Image 01 Image 03

Massive Canadian Wildfires Engulfing U.S. East Coast in Haze Were Sparked by Environmental Activism

Massive Canadian Wildfires Engulfing U.S. East Coast in Haze Were Sparked by Environmental Activism

A review of of the number of fires and the acreage burned for the past 30 years shows a decline in the number of fires and no discernible trend in the area burned.

The US East Coast is being engulfed in smoke from wildfires in Canada. So, of course, the American press rushes to print stores of “hazardous air contaminants.”

The air quality index, a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency metric for air pollution, exceeded a staggering 400 at times in Syracuse, New York City and Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. A level of 50 or under is considered good; anything over 300 is considered “hazardous,” when even healthy people are advised to curtail outdoor physical activity.

The drama!

And, of course, there was the requisite link to the “climate crisis.”

…[T]he conditions that make wildfires more intense and severe, including heat and drought, are strongly linked to human-induced changes in the climate.

Canada’s natural resources agency says climate change could potentially double the amount of area burned by the end of this century with potential economic consequences like lack of timber supply and changes in which tree species make up the majority of forests.

It turns out that the root cause of these fires may be environmental activism and policies that have hindered effective land management and brush clearing.

Some blame lax forest management, arguing that not enough controlled burns are being carried out thanks to campaigns by environmentalists.

In 2020, four scientists wrote a paper published in Progress in Disaster Science in which they said not enough money was being spent by Canada on managing forests.

‘Wildfire management agencies in Canada are at a tipping point,’ they wrote.

‘Presuppression and suppression costs are increasing but program budgets are not.’

In July 2021, the editorial board of Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper warned that more needed to be done to hold controlled burns, and reduce the problem of out-of-control wildfires.

Delving deeper into the issue of Canadian wildfires, it turns out that May is the peak month for such blazes in Alberta. At those high latitudes, after very frosty winters, dead fuel from the previous year has dried out, and summer rains and new growth haven’t started. Additionally, Canada had a dry and snow-free winter.

The Canadian Department of Natural Resources offers some interesting facts about their forest fires:

  • Canada has about 9% of the world’s forests. Each year over the last 25 years, about 7,300 forest fires have occurred. The total area burned varies widely from year to year, but averages about 2.5 million hectares annually.
  • Only 3% of all wildland fires that start each year in Canada grow to more than 200 hectares in area. However, these fires account for 97% of the total area burned across the country.

True, it may be that 2023 will be a year with unusually high numbers of fires. Yet, a review of the number of fires and the acreage burned for the past 30 years shows a significant and continuing decline in the number of fires and no discernible trend in the area burned. The following chart is from the Canadian National Forest Database.

And while the wildfires are concerning, there have been more enormous blazes in the history of Canada. Additionally, it is being reported that one of the fires grew after “containment efforts.”

Much of the area burned so far has come about as a result of the Donnie Creek blaze, 158 kilometres north of Fort St. John in northeastern B.C.

The fire is burning over an area of 2,404.8 square kilometres as of 8 p.m. Monday, making it the second largest fire on record in the province — although not as large as the 2017 Plateau Fire near Williams Lake, an amalgamation of several smaller fires that burned a total of 5,451 square kilometres.

It’s also not as large as the 2018 Tweedsmuir complex of fires, nor the 2017 Hanceville Riske Creek complex, which burned 3,015 and 2,412 square kilometres, respectively. However, wildfire officials say because those complexes consisted of multiple fires burning in separate but nearby areas, they are not considered a single blaze.

The size of the Donnie Creek fire is comparable to the Capital Regional District, which covers much of the southern tip of Vancouver Island and is also close to the size of Metro Vancouver.

While the fire is not burning near major population centres, it has resulted in evacuation orders for a sparsely populated region primarily used by the forestry and oil and gas industry.

According to fire information officer Julia Caranci, the fire grew significantly due to two planned ignitions last week that burned a 55-kilometre portion along its southern flank in an effort to control it and create “confinement lines.”

These facts will be good to have when the eco-hysteria over these wildfires begins. Hopefully, no iconic piece of Western art or architecture will be defaced in response to the climate panic sparked by press reports about Canada’s blazes.

DONATE

Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.

Comments

canuck bastards. Just kidding. Was it pj o’rourke who coined the phrase ‘watermelon environmentalists’? I am trying to recall who first used that term in published writing.

    Suburban Farm Guy in reply to joejoejoe. | June 8, 2023 at 7:32 am

    It’s embarrassing and depressing to consider how DUMB our fellow Westerners are — how they lap up the hysterical doom- and gloom-mongering because they’re incapable of independent critical thought. They don’t have the intellectual oomph to judge and reject the ‘science’ on which the Religion of Global Warming Hysteria bases all their scare tactics. A DUMB people can’t be free for long.

    Depressing.

E Howard Hunt | June 8, 2023 at 8:12 am

These same mindless lefties will demand that a relatively new school be torn down if a testing firm can find the minutest concentration of some substance supposedly increasing asthma risk. But, they just smirk and blame climate change when their stupid policies turn all of New England into Dickensian London.

“OMG, Gaia HATES US! She’s trying to kill us for all the damage we’ve done to her!” WTF…

I wonder how much poor land management has to do with these fires starting in the first place. It’s not the Earth trying to “get us” or “climate change”, which I simply call “weather”. It’s stupid people doing stupid things and other people with an agenda making fear porn out of it.

    Virginia42 in reply to UJ. | June 8, 2023 at 10:47 am

    Pretty much all of it. This happened in CA, OR and WA a few years back for much the same reasons.

If you want to ruin things let environmentalists be in charge. They tend to be nature worshipers. They believe that any action by mankind is damaging to glorious nature. In reality we are the gardeners. If we act properly on our role we keep nature from running wild and going in boom bust cycles such as massive underbrush buildups and then massive fires.

Answers to Questions You Didn’t Ask: The first disaster relief project by The American Red Cross was for the 1881 Thumb Fire, a garguatian forest fire in Michigan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thumb_Fire

Have they pinned this on Trump yet?

The west coast had similar from Canada during the pandemic. Air quality sucked.

On the flip side, if I understand the geography, the smoke flows down to a bunch of lib-tard blue states. So way to go Canada!!!!!

    henrybowman in reply to Andy. | June 8, 2023 at 12:52 pm

    And it’s also an opportunity to gore several other personal oxen.
    It’s being reported that the firefighting squad that let this controlled burn get out of control is some celebrated Canadian all-female firefighting team.
    Does the existence of such a team exhibit more diversity? Or less diversity?
    Modern intersectionalism is so confusing. Excuse me while I cough my lungs out.

      Subotai Bahadur in reply to henrybowman. | June 8, 2023 at 4:16 pm

      Even more than in this country, in Canada diversity is several orders of magnitude more important than ability to do the job.

      Subotai Bahadur

    SC Reader in reply to Andy. | June 8, 2023 at 5:03 pm

    We are affected by the haze in upstate SC, a red area in a red state. Tuesday was especially bad.

Nature does so much more to pollute our air than we do in the 21st century.
Maybe the EPA should look at shutting Her down?

Amazing how the lack of intervention with good land management practices b/c the environmental wacko lobby prevented them is being blamed on climate. What can’t climate do? Leave the under story, don’t clear brush or dead material off the Forrest floor and you have a fire waiting to happen. What’s more amazing to me is how many people will accept climate change as the culprit b/c they don’t know any better.

    GWB in reply to CommoChief. | June 8, 2023 at 1:28 pm

    Also, how many don’t understand that avoiding forest fires is very much a human imposition on Nature. Nature clears out old growth via fire. If you’re a greenie, you should simply suck it up when a wildfire wipes out your home and family – it’s just doing what it does.

    So, yes, we have to DO things to intervene, in order to accomplish what Nature is trying to do without the rather drastic occurrence of a wildfire.

      AF_Chief_Master_Sgt in reply to GWB. | June 8, 2023 at 3:21 pm

      Floods are the giant flush to clean out locations where they occur.

      Fires are the great smoke out of the locations where they occur.

      Land slides are the earth shedding its skin.

      Earthquakes is the earth settling itself.

      Let it be.

      /s

As Ronald Reagan said, trees are the largest cause of air pollution. 🙂

AF_Chief_Master_Sgt | June 8, 2023 at 3:18 pm

So, it finally happens that the United States is no longer blamed as the leading contributor of poor air quality in the world.

Of course, everyone knows that India, China, and many South American countries have been damaging the environment for decades. Everyone knows that the east coast of the US this week is worse than Los Angeles in the 70s.

But the blame falls squarely on the shoulders of Canada. When will our nation sue Canada for the damage it is having on the lives and health of American citizens?

Same crap as out in the Western US. I was involved with the Forest Service in the 90’s and the stunning lack of proper forest management which included prescribed burns to reduce undergrowth, salvage logging and so forth was stunning. Every time someone tried to do some actual forest management lawsuits immediately issued forth.

Canada’s natural resources agency says climate change could potentially

This means we really have no idea, but it fits the official narrative we are working from.

I am from California born in the late 50s. Reagan, a Republican, was my Governor when I was in elementary school. He had logging companies in the forests clearing deadwood and areas that needed new growth. This gave the state tax money and people jobs and making forest fires to be limited. He also built reservoirs for water needs of farms and people.

Once he left the Democrat Governor Brown came in he ended all forest activity by logging companies and no reservoir expansion. This was due to environmentalist wanting nothing done to the land. The effect was large forest fires over time, mud slides, and at times lack of water as the population doubled with less rain.

The same thing sounds like it is happening in Canada. It sounds like Trudeau is doing the same as Brown and other Dems did to California in Canada. The effect can be seen in the US NE, which shows it is not good.