By P Gosselin
Arson likely at play…images for shock journalists
Unusual weather situations are always the hour of attribution researchers these days. Canada is suffering from forest fires again this year. The reason is the persistent drought. According to a study, climate change has doubled the likelihood of forest fires in Canada:
Extreme wildfire conditions in Canada have been fueled by intense, spatially extensive and persistent fire-conducive weather conditions, known as fire weather, which has been observed since the beginning of May throughout the country. Canada has experienced its warmest May-June period since 1940, beating the previous record set in 1998 by a huge margin (0.8°C). At the national scale, relative humidity was also very low. The warm and dry conditions, together with continuous southeasterly winds fueled extensive fire spread in Alberta, British Columbia, central Saskatchewan and southwestern portions of the Northwest Territories.
There are at least 17 direct fatalities linked to the fires, more than 150,000 people have been evacuated, and at least 200 structures, including homes, were damaged in the fires (AP News, 2023). The Canadian wildfires have severely impacted air quality locally in Canada, and in the neighboring United States with Air Quality Index (AQI) values frequently exceeding safe levels in the Midwest and northeast USA, and in some cases approaching record levels (e.g. on June 7th AQI reached 341 in New York City, considered hazardous for all residents) (CNBC, 2023). Similarly, in southern Ontario, including the cities of Ottawa and Toronto, air quality reached the ‘very high risk’ level forcing officials to cancel public events and reduce hours for outdoor public services. Schools remained closed for several days in many states, including Nova Scotia, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.”
Trend defies alarmist claims
But the country’s official wildfire statistics do not show this suspected trend. Statista lists them. Strictly speaking, the trend in the number of fires is actually decreasing until 2022. For 2023, the numbers will rise again to August 23, 2023 almost 6,000 fires were counted. But that will still be below the 2006 figures.
Source: Statista
Now the study does not say that the number of forest fires has doubled, but the probability. That’s different, of course, but it’s hard to grasp, because in the end it’s the fires and the damage they cause that count. In the case of Canada, there are aggravating circumstances. Unlike in Europe, forest fires there can have natural triggers, i.e. lightning. This does not exclude arson, but broadens the sources of ignition.
A CBS report puts the number of natural causes at 50%. Jörg Kachelmann already assumed deliberate arson in June 2023 in the Kölner Stadtanzeiger. At that time it burned in the east of the country and the smoke went as far as the USA.
Kachelmann also assumes humans are the cause of the increased number of wildfires in eastern Canada. He tweeted a satellite image of the fires on the east coast, showing the individual sources of fire. Within an hour, there had been fires in more than ten places, Kachelmann wrote. Thunderstorms could not be considered as the cause of the fires, because this did not correspond to the weather situation at that time.
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Kachelmann assumes deliberate arson and says it was also clear at the time where the smoke would travel, namely to the East Coast of the United States. ‘I have never seen such a mass arson and it is very intriguing,” Kachelmann commented further.’”
He even suspected arson to create certain images in the media. The ZDF reports in its foreign news “Auslandsjournal” about the fires and lets Zeke Hausfather come to word. He also mentions the last 3 La Nina years, which would have delayed an increase in warming. This is noteworthy because such natural climate forcings do not appear in many reports. Hausfather describes a mix as emissions by humans and such forcings as a combination. The program can be seen until November 23,2023 in the ZDF-Media archives.
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Please…stop trying to confuse me with facts. My mind is made up! It’s worse than we thought.
Herostratus is my favorite Greek arsonist.
Erudite reference. I had to look it up. Spot on.
Some nuanced facts. 86% of Canadian wildfires are in its northern boreal forest. This is both natural and necessary for the forest to regenerate itself (no different than lodgepole pine in the western US, and for the same reasons).
The number of fires, per the chart, is not unusual.
BUT the areal extent this year is a new Canadian record. And it is the extent that caused the US smoke issue that precipitated a lot of faux press ‘Climate Change’ coverage.
The record extent this year is not surprising, since this year was unusually dry in northern Canada. But that is just weather spun incorrectly as climate change.
any charts to the number of acres burned? seems like that is more important than the number of fires
Good question. I quickly found the answer (thru 2021) using googlefu at the Canadian National Fire Database (CNFDB), online at cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca. Previous high extent years were 1981, 1989, and 1995.
“As of July 2023, some 11.5 million hectares of land burned in Canada as a result of forest fires. This was the largest annual land loss due to wildfires since records started.” https://www.statista.com/statistics/553520/area-burned-of-forest-fires-canada/
Thanks. I should have tried that first. My bad, always going back to official stuff original source data first.
So records began less than 20 yrs back. What’s to the area 80-2000 or 60s-80s?
By comparison?
These charts are not up to date. They have been lopping off data for various reasons. Some time ago I found data back to 1950, but even that is not realistic. You need to go back over a hundred years to get a real picture. They have conveniently ignored the 1930’s in Canada. When they say “as far back as records go, what they are really saying is “as far back as we are showing today. There were many large fires in Canada and the USA around 1900 but are being ignored for sensationalism today.
In this post there are charts showing burn acreages in the USA in the 1930’s which are much larger than recently. I would expect similar results in Canada but they are deleted.
the author “Kimanachrichten” won’t make it through peer review..
At last, a graph that gioes back more than a quarter century.
It doesn’t matter what the conclusion is, whenever I see a graph of less than 30 years making assertions about clmate trends, I know it’s meaningless.
“It doesn’t matter what the conclusion is, whenever I see a graph of less than 30 years making assertions about clmate trends, I know it’s meaningless.”
Poor old Monckton, wasting his time all these years with his “no warming for 6, 8, 10 years….!” pronouncements.
You might have told him how meaningless it all was.
Monckton ?
I think the data goes back longer than that and it’s done by others for satellite derived data
He’s winding people up. And it works every time 😉
Still warmer for most of the last 10,000 years.
But don’t let facts get in the way of a brainless idiotic comment.
You never have before.
What that chart shows for me is that if you have several years or more of low acreage burnt then unless to you something about the unburnt combustible material you’re eventually going to get rid of it in a single shot.
Many areas in Europe, and presumably elsewhere, have a policy of putting out fires before they become wild. For example France has 12 Canadair waterbombers and 8 Dash 8-400 multi role airtankers to tackle fires. Which is fine, apart from the fact that little or nothing is done about the unburnt material. This goes on until eventually when conditions are right and an uncontrollable fire starts.
Those politicians and bureaucrats that allowed this to happen now say “it wasn’t us was Climate Boiling that done it”. To which the MSM nod sagely and never ask the question “If you knew about the potential for dangerous wildfires through Climate Armageddon why didn’t you get rid of the fuel?”
For the climate cult human emissions of co2 is CAUSING larger and more frequent fires via “ climatic conditions “. That we know is crap.
However increased co2 does have a relationship with increased greening of the earth. Increases in combustible areas may result in larger burned extent, following the ignition event such as arson, lightning strike, human error etc.
Yes. The number of fires tracks the number of ignition events, which isn’t so dependent on climate. Climate accentuates the consequence., Here, courtesy CFFC, is the area burnt:
“Climate accentuates the consequence.”
That’s your conclusion, Mr. Fake ID. I could just as easily say ” Justin Trudeau lying” accentuates the consequence and it would be just as bogus as your nonsense. Try getting acquainted with this.
Spurious Correlations (tylervigen.com)
The graph you provided contradicts your conclusion.
A graph of area over time was requested – I posted it.
And it shows that apart from this year’s WEATHER event, the trend is downwards.
The graph shows an unmistakable upward trend, even without this year’s data.
The highest years before now were 1989. 1994. 1995.
Lowest year was 2020.
And did you know that so far this year, the USA has its lowest fire area this century !
I do not think you understand what a trend is. There is variation year over year, but on average, the annual area burned is increasing. This is the long term trend fit by ordinary least squares regression, excluding the 2023 area:
This is the trend with 2023 included:
Both are positive.
A poor understanding of basic statistics seems to be a hallmark of people who wish to deny the reality of climate change.
Your trend looks tight, but lots of YOY ups and downs. I am overlooking the data source. Would you please point me to it?
“tight” s/b “right”.
Moderator, lose the silly “You’re posting too fast” edit blocker. Commenters of every stripe agree…
Agree!!!
The data source is the chart from CFFC Nick Stokes provided above, I just pulled the values from the chart (I’m sure the data is available for download from the CFFC website but I didn’t look).
Per Sam Jackson in Jackie Brown:
“I can do that”.
I don’t think these trends are statistically durable (I realize that you’re not making that claim). The 1983-2022 data trend has a ~16% chance of being flat or down. Even the 1983-2023 data trend has a ~3% chance of being flat or down. And I saw a couple of earlier years bars on another source that were high enough to flatten the trend even more.
But bigger pic, why has the acreage burned data not dropped? I’m sure that Canadian efforts to do limit acreage burned are much better now than in 1983.
The trend through 2023 is statistically significant at the 95% level, the trend through 2022 is not, but the trend is the trend. There is no chance that it could be down. Statistical significance tests only tell us what the probability of achieving the same trend in a series of random noise would be. In this case it’s pretty clear by eye that the very large burned areas in the 90s are contributing significantly to the variance, but the underlying gradual trend is otherwise obviously positive; i.e. setting those values equal to the mean of the surrounding years results in a trend that is highly significant for 1983-2022:
So you have a pretty steady upward trend with some really wild outliers (similar to 2023).
Acreage burned has not dropped because the area of burnable acreage is increasing due to climate change. You can get marginally better at preventing fires from spreading out of control, but that doesn’t mean you can stop the areas where fires can burn from spreading.
No, there is not “no” chance that it could be down. I gave you the chances. As does, bdgwx, I use linest. Then, I use norm,dist, with the evaluation point set to zero, and the mean and standard deviation from linest, to estimate the chance that the trend is flat/down. It’s an any free opencalc.
I am not a fire scientist, but your explain about increasing acreage burned v time makes sense.
The area burned increased this year because most fires did not affect human habitation or infrastructure and were allowed to burn, reducing the fuel load for coming years. Since most of Canada’s boreal forest is not inhabited fires are left to burn themselves out. Climate change has nothing to do with it.
That doesn’t explain the long term trend.
Put 1980 and 1981 values in that graph and see what happens.
What is the r^2 value and is the trend statistically significant at the 95% level?
The trend through 2023 is statistically significant at the 95% level, the trend through 2022 is not.
And of course we know just how much USA was burnt in the 1930s compared to now.. Wonder if Canada was the same. 😉
The image is blurry and difficult to read, but am I correctly seeing that this is area burned in the state of Oregon, not the entire US? At any rate, I think the graph you are attempting to cite is a common one around these parts from the US Forest Service. I made a video some time ago debunking myths around this dataset:
https://youtu.be/D4iqqn103Do?si=9Sy62SMgkbD4ra0w
Nobody cares about a video made by a rabid alarmists known for propaganda lies and deceits.
No response whatsoever? Disappointing, but very much expected. Thanks for playing, anyway, better luck next time.
What is the slope without this year’s data?
Nick you are cherry picking 1982 as the start date. The full record form the Canadian National Fire Database shows a declining trend from the full start of the record.
The trend over this period is positive as well:
Where did the data pre 1980 come from
The website that you linked.
Ok so an important question is why are they not showing the data pre 1980 on their front website? In the video you linked above, you describe the unreliable way of counting burned area. Maybe they think the same about the data pre 1980. Also this doesn’t prove that climate change is behind the increasing trend. Even the NYT admits that poor forest management is behind the increase.
Is playing a role.*
So, Nothing back to the 1930s.
OK !
No Nick, yet again you are pretending to be clueless about the difference between climate and weather.
CLIMATE shows a DECREASE !
One bad WEATHER event this year.
Look at your graph, then say that again.
Surely the area should be increasing each year if it’s climate _ the average of the weather
All the numbers show it’s weather realted not climate
Sorry, I posted my response to this in the wrong place, it’s further up in reply to MCourtney.
It’s an unfortunate fact that we had a real nice May here in Alberta meaning warm and dry vs cold and wet.
So everybody rushed out to the woods to take advantage and within a week there were 100 fires pretty much all caused by people and it was game over as it was too many all at once and most went out of control.
People need to use their bloody heads.
Near record low burned area in the United States should be mentioned. The United States is warmer than Canada so if global warming is causing massive wildfires up there, the wildfires down here should be even more catastrophic.
Except for Hawaii, ‘climate change’ burned California down a couple of years ago.
Yes, I should clarify: the lower 48 is seeing near record low burned area for the 2023 season. As for Maui, correct me if I’m wrong but they weren’t even in a drought to begin with so I’m not sure how ‘climate change’ could have been responsible for their tragedy.
The Maui ‘killer’ was explained by Cliff Mass here earlier in a copied post. Unusual conditions facilitated a ‘foehn’ to the west of the Maui mountains. That hot dry wind caused the damage. Weather, not climate.
Been watching the local bushland, (Hunter Valley NSW Australia), as have many other locals.
The dry grass, the thick scrubby undergrowth, and young eucalypt and wattle saplings.
Most agree it is only a matter of time.
Just hope an ignition source doesn’t happen at the same time as a strong westerly wind.
Less forest fires = more fuel loads
As a significant SW Wisconsin dairy farm owner in the Uplands, let me expand. My land was originally all prairie savannah. Meaning grasslands interspersed with gigantic fire resistant burr oaks, home to turkey, buffalo, and deer. Frequently ‘brushed’ by wild grassfires. Even in the now forested deep ravines.
The farming settlers came in circa 1860-1870, and suppressed all wildfires. My own farm log cabin hand hewn oak core dates to 1877.
So the savannah burr oaks did not reproduce from lack of fire, and most on my farm are now dying of old age, albeit their now hollow trunks now harboring many wild honey bee colonies… The only reason we don’t have wildfires now is farming.
On the other hand I have a down valley non-farming neighbor with a small cabin on about 100 acres. Every spring he control burns his total land trying to bring back a little remnant of his former savannah prairie.
Yes; in Wisconsin, boreal Canada, and just about everywhere the Pre-Contact condition was prairie and open woodland — which were maintained by frequent anthropogenic fire. The residents going back 12,000+ years burned their/our landscapes on a regular basis.
Paleo and Neolithic people around the world used landscape fire deliberately to enhance survival: they modified the local habitats with fire to produce more food, clothing, shelter, energy, and security.
After expert traditional practices (and practioners) were eliminated, the vegetation changed from prairie/woodland to dense thicket forest. Biomass (fuel) has accumulated to levels in excess of any prior in the Holocene (or during the Wisconsin glaciation where biomass was entirely absent). The record fuel load is largely contiguous across millions of acres, so when fires start they spread to ever greater extents.
It is somewhat humiliating that aboriginal indigenous primitives were smarter and more capable at landscape management than enlightened sophisticated intelligent moderns.
When your survival depends on knowing the local environment, you get very good at it.
I don’t know about other parts of the world, but in Australia many of the “old timers” learned a great deal from the local Aborigines.
Australian aboriginals’ agenda was to remove rainforest and increase the areas of eucalypt open forest, for many reasons.
they could not live in rainforest with no clothes or bedding because they were eaten alive by ticks, leeches and all the other nasties.
Spears and boomerangs didn’t work in dense rainforest so anytime the wind was blowing from dry forest to rain forest they would light up.
Cook reported in 1770 that the whole country was on fire.
Huge areas of rainforest were converted to dry forest.
Most of Australia is too dry for rainforest, but, yes, early explorers reported that much of the timbered country they travelled through was quite open.
Much of the former grass lands are now covered by scrub.
red flag checklist.
lets assume the majority of fires are human caused. arson, careless smokers
then we should not expect to see a CLIMATE signal in number of fires
but if we assume drought leads to bigger fires, then we might see a climate signal in area burned REGARDLESS of the etiology of ignition.
so lets see. no tricks endorses the site he used for data so
goose /gander
https://www.statista.com/statistics/553520/area-burned-of-forest-fires-canada/
but its only canadian wood. burn it all
Flag for comments to ignore because they are total balderdash.
Mosher. ! You know everything it posts is garbage
Climate shows a DECREASE in number of fires.
(need to go back 30 years, not moosh’s short term data.)
One event is WEATHER.
You do know arsonists wait for just the right conditions, don’t you moosh !!
—
“burn it all”
Just send it to Drax in the UK, hey moosh !
During the past two centuries, at least 40 droughts have occurred in western Canada with multi-year episodes being observed in the 1890s, 1910s, 1930s, 1960s, 1980s, and the early 2000s.
Drought is nothing unusual in Canada.
Great Lakes’ water levels have shown substantial variability during the 20th century with no evidence of a long-term trend.
Lower levels coincided with the droughts of the 1930s, early 1960s, and the recent 1999-2001 dry period.
Over the Prairies, the numbers and water levels of wetlands have shown no clear trend over the last 40 to 50 years.
CMI in aspen parkland.
DroughtCMIgraph_1140.gif (1140×655) (canada.ca)
The climate hasn’t changed but the FUEL load has. Biomass is alive; it has grown and accumulated.
Why do the climastric time series models neglect, ignore, fail to consider the increase in fuel as an explanatory variable? Plain as day, staring you in the face — It’s the fuels, stupid.
red flag list –
Bigger fires are usually the result of fuel load building up in the good season(s) before the inevitable drought.
That’s why grazing, browsing, or hazard reduction burns are so important.
Makes sense, but i’ve read they’re hard to pull off, given safety concerns in Aus, and safety/air pollution concerns here.
Unfortunately, there is lots of red and green tape.
The Rural Fire Service tends to do big enough hazard reduction burns to require a number of brigades on site. That requires more planning and coordination, hence a longer lead time. If weather conditions on the day aren’t suitable, the burn doesn’t happen, so it takes yet more planning and coordination to try again.
There also seems to be a tendency to attempt hazard reduction burns in late winter and spring, rather than late autumn and winter.
The National Parks and Wildlife Service handles it in National Parks, and they seem to be short of staff in the field.
Your comment seems reasonable to me. Goodness only knows why someone downvoted it.
Thanks. Spasmodic muscle memory from Little Balls of Hate. I care about as much as you and bdgwx….
As the saying goes, people can disagree without being disagreeable.
I learned to my cost many years ago that winning a flame war is a Pyrrhic victory, so try to chill out in these discussions.
Actually, I do care, a bit. Being in the green is nice, and trying to work out why a non-contentious comment was downvoted can cause pause for thought.
I read your posts. I can learn both better behavior and substantive info (as above) from you.
Thanks, Bob.
There’s enough BS being spread in all directions on the ‘net without me adding more. That doesn’t mean I don’t get things badly wrong sometimes, but I hope I learn from mistakes as well as the nuggets of good info which crop up now and again..
Alan has this data back to 1982, and Nick Stokes posted the graph. I aksed Alan for his data, as I’m overlooking it.
Only to 1982.. Unlike the US that goes back to the 1930s..
But no problem with the data used for this post, that goes back to 2000.
But thx for the US data, however dated. I’m curious about the most recent ~17 missing years. Think I’ll check it out.
I found this, quick look.
https://www.nifc.gov/fire-information/statistics/wildfires
It goes from 1983 – 2021, and I jetted 2004 because there was no North Carolina data.
~173,000 acres/year increase, with a standard error of ~30,000 acres/year. Meaning that there is essentially no chance that the trend is flat/declining. So, the burning question. Why a durable, increasing trend when our knowledge of fire control and our technology must be better than that nearly 40 years ago?
Not sure who statista is, but the exact same graph is located on the Government of Canada Website
They do as the name suggests. You can get a lot for free, and they claim more for $.
Since every thread in WUWT is functionally “open”, I would like to mention the surprise we got on our trans Canada, 40th wed year, camping quest in our (Canada built) Escape 5.0TA, 5 years ago. Unlimited free firewood, cut and for the taking was great. Didn’t even have to go to the main pile that much. Campsite leftovers a plenty…..
Big oily blob, looking for trans in Canada.
Why doesn’t that surprise me.
No “looking”. All we “found” were lousy service tippers. Except for Canadian oilfield trash. From working with them for many years in conflict areas, I know they throw money around just like fellow US oilfield trash.