Wildfires have always happened, but the climate crisis is making them worse

As wildfires continue to ravage Canada and other countries around the world, many right-wing climate deniers continue to try to claim that fires have always happened and climate change has nothing to do with the devastation.

But those who deny the correlation ignore the fact that the issue isn’t that climate change is causing the fires. Rather, climate change is causing the fires that do break out to be more intense and spread faster and wider than in the past.

Kate Ervine, a professor in the global development studies department at Saint Mary’s University, says many impacts of climate change have an effect on the fire season.

“Looking at these things globally, whether it’s the wildfires, or the extreme heatwaves, or the droughts, or the flooding and record ocean temperatures, we’re seeing all these cascading events that are intensifying year on year,” Ervine said.

The fires, evacuations and damages in Nova Scotia in the spring were shocking to many residents of the province. Those fires were smaller than what is being experienced this week in British Columbia and the Northwest Territories, and what happened in Hawaii earlier this month.

“Obviously, this particular year looks a lot different than 10 years ago versus 20 years ago,” Ervine said.

She said ice core samples show that for about 800,000 years, levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere ranged from 170 to 300 parts per million, but that started to change 200 years ago at the dawn of the industrial age, when mankind started burning fossil fuels en masse.

On Monday, the levels in the atmosphere were 418 parts per million. Geological records show that the levels haven’t been that high in three to five million years.

“Fossil fuels are the primary source of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and stay there for hundreds to thousands of years, so the CO2 that was emitted during the industrial age, there’s a good chance it’s with us today, and what we’re burning in our coal-fired power plant today is going to be around for hundreds of years,” Ervine said. “It’s a cumulative problem.”

That’s why there won’t be an overnight change in terms of these extreme weather events. It takes time, Ervine said.

“As it accumulates in the atmosphere, we’re now starting to see the much more intense repercussions in terms of all the events we’re (experiencing).”

She said all extreme weather events are manifestations of the changing climate

“Climate change isn’t just about increasing temperatures, it’s also about more extreme variability, so you can have these droughts and drier temperatures that help fuel the wildfires we’re now seeing across Canada,” Ervine said. “This is an historic year in terms of the damage that we’re seeing, the fires we’re seeing, the evacuations, the wildfire smoke that people are dealing with.”

She said the various extremes cause more problems.

“With forests it’s not just drier temperatures and heat waves, which are super-significant. You also see more pest infestations, which weakens ecosystems and makes them less resilient in terms of the fires and biodiversity.”

No one is saying there haven’t been extreme weather events in the past, she said, but they’re getting more intense and more frequent, and that is connected to the warming climate from carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.

“Understanding that longer sweep of geological history, this is unprecedented. We’ve thrown ourselves completely out of whack of the conditions that allowed for the evolution of human civilization.”

That means past dependence on specific weather patterns for agriculture is affected because of the weather swings in extreme directions.

Ervine said there are other worrying signs, such as the ocean currents. Those are critical to regulating climate, but they may be slowing and eventually stopping.

“The deniers, they’ll always come back with something,” Ervine said. “For many of them, they’re not interested in informed debate.”

However, she said, when she’s out in the community she’s hearing more conversations about climate, and “it seems like the mainstream discussion of climate change is here now because people are seeing it and they’re feeling it.”