Those wildfires – some background

Leave a CommentThose wildfires – some backgroundCommentary

Wildfires in Canada and California will keep getting worse, and neither side’s favorite explanation — “bad forest management” (right) or “climate change” (left) — tells the whole story, argues “Dr. Platimus”.

The real argument he says is that many forests are naturally adapted to burn, and fire has shaped landscapes for hundreds of millions of years. Active management — controlled burns, harvesting, fuel reduction — is how humans have historically kept those natural cycles from becoming catastrophic, and it worked well for decades. But that progress stalled in part due to legal challenges from environmental groups, especially Sierra Club v. Bosworth (2007), which made it easier for a single rare species finding to block fuel-reduction projects under NEPA/ESA-style reviews.

The result, he argues, is bigger, more destructive fires — ironically undermining the ecosystems and climate outcomes these lawsuits aim to protect (citing Canada’s 2023 wildfires as a top global carbon source despite its small population).

Shut it with the climate alarmism

A new data-driven analysis is challenging the popular narrative that climate change is fueling Ontario’s wildfires through rising heat and drought. The analysis comes from Chris Martz, a meteorologist known for digging into raw observational data rather than relying on model projections or secondhand talking points. Pulling records from over a century of Canadian weather stations, he found no evidence of a meaningful long-term increase in heatwave frequency — if anything, the past six decades have seen slightly fewer heatwave days than the preceding fifty years, and the shift isn’t statistically significant. While the past several years stand out, he cautions against treating a short recent stretch as proof of a lasting trend rather than normal year-to-year swings.

The drought picture tells a similar story. Cross-referencing decades of drought severity data with modern monitoring standards turned up no significant worsening trend — and even a notable decline in the most extreme drought category, a recent spike notwithstanding.

The takeaway: claims linking Ontario’s wildfires to worsening heat and drought don’t survive contact with the long-term observational record, regardless of how sound the underlying physics of warming may be in theory — a reminder that in a field crowded with model-based forecasting, Martz’s willingness to build datasets from scratch and test claims directly against the numbers stands out.

It’s not all about Forestry but it might be about priorities

There are ~9,000 times as many trees in Canada as people. Most of the forest is highly inaccessible, far from any towns or roads. Any kind of large-scale active forest management is unrealistic in Canada, and firefighting is mostly limited to the small portion near inhabited areas. These forests are of a type typically referred to as “fire climax forests”. That means they grow to maturity until natural forest fires regularly and periodically sweep through them, destroying the young, weak, diseased, and dead trees, while clearing out understory shrubs.

A good time to remember – Follow the Money

Alarmism and keeping us (especially the youth) scared have worked out well for many.