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Permalink: https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/27/canada-2023-wildfires-carbon-emissions
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This is what scientists had been talking about for decades when they mentioned feedback loops. Once the fossil fuel driven climate change kicked into gear it would cause the natural world to start releasing massive amounts of additional carbon and greenhouse gases and triggering other big changes that we would have no control over. Increased forest fires, methane from under the former permafrost, ocean acidification. This stuff has all been discussed in the climate models since I was a child.
Tbf the carbon emissions from road transport represent about 12% It is definitely a part of the problem but other sectors have greater impact . Energy is the biggest contributor, especially Coal, nat gas and oil which represents about 73% of total emissions (road transport being part of that 73%) Also deforestation/Agriculture plays a crucial role. What surprised me was Global shipping at below 2%, I thought they would have a greater impact. Here is an older chart I found:
[https://ourworldindata.org/images/published/Emissions-by-sector-%E2%80%93-pie-charts_1302.png](https://ourworldindata.org/images/published/Emissions-by-sector-%E2%80%93-pie-charts_1302.png)
12% is still a great deal of carbon that we can lower. If the world wasn't so car dependent, we wouldn't have that high of a % and cities would be cooler in general
Hence why I said it is part of the problem but not as significant as other parts and if we aren’t tackling those other carbon contributors, driving all electric cars (which by the way still have a larger carbon footprint than most people would like to admit) will be a futile attempt. Of course, as you pointed out, 12% is still a decent number so anywhere we can cut out emissions matters, but one area is not gonna do anything if we are not willing to make actual changes across the board. We ought to rethink the way we do agriculture, the way we consume which drive our industry. Also keep in mind that, that 12% is ALL road transport which a big part of it is tie to the supply chain and our consumer demand/habits. If I remember right, personal transport/vehicle represents something like 3% of the total carbon emissions. Which is a drop in a bucket. One of the big problem I see is how industries “off set” their carbon emissions but buying carbon credits and claiming they are “green or zero emissions” when they are still polluting and nothing has changed really. They just paid for a section of forest that convert carbon to oxygen and somehow that has solved the problem. It’s ridiculous.
>What surprised me was Global shipping at below 2%
The majority of global shipping is done by actual ships, and benefit from the economy of scale. It takes a lot less to push a single large ship through the water than it takes to force things into the air. Buoyancy reduces the impact of gravity, so in a pure physics sense it's usually going to be somewhat efficient. Weather and waves have an impact, but they also impact other forms of transit.
Of course, the number is more complex than just the factors relating to the ships. Most of these figures are very complex. That's why it's been so simple and effective for the industries that profit from emissions to delay or avoid society from doing anything about it.
Ya it’s definitely complex and maritime shipping is probably the most efficient way to keep our global supply chain going. I was just saying this knowing that a Panamax container ship burns on average 63,000 gallons of diesel per day. With the number of ships going around I was under the impression their carbon footprint was more than that.
And yet people will say this isn't a problem caused by the feedback loops, it was "gonna happen anyway" so we shouldn't do anything about it because we can't control it.
It's not happening.
It's happening but humans didn't cause it.
It's happening and humans caused it but there's nothing we can do about it. <--- we are here.
Well, some people are there. Others are still back on earlier steps. Either way, the end conclusion is "let's doom our grandkids so we don't have to make any changes"
The difference is that trees are apart of the modern carbon system. Burning fossil fuels introduces carbon that wasn’t in the atmosphere for hundreds of millions of years.
> The difference is that trees are apart of the modern carbon system.
Trees are not apart of the modern carbon system They are most definitely part of it.
Canada has over half the land area of pluto, most of it hundreds or thousands of km from the nearest human. There are like 90,000 lakes up there with no names. It's so remote its like trying to fight fires on the moon. Once that stuff gets going there's not much that can be done.
Like in the states there are people everywhere. In Canada there are just enormous areas with nobody. No roads, no nothing, no way to fight the fires.
People don't seem to get this. I was a wilderness guide for a couple of decades in northern Ontario. I remember once I took a group of American geologists out to a site they were surveying and they thought they could just like pop off to town on the weekend. Fellas, you took multiple small planes and three days of bushwhacking to get here....where do you think you think town is?
I was in areas in the Yukon that no one had set foot on in at least 25 years. The only sign people had ever been there was a crashed plane from the 70s. The only way to get there was a 45 minute helicopter flight from Fort Liard, NWT.
I remember driving through the Yukon to get to Alaska, about 20 years ago. There was a town that had a sign which read "Population: 13" and a little shack with a gas pump outside. Another sign warned you that it was hundreds of miles to the next gas stop, so you need to fill up here.
I had a bit of an existential crisis when I realized what that meant. For hundreds of miles, there was literally nothing but wilderness in any direction. If something went wrong with the vehicle, my survival would depend almost entirely on someone else happening by and deciding to help.
I was on vacation in the UK once, and I ended up talking to a local in Cardiff. He was all about hiking and camping, and he talked about how he dreamed about canoeing the Mackenzie River. I was like, "well, that's awesome, tons of planning and prep needed for that." He seemed a little confused by that.
I got to talking about how there would be times where he would be literally hundreds of kilometres from the nearest human being, the need to worry about the wildlife like bears and wolverines, and the amount of gear required, and he seemed a bit taken aback. I think that he was thinking of it in terms of going for a weekend in Snowdonia, and the idea of it being a multi-week expedition where it'd be very challenging to get help if help was needed wasn't something that he expected.
I think it shouldn't be feared in the sense of never doing it, but it should be feared in the sense of needing adequate preparation to survive. But these experiences build confidence and character (if survived)!
Yup. I'm Canadian, and I drove through North Dakota a few years ago. Obviously it's still remote, and sparsely populated, but there were still towns every so often, and I felt if we got stranded I could still walk to somewhere. I haven't been to the most remote places of my province, but there are places where there is one road and that's it.
I remember when my Swiss cousin visited because he wanted to go moose hunting. Him and my dad drove for nearly 14 hours, slept, and drove another 5 hours to set up the camp. They shot the moose after carrying a canoe from that camp for 3 hours and navigating a river for another 4. They were over 24 hours away from the nearest hospital, and had to rely on a satellite phone to call a helicopter ambulance to find them in case of emergency.
The look on my cousin's face when we told him he was only somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of the way to the northern most point of Québec (if you could go in a strait line) was priceless.
Just saying, comparing the land area of Canada to that of Pluto is unlikely to be helpful. Not that many people have a lot of hands-on experience with Pluto.
I agree. I think a more useful comparison is that Canada has a little less than 1 and a half times the surface area of Saturn’s second largest moon, Rhea.
> Even if that were true, planets vary radically in size. It's not a useful piece of information.
On the contrary. It helps very much in helping me picture how small Pluto is.
My buddy works in the wildfire fighting services. They mostly use water bombers from the air.
The Irony was his town and the airport he was working out of had to be evacuated due to fires and he had to leave by land.
90,000 lakes isn't that much. Manitoba alone has more than 100,000 lakes. Hell my family has one named after our family as a reward from the government and we probably weren't the only ones.
But yea, massive amount of land that is uninhabited. Also very low population in proportion to the amount of land.
I will probably never see it in my life and I doubt few if any will either. The only idea I have of it's appearance is from a certificate for it, and looking it up on online maps. So I have no clue but I would rate it a 1 out of 10 for it's extremely remote location, and harsh weather.
Too bad they didn't include the graphics i've seen earlier today about it in collapse sub. It's not only 4 times of all planes, it's 4-5 times more than any other year before in Canada and emissions obliberated the previous record at a time with usually zero total emissions from wildfires.
Also these now are unfathomable large numbers. Just Canada wildfires alone was like ~~1.5%~~ 9.5% of anthropogenic global emissions, if that would increasing everywhere on this scale (and it inevitably will probably sooner than later), these emissons may easily counter any progress on our side just on their own.
Em good catch that i've overseen. On a second glance, the emissions in the graphic i saw were in million metric tons, not in CO2 equivalent. So the number i wrote above needs to be multiplied by 6.5
Well that explains why I haven't heard much about it.... I'm on the other side of the country. Usually I can tell its a bad season by looking out the window.
OK but a natural event versus things we can change is rather different.
Also these fires are caused by the intense temperatures and lack of rainfall from global warming.
Forest management can do a lot to reduce the chance of large uncontrolled wildfires. I can't speak for Canada, but in the United States there is a backlog of controlled burns that need to be done. They frequently get opposed by misguided people who grew up hearing about stopping wildfires from Smokey the Bear.
There’s also the problem of the conditions window for controlled burns shrinking. California at least got a reprieve from that the last couple winters but the trend will resume
That's true. Even in the colder seasons in Colorado we see such high winds that it's not possible to do a controlled burn. The Marshall fire happened in December of all times.
Would also add to it is that the US can't do nearly enough controlled burns to protect all of their towns either. Canada 1,5% more land while having only 12% of the population.
Large swaths of unpopulated land with no roads, and no infrastructure. It's not possible to manage these forests. Load up google maps, and look and look around in the northern territories.
Or Canada could just rake it's forests!
Controlled burns are highly weather dependent. In Canada the most hectares burned by prescribed fires in a year since the 80s was about 11,000 hectares. The '23 wildfires burned 16,500,000 hectares. Controlled burns can help protect towns and such, by they aren't going to do a damned thing to alleviate the kind of fires that are happening now.
I mean, according to google Canada has over 350 million hectares of forest
a low population with a population that is concentrated to a pretty narrow part of the country makes doing that harder
Exactly this. People are going to cling that this is worse than us so what we do doesn't matter. No. That's not how it works.
Natural things occur and produce emissions, yes. Can we decrease our own emissions, yes. Are our emissions contributing to the natural ones, yes, we know this.
It's never an "either or", it's much more nuanced than that and we should control the things we can or else the things we can't control are going to get worse.
"Nearly 85 percent* of wildland fires in the United States are caused by humans. Human-caused fires result from campfires left unattended, the burning of debris, equipment use and malfunctions, negligently discarded cigarettes, and intentional acts of arson."
https://www.nps.gov/articles/wildfire-causes-and-evaluation.htm
Doesn't the total carbon emission just even out when the burned area grows back in 15-20 years, and new trees sequester the same volume that was released?
> Doesn't the total carbon emission just even out when the burned area grows back in 15-20 years, and new trees sequester the same volume that was released?
Of course. It's the CO2 that's being released from fossil fuels that's the problem.
Last summer was the first time I experienced wildfire smoke in the northeast USA, where the smoke was from Canada. Also apparently the smoke blew to the UK?
I love the outdoors and its going to be depressing to see what happens in the future in terms of global warming.
I live on Vancouver Island.
Between the fires local on the island, California/Oregon, mainland BC and Alberta fires we've had yellow skies several (most? all?) of the last few years.
I joke we need to find out where the local production shot in "Mexico" is because they forgot to turn off the yellow filters when they closed up filming.
Last year's smoke (Southern Ontario) persuaded me to purchase a small Air Quality Monitor online. I checked the monitor frequently, especially when outdoors (or indoors with windows open). When my eyes were irritated and/or the monitor showed an AQI rose to the high moderate zone over 100, I went indoors and/or closed the windows.
The monitor is quite accurate when I compared my reading with online monitors in the area.
If you're in a fairly constant zone with high smoke and/or respiratory issues , I suggest considering purchasing a monitor or checking for nearby online AQI monitors.
[https://www.airnow.gov/](https://www.airnow.gov/)
Also useful are smoke sites:
[https://firesmoke.ca/forecasts/current/](https://firesmoke.ca/forecasts/current/)
The difference is that the vegetation will grow back and create a similar carbon sink relatively quickly.
India burning fossil fuels is a one-way carbon trip to planet hell.
It baffles me that we were able to agree on CFCs, International Space Station, Nuclear treaties, COVID pandemic and mass vaccination, even things like getting rid of lead or cocaine, but fail to act with same urgency on climate crisis. I am not saying there were no disagreements on these topics, but we were able to move ahead with a clear action plan after discourse at the very least. On this, it's whether doomsday scenario or absence of a problem.
Others would argue that the climate crisis is "overheated" by other powerful elites trying to establish a basis for tightening the screws on the social control their own power relies on.
If fighting power dynamics is your underlying principle then....
We are in a feedback loop. We need to desperately fight it but world leaders are trash people.
Billions will starve and quality of life will degrade for everybody.
Irrelevant or barely relevant to global warming. This carbon was already in the atmospheric carbon cycle. It would have been released via decay, or another fire at some point in the near future. C02 from fossil fuel however is pulled up from stable, long term sequestration.
BC has a major concern that many of our forests will turn to grasslands due to heat, fires, and dryer weather's. This will result in less overall Co2 being stored in our forests
https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/environment/natural-resource-stewardship/nrs-climate-change/applied-science/2e_va_forested_ecosystems_finalaug30.pdf
I'd say it's more than barely relevent, if climate change leads to more forest fires which leads to less forest land then that means less carbon is stored in the "buffer" which means more carbon is stored in the atmosphere.
It won't drive climate change but it will raise the PPM ceiling so to speak. I.e X emmisions = 400ppm when full forest land vs X emmisions = 450ppm when fire ravaged forest land. Same amount of carbon released by humans, different amount chilling in the atmosphere, more heating effect.
It's not irrelevant, because the carbon is in the atmosphere *right now*. The carbon cycle had a consistent balance of forests burning and regrowing for a long time, and so the *increase* in the burning we're seeing now (due to climate change) will increase the amount of carbon that's floating in the atmosphere, since the regrowth time isn't speeding up.
The forests are now burning faster, but they're not growing back faster. And as forest fires increase in intensity, it can become harder for the forests to rebound after.
Maybe short term, but still a buffer. Haven't/can't do the modelling but it seems to me that a sudden release of this carbon will be additional fuel for the positive feedback.
Geo engineering seems the only way forward, we will lose the ice cap reflectance and have even more co2 from forest fires etc. The positive feedback loop is happening.
Yes but Canada is vastly forested and its generated pollutions is more than offset by the growth and sequestering caused by natural ecosystem and tree growth. Stop and reduce logging and giving trees away for free by having high cutting fees instead of carbon taxing.
>Scientists at the World Resources Institute and the University of Maryland calculated how devastating the impacts of the months-long fires in Canada in 2023 that sullied the air around large parts of the globe. They figured it put 3.28bn tons (2.98 metric tons) of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air, according to a study update published in Thursday’s Global Change Biology. The update is not peer-reviewed, but the original study was.
>The fire spewed nearly four times the carbon emissions as airplanes do in a year, study authors said. It’s about the same amount of carbon dioxide that 647m cars put in the air in a year, based on US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data.
Paper: [Extreme wildfires in Canada and their contribution to global loss in tree cover and carbon emissions in 2023 | Environmental Change Journal | Wiley Online Library](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.17392)
The Australian bushfires of 2019-20 pumped out 830 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent. They were absolutely massive and went for months. So the Canadian fires produced almost 4x more?
I remember reading somewhere that wildfires are actually beneficial to the ecosystem as a whole (forests grow back stronger afterwards). And that they occur less often than their natural cycle since we intervene so much to stop them, also resulting in more violent wildfires.
Guys... I hate to be a buzzkill here... But trees are carbon neutral. They pull carbon out of the air during their lives and put it all back when they die by decomposition or by burning. If burning trees somehow added more carbon into the carbon cycle, earth would have cooked long before our species even came about. This article is misleading at best, and by engaging and falling for such pseudoscientific sensationalism, we're doing the fight against climate change a great disservice, both in it's reputation and by encouraging resources to be diverted to things that won't make a difference.
The problem is forests don’t necessarily regrow these days because of global warming. Many transform from rainforests to grasslands due to the heat and lack of moisture
That's a separate problem, and not for the forests that this article talks about. If a climate becomes unsuitable for forest, then the loss of that forest is already baked in, whether it dies by fires or time. Moreover, as much as there are places where it won't regrow, there are places that will become forests that weren't previously, which is already happening rapidly in Canada's North as temperature and rainfall increase. But counting these new forests as sequestered carbon to offset our emissions (which some provinces and forestry companies do)would be misleading, again due to the carbon cycle. Likewise, counting burns as emissions. The amount of carbon in the cycle is the real problem, not which form it's currently in. It's like a lazy river. If you want to prevent flooding, making dams along the lazy river to hold back the flow is futile, because the flow is circular. What you need to do is turn off the garden hose that's pouring into it.
But it'a ok because it was biofire. Like biofuel. As long as it's from a 'clean source' it isn't emitting.
What do you mean it's still dirty? Did the corn ethanol fuel lobby group lie to me?
Okay, but how much did the forests absorb when they weren't burning? Burn trees but don't repurpose the land and they'll grow back, absorbing as much carbon as they released.
Ya it's like putting water restrictions on watering your lawn, when home owners use less than 10% of the water.
Look at California. About 8% usage for urban areas (homes) while the rest is used by agriculture and commercial corporations.
Yet the people growing rice which requires flooding fields in water in a drought are ignored by the government.
https://calmatters.org/environment/water/2024/03/california-farms-water-conservation/
So arsonists that started multiple fires in Quebec, Nova Scotia, and northern Alberta should have received more jail time. Got ya. Legit would make sense so people don't exacerbate the problem ON PURPOSE.
[https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/17/climate/canada-conspiracy-theorist-arson-wildfires-intl/index.html](https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/17/climate/canada-conspiracy-theorist-arson-wildfires-intl/index.html)
[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/18/man-charged-canada-largest-wildfire-ever-nova-scotia](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/18/man-charged-canada-largest-wildfire-ever-nova-scotia)
> MacCarthy and colleagues calculated that the forest burned totaled 29,951 sq miles (77,574 sq km), which is six times more than the average from 2001 to 2022. The wildfires in Canada made up 27% of global tree cover loss last year, usually it’s closer to 6%, MacCarthy’s figures show.
> <...>
> Flannigan, Bendix, Tyukavina and MacCarthy all said climate change played a role in Canada’s big burn. A warmer world means more fire season, more lightning-caused fires and especially drier wood and brush to catch fire “associated with increased temperature,” Flannigan wrote. The average May to October temperature in Canada last year was almost 4 degrees (2.2 degrees Celsius) warmer than normal, his study found. Some parts of Canada were 14 to 18 degrees (8 to 10 degrees Celsius) hotter than average in May and June, MacCarthy said.
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This is what scientists had been talking about for decades when they mentioned feedback loops. Once the fossil fuel driven climate change kicked into gear it would cause the natural world to start releasing massive amounts of additional carbon and greenhouse gases and triggering other big changes that we would have no control over. Increased forest fires, methane from under the former permafrost, ocean acidification. This stuff has all been discussed in the climate models since I was a child.
Exactly, wait till the media figures out how much is released from melting perma frost.
Careful! Wouldn’t want to be alarmist!! That’ll only make me have to buy a bigger ram
1994 white one
3500 duallies
Tbf the carbon emissions from road transport represent about 12% It is definitely a part of the problem but other sectors have greater impact . Energy is the biggest contributor, especially Coal, nat gas and oil which represents about 73% of total emissions (road transport being part of that 73%) Also deforestation/Agriculture plays a crucial role. What surprised me was Global shipping at below 2%, I thought they would have a greater impact. Here is an older chart I found: [https://ourworldindata.org/images/published/Emissions-by-sector-%E2%80%93-pie-charts_1302.png](https://ourworldindata.org/images/published/Emissions-by-sector-%E2%80%93-pie-charts_1302.png)
12% is still a great deal of carbon that we can lower. If the world wasn't so car dependent, we wouldn't have that high of a % and cities would be cooler in general
Hence why I said it is part of the problem but not as significant as other parts and if we aren’t tackling those other carbon contributors, driving all electric cars (which by the way still have a larger carbon footprint than most people would like to admit) will be a futile attempt. Of course, as you pointed out, 12% is still a decent number so anywhere we can cut out emissions matters, but one area is not gonna do anything if we are not willing to make actual changes across the board. We ought to rethink the way we do agriculture, the way we consume which drive our industry. Also keep in mind that, that 12% is ALL road transport which a big part of it is tie to the supply chain and our consumer demand/habits. If I remember right, personal transport/vehicle represents something like 3% of the total carbon emissions. Which is a drop in a bucket. One of the big problem I see is how industries “off set” their carbon emissions but buying carbon credits and claiming they are “green or zero emissions” when they are still polluting and nothing has changed really. They just paid for a section of forest that convert carbon to oxygen and somehow that has solved the problem. It’s ridiculous.
The joke is that white dodge rams seem to be the choice vehicle for climate change deniers.
>What surprised me was Global shipping at below 2% The majority of global shipping is done by actual ships, and benefit from the economy of scale. It takes a lot less to push a single large ship through the water than it takes to force things into the air. Buoyancy reduces the impact of gravity, so in a pure physics sense it's usually going to be somewhat efficient. Weather and waves have an impact, but they also impact other forms of transit. Of course, the number is more complex than just the factors relating to the ships. Most of these figures are very complex. That's why it's been so simple and effective for the industries that profit from emissions to delay or avoid society from doing anything about it.
Ya it’s definitely complex and maritime shipping is probably the most efficient way to keep our global supply chain going. I was just saying this knowing that a Panamax container ship burns on average 63,000 gallons of diesel per day. With the number of ships going around I was under the impression their carbon footprint was more than that.
Ahhh Ram, the choice of drunken drivers everywhere
2014, the peak of excellence
> That’ll only make me have to buy a bigger ram I think my computer's already maxed out.
It's the methane that's trapped under there that is the big problem, at least in the short term.
Plus all the fun old diseases that are hibernating in permafrost
Oh, they know. That news doesn't sell ads or sway voters.
And yet people will say this isn't a problem caused by the feedback loops, it was "gonna happen anyway" so we shouldn't do anything about it because we can't control it.
It's not happening. It's happening but humans didn't cause it. It's happening and humans caused it but there's nothing we can do about it. <--- we are here. Well, some people are there. Others are still back on earlier steps. Either way, the end conclusion is "let's doom our grandkids so we don't have to make any changes"
That's why I'm taking the grandkids out of the equation, end of the line.
Damn, pops, you don’t have to kill them!
It's the same group of people who spent decades denying it was even happening. Anything to avoid taking responsibility for the problem.
that's just god's will bro
[удалено]
“You’re all gonna burn”
The difference is that trees are apart of the modern carbon system. Burning fossil fuels introduces carbon that wasn’t in the atmosphere for hundreds of millions of years.
> The difference is that trees are apart of the modern carbon system. Trees are not apart of the modern carbon system They are most definitely part of it.
Can't we just mine giant ice cubes from asteroids and drop one into the ocean every now and then?
But hasn't the GOP outlawed climate change? That should be enough to get it to stop, right?
What’s the current rate of change of events like this? Is there a ratio where it accelerates?
Oh look feedback loops!
Canada has over half the land area of pluto, most of it hundreds or thousands of km from the nearest human. There are like 90,000 lakes up there with no names. It's so remote its like trying to fight fires on the moon. Once that stuff gets going there's not much that can be done. Like in the states there are people everywhere. In Canada there are just enormous areas with nobody. No roads, no nothing, no way to fight the fires.
People don't seem to get this. I was a wilderness guide for a couple of decades in northern Ontario. I remember once I took a group of American geologists out to a site they were surveying and they thought they could just like pop off to town on the weekend. Fellas, you took multiple small planes and three days of bushwhacking to get here....where do you think you think town is?
I was in areas in the Yukon that no one had set foot on in at least 25 years. The only sign people had ever been there was a crashed plane from the 70s. The only way to get there was a 45 minute helicopter flight from Fort Liard, NWT.
I remember driving through the Yukon to get to Alaska, about 20 years ago. There was a town that had a sign which read "Population: 13" and a little shack with a gas pump outside. Another sign warned you that it was hundreds of miles to the next gas stop, so you need to fill up here. I had a bit of an existential crisis when I realized what that meant. For hundreds of miles, there was literally nothing but wilderness in any direction. If something went wrong with the vehicle, my survival would depend almost entirely on someone else happening by and deciding to help.
I was on vacation in the UK once, and I ended up talking to a local in Cardiff. He was all about hiking and camping, and he talked about how he dreamed about canoeing the Mackenzie River. I was like, "well, that's awesome, tons of planning and prep needed for that." He seemed a little confused by that. I got to talking about how there would be times where he would be literally hundreds of kilometres from the nearest human being, the need to worry about the wildlife like bears and wolverines, and the amount of gear required, and he seemed a bit taken aback. I think that he was thinking of it in terms of going for a weekend in Snowdonia, and the idea of it being a multi-week expedition where it'd be very challenging to get help if help was needed wasn't something that he expected.
That would make me so nervous. I’m a healthy young-ish man but just being away from civilization like that would make me feel so weird.
I think it shouldn't be feared in the sense of never doing it, but it should be feared in the sense of needing adequate preparation to survive. But these experiences build confidence and character (if survived)!
I agree. I’ve really only done it a few times in my life and each time I walk away thinking “that was rad”
Yup. I'm Canadian, and I drove through North Dakota a few years ago. Obviously it's still remote, and sparsely populated, but there were still towns every so often, and I felt if we got stranded I could still walk to somewhere. I haven't been to the most remote places of my province, but there are places where there is one road and that's it.
I remember when my Swiss cousin visited because he wanted to go moose hunting. Him and my dad drove for nearly 14 hours, slept, and drove another 5 hours to set up the camp. They shot the moose after carrying a canoe from that camp for 3 hours and navigating a river for another 4. They were over 24 hours away from the nearest hospital, and had to rely on a satellite phone to call a helicopter ambulance to find them in case of emergency. The look on my cousin's face when we told him he was only somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of the way to the northern most point of Québec (if you could go in a strait line) was priceless.
In the US the furthest away from a road anywhere you can go is like 10 miles
Hello Alaska. How have you been?
My bad, the contingent US
Just saying, comparing the land area of Canada to that of Pluto is unlikely to be helpful. Not that many people have a lot of hands-on experience with Pluto.
I agree. I think a more useful comparison is that Canada has a little less than 1 and a half times the surface area of Saturn’s second largest moon, Rhea.
Thanks, a perspective I can get.
Pluto is a planet.
Even if that were true, planets vary radically in size. It's not a useful piece of information.
> Even if that were true, planets vary radically in size. It's not a useful piece of information. On the contrary. It helps very much in helping me picture how small Pluto is.
No it's not.
My buddy works in the wildfire fighting services. They mostly use water bombers from the air. The Irony was his town and the airport he was working out of had to be evacuated due to fires and he had to leave by land.
DOH. Stupid Canada, and their stupid pretty forests. We should burn down the works.
the metro population of Tokyo is roughly the same, and at times is larger than all of Canada. Meanwhile Canada is roughly the size of Europe.
90,000 lakes isn't that much. Manitoba alone has more than 100,000 lakes. Hell my family has one named after our family as a reward from the government and we probably weren't the only ones. But yea, massive amount of land that is uninhabited. Also very low population in proportion to the amount of land.
Weird flex, but ok
Not really a flex, it was nothing I did. Also relatively meaningless with the amount of lakes.
What would you rate the lake out of 10?
I will probably never see it in my life and I doubt few if any will either. The only idea I have of it's appearance is from a certificate for it, and looking it up on online maps. So I have no clue but I would rate it a 1 out of 10 for it's extremely remote location, and harsh weather.
no no no the 90,000 is just unnamed in total it's estimated Canada has more lakes than the rest of the world
Not surprised but that's a fact I didn't know.
Too bad they didn't include the graphics i've seen earlier today about it in collapse sub. It's not only 4 times of all planes, it's 4-5 times more than any other year before in Canada and emissions obliberated the previous record at a time with usually zero total emissions from wildfires. Also these now are unfathomable large numbers. Just Canada wildfires alone was like ~~1.5%~~ 9.5% of anthropogenic global emissions, if that would increasing everywhere on this scale (and it inevitably will probably sooner than later), these emissons may easily counter any progress on our side just on their own.
weird, I definitely would have thought India’s fossil fuel use was more than 1.5% at this point
Em good catch that i've overseen. On a second glance, the emissions in the graphic i saw were in million metric tons, not in CO2 equivalent. So the number i wrote above needs to be multiplied by 6.5
Yeah that makes more sense!
I'm curious to see how offset it was by the west coast having relatively low fire numbers that year.
Well that explains why I haven't heard much about it.... I'm on the other side of the country. Usually I can tell its a bad season by looking out the window.
Positive feedback loop
If only scientists could have warned us about this in the 1970’s.
They warned us about it in the 1800s
And nobody listened, right? Because we chose not to believe it.
OK but a natural event versus things we can change is rather different. Also these fires are caused by the intense temperatures and lack of rainfall from global warming.
Forest management can do a lot to reduce the chance of large uncontrolled wildfires. I can't speak for Canada, but in the United States there is a backlog of controlled burns that need to be done. They frequently get opposed by misguided people who grew up hearing about stopping wildfires from Smokey the Bear.
There’s also the problem of the conditions window for controlled burns shrinking. California at least got a reprieve from that the last couple winters but the trend will resume
That's true. Even in the colder seasons in Colorado we see such high winds that it's not possible to do a controlled burn. The Marshall fire happened in December of all times.
I think you might be underestimating how large the Canadian boreal forest is
Too much land compared to the US national parks/forests. No way they can regularly do controlled burns for thousands of square miles
Would also add to it is that the US can't do nearly enough controlled burns to protect all of their towns either. Canada 1,5% more land while having only 12% of the population.
The problem is that they don't do many controlled burns in the US in the first place or adequate forest management in general.
Large swaths of unpopulated land with no roads, and no infrastructure. It's not possible to manage these forests. Load up google maps, and look and look around in the northern territories.
Or Canada could just rake it's forests! Controlled burns are highly weather dependent. In Canada the most hectares burned by prescribed fires in a year since the 80s was about 11,000 hectares. The '23 wildfires burned 16,500,000 hectares. Controlled burns can help protect towns and such, by they aren't going to do a damned thing to alleviate the kind of fires that are happening now.
yeah we’ll get right on raking thousands of square kilometres of forest
I mean, according to google Canada has over 350 million hectares of forest a low population with a population that is concentrated to a pretty narrow part of the country makes doing that harder
Rather different, but still a positive feedback loop initiated by our actions.
Exactly this. People are going to cling that this is worse than us so what we do doesn't matter. No. That's not how it works. Natural things occur and produce emissions, yes. Can we decrease our own emissions, yes. Are our emissions contributing to the natural ones, yes, we know this. It's never an "either or", it's much more nuanced than that and we should control the things we can or else the things we can't control are going to get worse.
"Nearly 85 percent* of wildland fires in the United States are caused by humans. Human-caused fires result from campfires left unattended, the burning of debris, equipment use and malfunctions, negligently discarded cigarettes, and intentional acts of arson." https://www.nps.gov/articles/wildfire-causes-and-evaluation.htm
Doesn't the total carbon emission just even out when the burned area grows back in 15-20 years, and new trees sequester the same volume that was released?
> Doesn't the total carbon emission just even out when the burned area grows back in 15-20 years, and new trees sequester the same volume that was released? Of course. It's the CO2 that's being released from fossil fuels that's the problem.
Last summer was the first time I experienced wildfire smoke in the northeast USA, where the smoke was from Canada. Also apparently the smoke blew to the UK? I love the outdoors and its going to be depressing to see what happens in the future in terms of global warming.
The smoke caused upheval in Portugal too. They sent volunteers and aircraft to help. Big thanks to the people of Portugal.
I live on Vancouver Island. Between the fires local on the island, California/Oregon, mainland BC and Alberta fires we've had yellow skies several (most? all?) of the last few years. I joke we need to find out where the local production shot in "Mexico" is because they forgot to turn off the yellow filters when they closed up filming.
Last year's smoke (Southern Ontario) persuaded me to purchase a small Air Quality Monitor online. I checked the monitor frequently, especially when outdoors (or indoors with windows open). When my eyes were irritated and/or the monitor showed an AQI rose to the high moderate zone over 100, I went indoors and/or closed the windows. The monitor is quite accurate when I compared my reading with online monitors in the area. If you're in a fairly constant zone with high smoke and/or respiratory issues , I suggest considering purchasing a monitor or checking for nearby online AQI monitors. [https://www.airnow.gov/](https://www.airnow.gov/) Also useful are smoke sites: [https://firesmoke.ca/forecasts/current/](https://firesmoke.ca/forecasts/current/)
The difference is that the vegetation will grow back and create a similar carbon sink relatively quickly. India burning fossil fuels is a one-way carbon trip to planet hell.
Yeah, any forest fire is by definition carbon neutral as long as the forest eventually grows back.
Welcome to the inflection point
Good luck trying to explain this to any right wing cult member.
Yeah right wing is very pro forest fires.
Framing it as national blame isn't helpful. The Canadian wildfires will happen again, within and outside of Canada.
It baffles me that we were able to agree on CFCs, International Space Station, Nuclear treaties, COVID pandemic and mass vaccination, even things like getting rid of lead or cocaine, but fail to act with same urgency on climate crisis. I am not saying there were no disagreements on these topics, but we were able to move ahead with a clear action plan after discourse at the very least. On this, it's whether doomsday scenario or absence of a problem.
Fixing this issue includes stifling a *massive* part of the economic engine that the people with power rely on.
Others would argue that the climate crisis is "overheated" by other powerful elites trying to establish a basis for tightening the screws on the social control their own power relies on. If fighting power dynamics is your underlying principle then....
We are in a feedback loop. We need to desperately fight it but world leaders are trash people. Billions will starve and quality of life will degrade for everybody.
Irrelevant or barely relevant to global warming. This carbon was already in the atmospheric carbon cycle. It would have been released via decay, or another fire at some point in the near future. C02 from fossil fuel however is pulled up from stable, long term sequestration.
BC has a major concern that many of our forests will turn to grasslands due to heat, fires, and dryer weather's. This will result in less overall Co2 being stored in our forests https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/environment/natural-resource-stewardship/nrs-climate-change/applied-science/2e_va_forested_ecosystems_finalaug30.pdf
I'd say it's more than barely relevent, if climate change leads to more forest fires which leads to less forest land then that means less carbon is stored in the "buffer" which means more carbon is stored in the atmosphere. It won't drive climate change but it will raise the PPM ceiling so to speak. I.e X emmisions = 400ppm when full forest land vs X emmisions = 450ppm when fire ravaged forest land. Same amount of carbon released by humans, different amount chilling in the atmosphere, more heating effect.
It's not irrelevant, because the carbon is in the atmosphere *right now*. The carbon cycle had a consistent balance of forests burning and regrowing for a long time, and so the *increase* in the burning we're seeing now (due to climate change) will increase the amount of carbon that's floating in the atmosphere, since the regrowth time isn't speeding up. The forests are now burning faster, but they're not growing back faster. And as forest fires increase in intensity, it can become harder for the forests to rebound after.
Maybe short term, but still a buffer. Haven't/can't do the modelling but it seems to me that a sudden release of this carbon will be additional fuel for the positive feedback.
This is what we call "Feedback loops".
Geo engineering seems the only way forward, we will lose the ice cap reflectance and have even more co2 from forest fires etc. The positive feedback loop is happening.
Nature is already gearing to cook humanity, no need to help make it worse.
Sorry, let me just go tell the forest fires to keep it down this year.
Yes but Canada is vastly forested and its generated pollutions is more than offset by the growth and sequestering caused by natural ecosystem and tree growth. Stop and reduce logging and giving trees away for free by having high cutting fees instead of carbon taxing.
A process has been set in motion that we cannot influence. We're left to spin the damn wheel.
>Scientists at the World Resources Institute and the University of Maryland calculated how devastating the impacts of the months-long fires in Canada in 2023 that sullied the air around large parts of the globe. They figured it put 3.28bn tons (2.98 metric tons) of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air, according to a study update published in Thursday’s Global Change Biology. The update is not peer-reviewed, but the original study was. >The fire spewed nearly four times the carbon emissions as airplanes do in a year, study authors said. It’s about the same amount of carbon dioxide that 647m cars put in the air in a year, based on US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data. Paper: [Extreme wildfires in Canada and their contribution to global loss in tree cover and carbon emissions in 2023 | Environmental Change Journal | Wiley Online Library](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.17392)
The Australian bushfires of 2019-20 pumped out 830 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent. They were absolutely massive and went for months. So the Canadian fires produced almost 4x more?
I remember reading somewhere that wildfires are actually beneficial to the ecosystem as a whole (forests grow back stronger afterwards). And that they occur less often than their natural cycle since we intervene so much to stop them, also resulting in more violent wildfires.
Generally yes, there is a natural fire cycle and some plants are dependant on it. Too much fire is not as good as it has other impacts.
Guys... I hate to be a buzzkill here... But trees are carbon neutral. They pull carbon out of the air during their lives and put it all back when they die by decomposition or by burning. If burning trees somehow added more carbon into the carbon cycle, earth would have cooked long before our species even came about. This article is misleading at best, and by engaging and falling for such pseudoscientific sensationalism, we're doing the fight against climate change a great disservice, both in it's reputation and by encouraging resources to be diverted to things that won't make a difference.
The problem is forests don’t necessarily regrow these days because of global warming. Many transform from rainforests to grasslands due to the heat and lack of moisture
That's a separate problem, and not for the forests that this article talks about. If a climate becomes unsuitable for forest, then the loss of that forest is already baked in, whether it dies by fires or time. Moreover, as much as there are places where it won't regrow, there are places that will become forests that weren't previously, which is already happening rapidly in Canada's North as temperature and rainfall increase. But counting these new forests as sequestered carbon to offset our emissions (which some provinces and forestry companies do)would be misleading, again due to the carbon cycle. Likewise, counting burns as emissions. The amount of carbon in the cycle is the real problem, not which form it's currently in. It's like a lazy river. If you want to prevent flooding, making dams along the lazy river to hold back the flow is futile, because the flow is circular. What you need to do is turn off the garden hose that's pouring into it.
I don't think there are rainforests in Canada
They have both temperate and coastal rainforests. The misconception here is that only tropical rainforests are rainforests
But it'a ok because it was biofire. Like biofuel. As long as it's from a 'clean source' it isn't emitting. What do you mean it's still dirty? Did the corn ethanol fuel lobby group lie to me?
yes, but wood burned today is not fossil.
Okay, but how much did the forests absorb when they weren't burning? Burn trees but don't repurpose the land and they'll grow back, absorbing as much carbon as they released.
Yup, we’ve started the cyclic nature of global warming, w whist have to hope for a cataclysmic volcanic eruption to cool things off for a while
So you are saying, it was bad with all the deliberate human generated stuff, and the accidental stuff made it worse? Color me amazed.
Just wait until data comes out about how much emission the constant rocket launches are creating.
Good job to the hard working arsonists
Yeah set intentionally.
Meanwhile my car would fail inspection if I had a rust pinhole in the exhaust
Ya it's like putting water restrictions on watering your lawn, when home owners use less than 10% of the water. Look at California. About 8% usage for urban areas (homes) while the rest is used by agriculture and commercial corporations. Yet the people growing rice which requires flooding fields in water in a drought are ignored by the government. https://calmatters.org/environment/water/2024/03/california-farms-water-conservation/
So arsonists that started multiple fires in Quebec, Nova Scotia, and northern Alberta should have received more jail time. Got ya. Legit would make sense so people don't exacerbate the problem ON PURPOSE. [https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/17/climate/canada-conspiracy-theorist-arson-wildfires-intl/index.html](https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/17/climate/canada-conspiracy-theorist-arson-wildfires-intl/index.html) [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/18/man-charged-canada-largest-wildfire-ever-nova-scotia](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/18/man-charged-canada-largest-wildfire-ever-nova-scotia)
it’s a natural disaster for a reason, can’t control that
> MacCarthy and colleagues calculated that the forest burned totaled 29,951 sq miles (77,574 sq km), which is six times more than the average from 2001 to 2022. The wildfires in Canada made up 27% of global tree cover loss last year, usually it’s closer to 6%, MacCarthy’s figures show. > <...> > Flannigan, Bendix, Tyukavina and MacCarthy all said climate change played a role in Canada’s big burn. A warmer world means more fire season, more lightning-caused fires and especially drier wood and brush to catch fire “associated with increased temperature,” Flannigan wrote. The average May to October temperature in Canada last year was almost 4 degrees (2.2 degrees Celsius) warmer than normal, his study found. Some parts of Canada were 14 to 18 degrees (8 to 10 degrees Celsius) hotter than average in May and June, MacCarthy said.
See guys, see! Global warming isn’t created by humans, it’s the planet naturally! *Super Smug Face*
Dude stuff don't give Trudeau any ideas... he's gonna give us a forest fire carbon tax