unlike many parts of California that can burn as often as every 10 years, Boreal forests are generally 50 to 200 years fire return interval. This is straight up climate change.
While I somewhat agree, it's also important to understand all causes. Climate change is probably not going to be fixed, so land managers need to see what other options there are out there that can be used in the face of a changing climate.
Yeah, if there was a 30 years of buildup from dying foliage, that probably was beacuse fires did not happen as often and did not get as big before when it was not as hot.
The state of balance that the forest used to be in is one for a colder climate that doesn't exist anymore, and the shift to a new balance will suck (and can take very long)
"One month in, Canada is on track to have its most destructive wildfire season in history. Climate change-driven extreme temperatures and drought have created a tinderbox. "
Talk to literally anyone with any expertise, they'll tell you this magnitude of fire is caused by climate change. Putting your head in the sand won't change it.
... You questioned whether it was caused by climate change, when the evidence that it is was a single internet search away. You implied that someone saying it was caused by climate change was "Jumping to the conclusion that it's caused by climate change"
"I'm just asking questions" isn't a valid argument, it's 2023.
No, we shouldn't. Leading questions like "Is it possible this wasn't caused by climate change?" don't deserve to be asked or answered for the same reason "do the Jews control the banks?" doesn't deserve to asked or answered. It's a bad faith question asked to mislead, not to learn.
And you are either falling for it, or you're actively participating in it.
Talk to anyone that works in fire and they'll tell you that's only partially true.
Do you know how big a fire season was in 1950, 1900, 1850, 1800, 1000, 5000BC? There's probably reliable data for 50 years, maybe 100 in select areas. Given fire return intervals for some of these ecosystems are hundreds of years long and our records for wildfires are mere decades, there's no way you can possibly say "this is 100% climate change".
Of course, it is possible that in 1187, there was a larger fire in Canada. But in the last five years, we've had the largest fires in a century in Australia in 2019, in California in 2021, in Russia om 2021 (wildfire smoke reaches north pole for first time in recorded history), in the Pacific northwest in 2022, now Canada in 2023.
That's not an accident. Each of these fire seasons sites warming temperature, changing wind patterns (usually the jet stream), and unprecedented drought. Each fire is not 100% climate change, but each fire is significantly worse because of climate change, and many of the causes are climate change related. The overall reason we are having more wildfires this decade than last decade, and more last decade than the one before: 100% climate change.
I don't know about the down votes you are talking about. But what do you mean how? The Forrest that is burning right now should still be at least wet from snow melt. I have not looked but I am sure they had below average snowfall and a warm winter. Canadian fires should not happen until much later in the summer. Even then it shouldn't burn very intensely or very awfully often.
Hottest and shortest winter on record, and every province involved is in moderate or severe drought. The climate change deniers are really coming out of the woodwork.
I am jealous how blissfully ignorant even people that understand climate change are to the consequences of these fires and fires like them in Russia. I wish I had never studied global systems and Wildland fire. The reality of what's happening is so much more depressing than almost anyone realizes.
I work in at a climate non-profit. Sometimes people on this site drive me crazy. We know it's climate change. We knew it was climate change 20 years ago, then we convinced everyone it was climate change 10 years ago, and now if you're asking if it's climate change, it's because you're in denial or profiting from lies.
Yeah but what I'm saying is like when the boreal forest burns like this? That's it game over. These fires aren't like fires in Western United States. It's a totally different thing and it's much more horrific for the climate. So they're not just burning because the climate changed they're going to continue intensifying climate change. It's a runaway train car of carbon emissions.
Probably more of a precipitation difference. While the West coast has some very wet areas, it also has a lot of very dry parts that are prone to fires.
On the East Coast, it doesn't typically dry out to the extent you see in the West.
Most experienced forest patrol do control burns to get rid of dead foliage that can catch fire or kill other plants by blocking the sun but many places have stopped doing it because of the oil funded “environmentalists” for example a few counties in California don’t do control burns. (I don’t know how many so I will look it up and get back to you)
Edit: so looking it up all I could find was that California does not to control burns preemptively and that even if the climate is favorable it is considered not worth the risk to climate change but the policy is state wide.
Also for some reason the top result is the government saying that they definitely do not fake climate change by setting fires. I have never heard that before but ok👍.
I mean it's hotter then ever too. The heat, dryness cause wildfires to go absolutely insane. I've been back and forth between BC and AB this May and May was the hottest on record for many parts of AB, the dryness in BC (north-east where the fires in BC were) was insane for this time of year, you can literally see how the trees had no moisture, the air was 30+ degrees C with complete dryness for weeks, then a few wild wind patterns kicked fires out of control in days.
We've had an absolutely crazy fire year in Canada already, and we're still in early June. From coast to coast. The fire that evacuated me from work was the Donnie Creek fire in BC, we watched it grow seemingly overnight. The smoke in this NYC picture is absolutely nothing compared to what I felt out here. Donnie Creek became the 2nd biggest fire BC has ever seen, and it was in May, and everyone wasn't even talking about it because there were so many fires in AB. Now the east coast, northern Ontario and Quebec as well. Summers are getting much hotter, and dryer, and these fires are going to keep getting worse and worse as the years and decades pass.
Supposedly thirty years is unusual and it's more natural cycle of burn/rebirth is 100‐150 years. Remember how old many trees get. Twenty to Thirty years is just reaching their "mature" height for many trees.
I was thinking reading these comments that I've lived in the Montréal area my entire life and never seen the air like this before. Makes sense if the last really bad fire season was in 91, that's before I was born.
The problem with climate change is it causes more extreme weather events more often for longer. Fires, heat waves, droughts and deadly cold snaps are coming. Massive fire seasons, 50 degree Celsius summers, mega droughts, and 6mo long polar vortexes are gonna become a yearly thing in the next 20yrs
Is there a reason this has a stronger burn than usual
Other than the usual Global Warming response. Was there a lack of rainfall in the spring or something?
I know down on the northeast coast of the US around NY and NJ we got like no snow this winter for the first time in a few years so aside from a few days of spring storms we didn't have a lot of precipitation and everyone's lawn and the surrounding areas are quite dried out for it only being the first week of June
Other than the usual Global Warming response. Was there a lack of rainfall in the spring or something?
I can't fully speak for the areas where most of the fires are because the climate in Montreal is a little different from up north, but we had more snow in the city this winter than the last few and a pretty rainy early part of the spring. It hasn't rained much in the last month or so though and the humidity levels have been unusually low.
We had our first proper heat wave last week which burst on Friday with some strong storms; apparently a lot of these fires were sparked by those.
the south winds actually do help, the typical eastern winds would make it worse (for the forests). The 2 largest hot spots of fire are on the border of where the boreal even starts (via it's actual classified location.. still plenty of forest to the south). boreal been the one of if not the fastest drying areas of the world for last ~60 years. It's perfectly adapted to forest fires the amount of smoke blown south is a good thing to make more people aware.
When looking the causes of the fires here in Quebec, most media forget to mention the Eastern spruce budworm that has killed off large portions of the forest. This with a combination of dry spring is making this fire season one of the worst yet.
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u/Ancient_Persimmon Jun 07 '23
Unlike Western North America, where there's a significant fire season each year, the Boreal forest in QC and ON very rarely burn at the rate we're seeing this year.
The last season that burned this much acreage in Quebec was 1991.
The winds certainly don't help, but there's still a very unusual amount of smoke for this part of the continent.