Eastern US primed for fires.
This is a postcard from the future.
The fires we have seen in the west in recent decades, could well be coming to Eastern North America, as climate change makes for favorable conditions. The implications are serious, considering much higher population densities.
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.
I remember when living in New England how people looked forward to the amazing reds and yellows of trees at this time of year. This is like a cruel prank on the concept.
Canada has an awful lot of boreal forest – scroll down for their map on this page:
https://natural-resources.canada.ca/our-natural-resources/forests/sustainable-forest-management/boreal-forest/13071
Add in the ability of fires, in the right conditions, to get down into the duff and smolder over the winter. Here from a 2017 headline in the Edmonton Journal: “Fort McMurray — After 458 days, the Horse River fire that destroyed thousands of homes and scattered tens of thousands of people across Canada is finally dead. ”
According to the article, it hadn’t flared again for most of that time, but it was being hunted down by tracking warm spots of ground and digging in to extinguish embers in the carbon-rich soil. Wildfire fighting is going to be a growth employer globally, and anyone who thought masking in public was gone with the end of the worst of the pandemic hadn’t experienced the smokes last year in the Eastern US from fires in Canada and the US West.
Between the ridiculously crap pay and the burnout (NPI) from stress and overwork, they’ll probably have a hard time getting people to fill those roles.