Hotter and dryer means more conditions for fires. Hotter and wetter means more fuel for fires.
Above, Mike Flannigan PhD, of the University of Alberta.
At nine years old, Carter Vigh loved soccer, his friends, and dancing to music.
“He was just the kid that everybody wanted to hang out with, and he was always willing to make the time for anybody and willing to stand up for anyone that was being bullied or sad,” said Carter’s mom, Amber Vigh. “He was tiny but mighty.”
Carter also had asthma. The hot temperatures and dense wildfire smoke that enveloped the Vighs’ British Columbia home, 100 Mile House, in the summer of 2023 exacerbated his asthma and killed him.
Carter’s family did everything they knew how to do. They kept Carter inside on smoky days. They made sure he always had his inhaler. On the morning of his last day, they checked air quality measurements before taking him to summer camp. But they’d later learn that the air quality data they’d reviewed was coming from a sensor nearly 100 kilometers (62 miles) away from their home.
“The day that Carter died, if you had asked me up until about 4 o’clock that night, ‘How’s Carter?’ I would have told you he was great,” Vigh said.
Climate change likely played a role in Carter’s death. In a 2023 study, researchers found that recent extreme wildfire seasons in British Columbia were correlated with hot summers and high levels of evaporation. “It is likely that the potential for wildfire will continue to increase in the upcoming century, even under the most optimistic climate scenario,” the study’s authors wrote.
Carter was one of tens of thousands of people whose lives were cut short in extreme weather events in 2023. As climate change intensifies extreme weather, more deaths can be expected. But many lives can still be saved. Carter’s family has partnered with the BC Lung Foundation to improve education and install air pollution monitors across British Columbia.
“People need to realize how insane our climate has become and how dangerous it can be for people that have lung issues,” Vigh said.
It’s impossible to accurately calculate the number of people who died in 2023 as a result of climate change. But a review of data suggests that, at minimum, tens of thousands of people died in climate-change-influenced weather events around the world last year.
Deaths reported from extreme weather events like heat waves are almost always undercounts. For example, death certificates often list only causes of death such as heart failure, even if hot temperatures played a role.
Kristie Ebi studies the health risks of climate change at the University of Washington. Ebi said more accurate numbers can be generated by looking at excess deaths, a measure that compares the total number of deaths to the average number under normal circumstances. “You get these numbers of ‘X number of people died in a heat wave,’ and then you go and look at the number of excess deaths, and it’s like, no, that’s not really the case,” she said.
A field called attribution science can also be used to understand how climate change is contributing to extreme events, including those that hurt or kill people. The field aims to quantify how much the burning of fossil fuels supercharged a given heat wave, hurricane, wildfire, drought, flood, or other extreme weather event.
World Weather Attribution and Climate Central are leaders in producing and communicating climate attribution science. Combined, the two organizations analyzed 19 different weather events of 2023 to see whether the fingerprint of climate change was present. For 17 of those events, the answer was a clear yes. For the remaining two, limited data and high uncertainty meant the researchers couldn’t quantify the effect of climate change.
For six of those events, no official mortality data is available. Those events include an early heat wave in the Pacific Northwest and Western Canada that had high temperatures made five times more likely by climate change and a drought in Syria, Iraq, and Iran that would have been so much less severe without climate change that it wouldn’t have been classified as a drought at all.
Comprehensive data were also not yet available for 2023 heat waves in Europe, though French authorities reported that three out of every 100 deaths in the summer of 2023 resulted from heat. And a study of the 2022 European heat wave estimated that 70,066 people died. Temperatures in the summer of 2023 were even higher than the previous year.
When forest fire researcher Mike Flannigan looks ahead at what climate change means for wildfires in Canada, he doesn’t beat around the bush: “in a word, the future is smoky.”
Flannigan has been studying fire for over thirty years. He’s researched the key ingredients of destructive wildfires – fuel, ignition, and weather – all over the world. His work, and the work of hundreds of other researchers, shows that climate change is predicted to worsen all three ingredients across most of Canada, making global warming a triple threat to our forests.
When he considers what’s in store for Canada, Flannigan says simply that “There is a lot more fire in the future, and we better get used to it.” More and more Canadians are living, working, and playing in Canada’s forests. That means more people are likely to be affected by larger and larger fires – even catastrophic ones. “Was Fort McMurray a one-off?” Flannigan muses: “Heavens, no.”
To figure out what climate change means for forest fires in Canada, Flannigan and a team of researchers at the Canadian Forest Service analyzed the findings of almost 50 international studies on climate change and fire risk. [4] They found that our future looks “smoky” because climate change will worsen the three major factors that influence wildfire: having dry fuel to burn, frequent lightning strikes that start fires, and dry, windy weather that fans the flames.
Another recent study [5] by Flannigan and several other scientists predicts that western Canada will see a 50% increase in the number of dry, windy days that let fires start and spread, whereas eastern Canada will see an even more dramatic 200% to 300% increase in this kind of “fire weather.” Other studies predict that fires could burn twice as much average area per year in Canada by the end of the century as has burned in the recent past.
The type of fires seen this year in western Canada are in amounts scientists and computer models predicted for the 2030s and 2040s. And eastern Canada, where it rains more often, wasn’t supposed to see occasional fire years like this until the mid 21st century, Flannigan said.
If the Canadian east is burning, that means eventually, and probably sooner than researchers thought, eastern U.S. states will also, Flannigan said. He and Williams pointed to devastating fires in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, that killed 14 people in 2016 during a brief drought in the East.
America burned much more in the past, but that’s because people didn’t try to stop fires and they were less of a threat. The West used to have larger and regular fires until the mid-19th century, with more land settlement and then the U.S. government trying to douse every fire after the great 1910 Yellowstone fire, Williams said.
Since about the 1950s, America pretty much got wildfires down to a minimum, but that hasn’t been the case since about 2000.
“We thought we had it under control, but we don’t,” Williams said. “The climate changed so much that we lost control of it.”
