UNPRECEDENTED
As with every fire season in recent memory, we’re being told this one is unprecedented. Fires in Alberta and Nova Scotia are said to be sending never-before-seen volumes of smoke across the continent; social media is replete with catastrophizing about the situation here in Canada and around the world; and there is talk of this being the clearest sign of a world becoming uninhabitable. Others offer up specifics telling us there have been 1,800 fires and 2.7 million hectares burned.
The problem with this is that Canada has very good, if only recent, data and modelling on forest fires, their numbers, severity, behaviour, and cause. And if you go looking at any of these sources you’ll find a very different story. The most recent data on the current situation comes from the National Wildland Fire Situation Report, for example. Updated May 24th, it tells us 1,559 fires have consumed 2,043,529 hectares. There isn’t better of more recently updated information available.
COMPARED TO WHAT?
From there you may be interested in a historical analysis. How does this year or any recent year compare? You can find that out from a bunch of different official sources. The Canadian National Fire Database and the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre both offer graphs employing data from verified reports across the country.
With such reports in hand, you can see that, by any accounting, the unmistakable trend for the annual number of fires over the last forty years is downward. Too, the area burned in the last two decades has never approached the record burns, of more than six million hectares and even nearing eight million, that occurred throughout the ’80s and ’90s. That said, the average does appear to be up slightly. Still, none of this looks like catastrophe or even as though things could be interpreted as moving in the wrong direction. This can be said with confidence while also acknowledging that there will be big burns in the future and even very likely some tremendous outliers, with or without human involvement. That’s just how the world works.
Along with this, considering unprecedented events, it’s worth noting that 2020 was the lowest burn year on record. It was a truly unusual year and stands out strongly with just a glance of any visual or data set. Astonishingly, this unprecedented wildfire year was so severely counter-narrative that it was also deemed non-newsworthy by the same folks who claim to be focused on unprecedented weather, climate, and other environmental events. (In the same way we all, apparently, decided to disregard the 2012-14 record sea ice extent in Antarctica. Weird how that happens.) So it seems worth asking if climate change took a nap or if someone was able to put in a word with Zeus to eliminate lightening in 2020? My assessment is that the simplest and most obvious explanation for the immediate, unexpected, and dramatic disappearance of forest fires from the entire country was that there was another correlated (and likely causal) unprecedented event: the pandemic (with its voluntary and involuntary movement and travel restrictions and accompanying closures of parks of all kinds.) Many, and in some places most or nearly all, forest fires are started by humans. Still, though I’ve tried several times, I’ve failed to find or induce in anyone a coherent argument against this assessment (though I can find many who enthusiastically reject it.) Relatedly, if you go looking, as I have done, you’ll find that human-caused fires have doubled since the ’90s. I also can’t find any good explanation for why that is. (The rise of MEC or pick-up ownership? A decline in the popularity of Smokey the Bear?)
(Trying to make sense of all of this, I’ve brought the issue up with Canadian climate scientists and forest fire researchers via email and on various social media platforms. Of course I preface these interactions by telling them that I have a graduate degree in environmental communication, where from, and that I'm trying to make sense of and write about what seems like a set of contradictions. Those conversations never go anywhere, if they even begin at all. If we do start getting into it, they insist that the human factor is, simply, not a factor. Period. They demand that the only relevant element for wildfire is climate change. Even when I ask about confounding data within the same sources they cite in their research or public statements (such as 2019-20 being hot and dry and a bad year in climate terms but completely lacking in fires to a degree we’ve never seen, while corresponding with the strongest-ever restrictions on human movement), they tell me I’m wrong and just do not understand. Of course I retort that we all know how for 80 years Smokey’s whole raison d’etre has been this very premise: that not lightening gods nor fire-starting birds nor train or electrical companies (nor a little of each) but “ONLY YOU can prevent forest fires!” The hate that. When I ask them to explain or to offer me some readings to illuminate what I’m missing from the bigger picture, they offer nothing and instead tell me I won’t understand or can’t understand. One suggested the problem was that I lack a graduate degree in physics and sufficient background in statistics. When I persist, they demand that I must be a some kind of troll or oil company lobbyist or other ne’redowell. Such is the state of the discourse, apparently.)
QUALITY?
More than all this, there are some serious issues with these data themselves which, of course, we also never get to talk about. Most obvious is that this whole vantage we have is very limited in time. That’s because prior to the 1970s research was seriously impeded by poor or non-existent record keeping as well as technological barriers preventing good data collection, particularly in remote wilderness areas, places that can now be cheaply and easily monitored via cameras and sensors or via satellite. So, though folks like to talk about current events being unprecedented, the oldest data on offer is seen in these graphs and only goes back a few decades. That just covers my very brief lifetime and isn’t much perspective on forests or climate. I mean, young trees here on the coast are hundreds of years old. (On that fact, surely we have tree ring data that can tell us something about fires going back centuries and eons. But where is that information? I can’t find it.)
Similarly, every data collection and visualization I’ve come across on this topic fails to account for changes in policy over time. And yet, in just my lifetime there has been a dramatic paradigm shift around wildfires. We’ve come to appreciate the critical ecological role of fire in aiding plant diversity, regenerating vegetation, sustaining nutrient dynamics and carbon cycling, positively impacting hydrology, and so much more. With this new view, we’ve shifted from a policy of “suppress all fires” to a much more nuanced one allowing fires to burn when deemed appropriate and only suppressing them when lives and infrastructure are threatened. So, what, has electing to not put out fires resulted in no noticeable impact on the total area of wildfire burns or their severity and duration? That has to be the consensus among experts and analysts. How else would this be entirely absent?
Also unhelpful for trying to make sense of things is that dates of analysis are wildly inconsistent. Some current sources reference the whole narrow data set, starting in the ’70s while others look only from the ’80s or ’90s to the present. Alternatively, and very weirdly (and also never clearly stated or justified), others will focus on a seemingly random thirty-year window therein and use that window to make some proclamation. So, if you go to the Natural Resources Canada website, for example, head over to the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System and click the “Historical Analysis” link, you are taken to a page with various heat maps showing severity of drought, fire fuel build-up, and more. Separate maps come for each month of the fire season, April to September. Great. However, you can’t compare the maps and the analysis doesn’t provide the actual data but only the mean for all information from 1981 to 2010. Who is this for? For what purpose? This is a present analysis but missing a decade from the start of data collection and the most recent decade as well? What is that? Not only is this almost perfectly useless, this data window insists upon removing all the worst fire years on record (and dramatically so) and also skips out on the total absence of fire in 2020. To what end? This is exactly what you would do if you were desperate to not understand what’s going on and confuse everyone else in the process.
On a similar page with similar maps, they offer a very different window in time. How helpful is that? So, if you go to their “Maps and Reports” page, you’ll find heat maps for fire hot spots, area burned, and more. All super interesting. Great. But the data here only goes from the present back as far as 2000. Such an offering could not be more misleading. If you only observe the last two decades and focus only on area burned it is obvious that you would miss (or obfuscate for others) all the worst years on record. Too, you get what may appear like a clear picture that everything is getting exponentially worse. But that’s far more stupefying than it is enlightening. And obviously so. (And, one might ask, what kind of deep “historical analysis” is this that just barely predates Facebook and the iPhone? That’s a meaningful trend in the world of fast fashion or interest rates but not in geology, biology, or climate. Again, obviously so.)
Stranger still, to my mind, inconsistent framing will come up even within the same fact sheet. They’ll offer you an average for area burned “over the last 25 years”, then in the very next bullet point they will fail to offer any date range or even an average, and then they will finish off giving you a typical cost for annual fire suppression “over the last decade”, not over 25 years and not offering an average but instead a wide and vague range: “from about $800 million to $1.5 billion”. Again, what are we doing? Who is this for? To what end?
This sort of thing seems far closer to what we expect from a political campaign or PR firm, seeking the appearance of being forthcoming and transparent while providing no substantive details anyone can make sense of or use. Sadly, this does seem to be the best information we have. When I go looking for data and analysis in academic journals, I get very similar results. Do you have better information? Who does? How can we say anything meaningful when, due to our limited data, just ten more years worth of information, say, would likely skew the whole present picture in the same way as focusing on just the most recent decade? I mean, the only thing I’m comfortable saying about wildfires in Canada is that at least we are now paying attention and recording data for future generations.
CONTEXT
I would also note that what is desperately missing from the avalanche of reportage and repostings from on-line climate activists is any context at all. In an article titled How wildfires are changing in Canada, senior CBC writers and producers share that the numbers of fires have been going down since the ’80s. They say “experts attribute that to improved fire prevention — so the number of human-caused fires is going down.” Only, national data shows fires started by people are significant and the area burned by human-caused fires have been on an exponential increase back as far as data goes, has doubled in thirty years, and shot up dramatically more recently, with the latest numbers showing a recent spike and two spikes in the early ’00s that are 10x the average area burned by humans in the ’80s. So what are we talking about?
They also tell us 80,000 people were displaced by the 2016 fires in Fort McMurray, for example, and that being the largest evacuation in Canadian history — and, thusly, the situation is clearly far worse now than in the past. There’s talk about that catastrophe being the result of a combination of climate change and aggressive fire suppression conspiring to deliver unprecedented fuel supply. There’s no explanation that we aren’t talking about a steady baseline, and that the population and developed land in this extremely remote region grew tenfold in recent years due to Tar Sands development. Right. And so that exact same fire would have displaced no one fifty years ago. You see, we aren’t even trying to make sense. Too, while they interview researchers, there is no word anywhere from them explaining how Canada’s boreal is one of the largest forest ecosystems on the planet – and how regular, high-intensity crown fires throughout are essential to maintaining biome integrity. (And in a 900 word article about Canadian wildfires, in which they interview two researchers from different universities, no mention is made of the terms “biome”, “ecosystem”, or “boreal”. The words “pine”, “spruce”, “birch”, and “species” make no appearance either. “Forests” comes up just once. “Climate change”, on the other hand, appears five times!)
So does all of this look to you more like folks are trying to inform or misinform? Are we trying to understand and help one another do so? What about some context? Below are some historical North American fires, ones cited in none of our current catastrophizing and not making the above graphs of “relevant” or “reliable” fire history.
HISTORICAL FIRES
The Great Miramichi Fire, ripped across northern New Brunswick in 1825, claiming 4 million acres (1,620,000 hectares or about 1/5 of all of New Brunswick’s forests) while devastating the towns of Newcastle and Douglastown, before jumping the Miramichi River to Chatham Head, and then taking out the villages of Black River, Bushville, and Napan. This brutal conflagration killed 160. The fire is presumed to have been human-caused and is often cited as the largest ever fire in North America. In terms of size and loss of life, it also makes Fort McMurray look like a joke.
On August 17th, 1870, a work gang set a fire to clear brush along the tracks of the Central Canada Railway between Pakenham and Almonte near the village of Rosebank. It got away from them and quickly spread into the neighbouring woods. And thus began The Great Ottawa Valley Fire. The fire ripped through the townships of Goulbourn, Huntley, March, Fitzroy, Torbolton and Nepean, and then claimed the villages of Bells Corners, Ironsides, and Stittsville. 2,000 displaced people poured into Ottawa. That’s when panic set in. In all, the fire burned an area stretching from the Rideau Lakes in the south to Wakefield in Quebec in the north, an area of hundreds of thousands of acres. Approximately 20 people died, 500 farmers lost everything, and many thousands were left homeless. It is said Canada’s capital would likely have burned to the ground had it not been for the quick-thinking of an engineer who ordered the gates of the St. Louis dam to be breached, flooding the city’s streets.
Seventeen villages were turned to ash in the Peshtigo fire in Wisconsin the following year, in 1871. Though the fire burned perhaps as much as 1.5 million acres and may have killed as many as 2,500 people, it is largely forgotten because it occurred at the same time as the much more visible Great Chicago Fire. That one took roughly 300 people and 2,100 acres of the city, including over 17,000 structures, leaving more than 100,000 homeless residents. (And, that’s right, both fires were said to have been started by people.)
A decade later, in 1881, Michigan’s Thumb fires burned more than a million acres, took 1,480 barns, 1,521 houses, and 51 schools. These fires killed 282 and left more than 15,000 homeless across four counties. Smoke from those fires darkened the sky over Toronto and many location across the East Coast of the US. Twilight appeared at noon and September 6, 1881, became known as Yellow Tuesday.
In 1908, the British Columbia town of Fernie, population 5,000, was obliterated by a conflagration. In just 90 minutes the fire took 700 homes, 100 businesses, and the lives of 10 people.
In 1911, the Porcupine fire burned 494,000 acres and killed perhaps as many as 200 people while levelling the towns of South Porcupine and Pottsville, Ontario and partially destroyed Golden City, Porquis Junction, and Cochrane. Just five years later, the Matheson Fire, also human-caused, swept through the same region, devastating 490,000 acres and killing another 223 people.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Coogan et al (2020) Fifty years of wildland fire science in Canada
Canadian Journal of Forest Research; Vol. 51, No. 2
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