Alberta wildfire season, crazy fear heating up

Alberta heads into a new wildfire season, with at least one concerning severity signal.

Through the winter, 64 wildfires from last year’s heavy season were still burning, Alberta Wildfire information unit manager Christie Tucker said Thursday at 2024’s first provincial wildfire update.

Five hundred hectares have already burned, Tucker said, about 400 hectares more than this time last year.

Then there are the nutty political fireworks. The debate about wildfire causes and prevention has become intensely, even stupidly political.

At one extreme, the first question asked by partisans about Alberta’s record wildfires last summer was: “Were fires set by arsonists, maybe even leftist eco-terrorists?”

At the other extreme, the first response was: “This is all because of global warming. The world is burning!”

Rarely has a month gone by without federal Environment Minister Steve Guilbeault invoking the wildfire threat and blaming climate change on social media.

In December, Energy Minister Jonathan Wilkinson, pushing plans for the world’s most aggressive emissions cap on Canada’s oil and gas sector, said, “We talk a lot about climate change these days for a very good reason — the planet is at risk of burning up.”

The fearmongering on the right has been just as heated. As the National Post’s Tristin Hopper noted last June when Canadian wildfires were causing the most damage: “Several social media posts have gone viral with satellite video showing nearly a dozen Quebec wildfires erupting on June 1 at virtually the same time, with the implication that it is evidence of human co-ordination.”

Things are so raw in fire-damaged Alberta communities mentioning climate change causing wildfires might well incite rage, as Forestry Minister Todd Loewen noted recently in the legislature: “If I went into communities that had lost their homes in fires and said when they asked me, ‘What are you going to do this year to prevent wildfire?’ . . . ‘I’m going to battle climate change,’ I don’t think they would let me leave . . . without being lynched.”

While we can’t turn down the temperature outdoors this fire season, but perhaps we can on this debate.

l find it best to look past politicians for guidance in favour of those public intellectuals, such as climate scientist Judith Curry and Prof. Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado Boulder, an expert on public policy around climate change, who recognize climate change is real, that the slow, gradual warming of our planet is happening, but don’t immediately cry out that a fiery apocalypse is upon us.

At the height of Canada’s fire season, Pielke wrote a Substack article arguing the narrative that climate change is to blame for the new wave of massive fires worldwide is inaccurate. It’s also at odds with the findings of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), he said.

Weather isn’t the most important factor in bringing on the dry, hot “fire weather” that can lead to more wildfire, the IPCC has reported: “human activities have become the dominant driver.”

But wildfire emissions have declined globally since 2003, based on European Union data, Pielke said.

There is more fire weather in some areas of the world, but not others, and the IPCC expressed high confidence fire weather will increase in only a few regions by 2050. There is no signal for increased fire weather worldwide by 2100.

As for our wildfires, Pielke said Canada has not seen fire activity increase in recent decades. “Going back to 1700, research indicates that recent ‘burn rates’ across Canada in recent decades have been much lower than in centuries past.”

When it comes to fighting wildfire, Pielke pointed to an OECD report on useful measures, such as creating fuel breaks and buffer zones, ensuring infrastructure resilience, and wildfire risk awareness for the public.

Our most reasonable bet? First, reject the politicizing of wildfires.

Second, focus on the basics: Put out the fire, help the victims as best we can, and see if we can prevent similar fires.

Just like we did in saner, less divided times.