Fort McMurray and the Fires of Climate Change - by Elizabeth Kolbert

According to a Forest Service report published last April, “Climate change has led to fire seasons that are now on average 78 days longer than in 1970.”  Over the past three decades, the area destroyed each year by forest fires has doubled, and the service’s scientists project that it’s likely to “double again by midcentury.”  A group of scientists who analyzed lake cores from Alaska to obtain a record of forest fires over the past ten thousand years found that, in recent decades, blazes were both unusually frequent and unusually severe.  “This extreme combination suggests a transition to a unique regime of unprecedented fire activity,” they concluded.

All of this brings us to what one commentator referred to as “the black irony” of the fire that has destroyed most of Fort McMurray.

The town exists to get at the tar sands, and the tar sands produce a particularly carbon-intensive form of fuel.  (The fight over the Keystone XL pipeline is, at its heart, a fight over whether the U.S. should be encouraging —or, if you prefer, profiting from—the exploitation of the tar sands.)  The more carbon that goes into the atmosphere, the warmer the world will get, and the more likely we are to see devastating fires like the one now raging.

To raise environmental concerns in the midst of human tragedy is to risk the charge of insensitivity.  Prime Minister Justin Trudeau alluded to this danger at a recent news conference:  “Any time we try to make a political argument out of one particular disaster, I think there’s a bit of a shortcut that can sometimes not have the desired outcome.”  And certainly it would be wrong to blame the residents of Fort McMurray for the disaster that has befallen them.  As Andrew Weaver, a Canadian climate scientist who is a Green Party member of British Columbia’s provincial legislature, noted, “The reality is we are all consumers of products that come from oil.”

But to fail to acknowledge the connection is to risk another kind of offense.  We are all consumers of oil, not to mention coal and natural gas, which means that we’ve all contributed to the latest inferno.  We need to own up to our responsibility, and then we need to do something about it.  The fire next time is one that we’ve been warned about, and that we’ve all had a hand in starting.

Read more at Fort McMurray and the Fires of Climate Change