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What happened in Alberta was just a couple weeks of warm weather after a fairly cold winter. The timing was right when new growth hadn't had a chance to take ho

What happened in Alberta was just a couple weeks of warm weather after a fairly cold winter. The timing was right when new growth hadn't had a chance to take hold so all the dry grass and tinder was perfect fuel. The rap attack helicopter crews were dismantled in both BC and Alberta to save a few millions at best. Easily doubled the size of the burn area not having this capability. This is normal but not new. Alberta has had larger amounts burned and the trend is down. The 1920's to 1940's were the worst in recorded history. Accurate measuring of what was burned has improved each decade too. Earlier in the record much was not included.

op00to 3y ago
The problem isn’t just the fire. It’s the strange weather patterns that bring smoke down to areas that have never seen conditions like that. Was the warm ocean keeping the jet stream from its typical shape?
- swader999 3y ago
  Smoke in New York from Canadian boreal fires happened in the May 2010 fire and the May 1870 Saguenay fire. In 1870 parts of Europe were covered in smoke from the Canadian fire. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguenay_Fire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguenay_Fire
  - ip26 3y ago
    1870, 2010, 2023, ????
    - _ea1k 3y ago
      1870, 2010, 2023, 2146, ????
      - runarberg 3y ago
        So what is you point here? That warming planet is not likely to increase the rate of New York suffering smokes? Honestly this would put New York in a pretty special place as forest fires are set to increase a lot, and smokes are expected to distribute in higher density to wider areas. This is pretty observable on the West Coast already, where we have a brand new Smoke Season in the early to late autumn in the Pacific North West. But realistically New York will not be this lucky, and the chances of the next smokes coming as distantly apart as per-industrialization is probably close to 0. I’m not a climate scientist but I bet we will for sure see several more smokes coming to New York before the end of the century (just like we have on the West Coast in the past 5 years).
        _ea1k 3y ago
        My point is that sequences like that are insufficient to draw conclusions.
        runarberg 3y ago
        Maybe so, but I don’t think your parent was drawing any conclusions, just pointing out the very likely scenario that these smokes will happen with increased frequency, or at least, that’s how I understood it.
- bequanna 3y ago
  These weather patterns aren’t new or all that strange. This set of conditions periodically occur over time. The difference is that now people have hyper awareness of uncommon but normal weather events. Cue confirmation bias.
  - op00to 3y ago
    The Omega Block is a "strange" weather pattern compared to the usual configuration of the jet stream. It is unusual and surprising. I didn't say it was new, rare, or uprecedented. It's possible for a weather event to be "normal" (something we see from time to time) but also triggered or more likely ehanced by anthropogenic climage change. Hurricanes aren't anything new, and devastating hurricanes earlier and later in the season aren't even "new". The fact that we've seen it before doesn't mean that humans aren't making it worse. It doesn't need to be raining locusts for things to be really messed up.
    - bequanna 3y ago
      > It doesn't need to be raining locusts for things to be really messed up. Fair enough, but what is the metric for calling something "due to climate change"? Because it seems to me that currently the blame for every drop of rain that falls above (or below) average is directly ascribed to the evil people in the suburbs driving their cars.
      - op00to 3y ago
        Right, well. In that case, I suppose we shouldn't do anything at all. The issue isn't that something is "due to climate change". This is a false choice: "either it's due to climate change, or it's not". The extra energy in the atmosphere doesn't pick and choose where to apply itself. Every weather pattern is affected by climate change. Everything has its gain knob turned up a little more each year.
    - letsawaytoday 3y ago
      [flagged]
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
"Just a couple weeks of warm weather" is precisely the problem though; it's hot dry weather at a time of year when this historically does not happen. The problem is that the statistical variance of events is going crazy. It's not that there's some sudden break and the temperatures are unilaterally higher, it's that the plot drawing the standard deviation in temperatures (and precipitation) now looks much crazier than it did in the past, and this leads to this kind of unpredictable situation with severe consequences. And so we'll continue to have "plausible deniability" among some of the corelation of any of these things to climate change, despite the statistical modeling so clearly showing that they're tied together. No sane person is saying we're only getting forest fires because of climate change. We're saying forest fires are incrementally more frequent or severe or unpredictable because of it. I grew up in the 70s and 80s in one of the areas (Parkland County) that had severe fires this year, and this is not an area traditionally affected directly by this scale of fire. My parents live 5 minutes from a town that was evacuated (Entwistle). Some people in their church had their whole house & barn incinerated. It's not a remote highly forested area, it's heavily settled and a mix of farmland and some wooded areas and bush. In my childwood did we didn't have April and May temperatures like this. In fact, summer time... July, August... temperatures rarely went above 25c-28c, let alone up into near 30c with no precipitation in the end of April. Snow was on the ground often into last week of April at least. And often still is. Further west on HWy 16, Edson, Hinton, and down in David Thomson country, and the areas in the eastern foothills, sure, that's always had fairly high fire risk. But what is unique about this spring is the way these fires were brought much closer to settled areas, and how they occurred so early in the season.
- swader999 3y ago
  It's hard to find decent data on Alberta but here's Canada: https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/ha/nfdb https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/ha/nfdb Hard to find a trend in that and if you go back eighty more years we are about two thirds less area burned than in the 20's to the 40's. Mapping of area burned has become better every decade too.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    I'm not sure how meaningful stats are from the 20s to 40s given the forested vs populated area of the country was so massively different. There was simply more forest to burn. FWIW my great-grandparents cleared their farm in Alberta (Innisfail area) from bush/forest in the 20s. Huge areas that are just wide open heavily settled farm fields now were aspen parkland and forest.

op00to 3y ago

The problem isn’t just the fire. It’s the strange weather patterns that bring smoke down to areas that have never seen conditions like that. Was the warm ocean keeping the jet stream from its typical shape?

swader999 3y ago
Smoke in New York from Canadian boreal fires happened in the May 2010 fire and the May 1870 Saguenay fire. In 1870 parts of Europe were covered in smoke from the Canadian fire. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguenay_Fire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguenay_Fire
- ip26 3y ago
  1870, 2010, 2023, ????
  - _ea1k 3y ago
    1870, 2010, 2023, 2146, ????
    - runarberg 3y ago
      So what is you point here? That warming planet is not likely to increase the rate of New York suffering smokes? Honestly this would put New York in a pretty special place as forest fires are set to increase a lot, and smokes are expected to distribute in higher density to wider areas. This is pretty observable on the West Coast already, where we have a brand new Smoke Season in the early to late autumn in the Pacific North West. But realistically New York will not be this lucky, and the chances of the next smokes coming as distantly apart as per-industrialization is probably close to 0. I’m not a climate scientist but I bet we will for sure see several more smokes coming to New York before the end of the century (just like we have on the West Coast in the past 5 years).
      - _ea1k 3y ago
        My point is that sequences like that are insufficient to draw conclusions.
        runarberg 3y ago
        Maybe so, but I don’t think your parent was drawing any conclusions, just pointing out the very likely scenario that these smokes will happen with increased frequency, or at least, that’s how I understood it.
bequanna 3y ago
These weather patterns aren’t new or all that strange. This set of conditions periodically occur over time. The difference is that now people have hyper awareness of uncommon but normal weather events. Cue confirmation bias.
- op00to 3y ago
  The Omega Block is a "strange" weather pattern compared to the usual configuration of the jet stream. It is unusual and surprising. I didn't say it was new, rare, or uprecedented. It's possible for a weather event to be "normal" (something we see from time to time) but also triggered or more likely ehanced by anthropogenic climage change. Hurricanes aren't anything new, and devastating hurricanes earlier and later in the season aren't even "new". The fact that we've seen it before doesn't mean that humans aren't making it worse. It doesn't need to be raining locusts for things to be really messed up.
  - bequanna 3y ago
    > It doesn't need to be raining locusts for things to be really messed up. Fair enough, but what is the metric for calling something "due to climate change"? Because it seems to me that currently the blame for every drop of rain that falls above (or below) average is directly ascribed to the evil people in the suburbs driving their cars.
    - op00to 3y ago
      Right, well. In that case, I suppose we shouldn't do anything at all. The issue isn't that something is "due to climate change". This is a false choice: "either it's due to climate change, or it's not". The extra energy in the atmosphere doesn't pick and choose where to apply itself. Every weather pattern is affected by climate change. Everything has its gain knob turned up a little more each year.
  - letsawaytoday 3y ago
    [flagged]

cmrdporcupine 3y ago

"Just a couple weeks of warm weather" is precisely the problem though; it's hot dry weather at a time of year when this historically does not happen. The problem is that the statistical variance of events is going crazy. It's not that there's some sudden break and the temperatures are unilaterally higher, it's that the plot drawing the standard deviation in temperatures (and precipitation) now looks much crazier than it did in the past, and this leads to this kind of unpredictable situation with severe consequences. And so we'll continue to have "plausible deniability" among some of the corelation of any of these things to climate change, despite the statistical modeling so clearly showing that they're tied together. No sane person is saying we're only getting forest fires because of climate change. We're saying forest fires are incrementally more frequent or severe or unpredictable because of it. I grew up in the 70s and 80s in one of the areas (Parkland County) that had severe fires this year, and this is not an area traditionally affected directly by this scale of fire. My parents live 5 minutes from a town that was evacuated (Entwistle). Some people in their church had their whole house & barn incinerated. It's not a remote highly forested area, it's heavily settled and a mix of farmland and some wooded areas and bush. In my childwood did we didn't have April and May temperatures like this. In fact, summer time... July, August... temperatures rarely went above 25c-28c, let alone up into near 30c with no precipitation in the end of April. Snow was on the ground often into last week of April at least. And often still is. Further west on HWy 16, Edson, Hinton, and down in David Thomson country, and the areas in the eastern foothills, sure, that's always had fairly high fire risk. But what is unique about this spring is the way these fires were brought much closer to settled areas, and how they occurred so early in the season.

swader999 3y ago
It's hard to find decent data on Alberta but here's Canada: https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/ha/nfdb https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/ha/nfdb Hard to find a trend in that and if you go back eighty more years we are about two thirds less area burned than in the 20's to the 40's. Mapping of area burned has become better every decade too.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  I'm not sure how meaningful stats are from the 20s to 40s given the forested vs populated area of the country was so massively different. There was simply more forest to burn. FWIW my great-grandparents cleared their farm in Alberta (Innisfail area) from bush/forest in the 20s. Huge areas that are just wide open heavily settled farm fields now were aspen parkland and forest.