"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 proble

"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.