The massive fires, now in Canada, prove the impact of global warming, and that its outbreaks are not exclusively due to the inexperience of one type of ruler, nor to a political sign. The first Minister Justin Trudeautoday at the stake of the environmentalists, had sinned during the fires in the Amazon of wanting to act as a moral compass against Jair Bolsonaro, who then accused Biden, Macron and Trudeau himself, of “lashing out at Brazil all the time” assuring “that we don’t know how to deal with the Amazon.” Then, the Canadian prime minister had written on Twitter: “we need to act for the Amazon and act for our planet: our children and grandchildren are counting on us.”
His words come back as Boomerang: They accuse him today of favoring the Barrick Gold mining company, responsible for contaminating and plundering natural resources in various parts of the planet, while questioning the construction of a second line of the Trans Mountain pipeline (through the current pipeline some 300,000 barrels per day are transported of oil from Edmonton to Burnaby). AND they call him cynical by presenting in the midst of the fires a belated legislative project to declare a climate emergency.
Heating
“The ongoing wildfire season in Canada is a harbinger of our immediate climate future,” says Mohammadreza Alizadeh, a researcher at McGill University in Montreal and MIT. Research shows that climate change is primarily responsible for wildfires (according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association). By 2090, global wildfires are expected to increase in intensity by up to 57%, another United Nations report warned last year.
And Canada is on track to experience its most severe wildfire season on record, Canadian officials marked this week. The country has already seen a 1,400% increase in the normal amount of land burned for this time of year. More than 400 fires were burning across Canada last week. And hot, dry conditions are expected to persist through the end of the summer season in September.
According to Canada’s natural resources agency, by the end of the century, climate change could double the area burned by wildfires, with the loss of vast forests and a high cost to human safety, ecosystems and air quality, while time that threatens the supply of wood.
Unexpected. Both the intensity and the wide distribution of fires this year in Canada have surprised officials. Fires are burning in almost all provinces and territories. “The distribution of fires from coast to coast this year is unusual. At this time of year, fires generally occur on only one side of the country at a time, most often in the west,” Michael Norton, an official with Natural Resources Canada, told Reuters.
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the Institute for Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles, added that the research shows that there has already been a climate change-related increase in fire levels in western Canada. The fires have forced tens of thousands of people to evacuate their homes since May and have generated intense smoke that has degraded air quality hundreds of miles away in the United States, covering even New York. Marshall Burke, an associate professor of Earth System Science at Stanford University, noted that the smoke in New York was on a larger scale than anything seen in the past two decades.
Revive
This wave of outbreaks of fire in Canada comes anyway not without warnings. The anger with Trudeau is that another unprecedented fire season occurred two years ago: flames then destroyed an entire village as the nation hit its record temperature in a century. AND Greenpeace Canada He pointed out incredulously on Twitter that the Trudeau government advertised Canada’s Clean Air Day on June 7, while the authorities blamed climate change entirely, but without a more aggressive action plan to mitigate its effects. “The ongoing wildfires remind us that carbon pollution comes at a cost to our society as it accelerates climate change,” Steven Guilbeault, Canada’s minister for the environment and climate change, tweeted.
“Climate change makes forest fires more frequent and widespread. If we do nothing, this is our new reality,” the US senator replied on the same social network. Bernie Sanders. “It’s time to act,” she said. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez echoed: “We must adapt our food systems, energy grids, infrastructure, healthcare, etc. ASAP to prepare for what is to come and catch up with what is already here,” she tweeted.
The fires and resulting air quality emergencies occur when world officials gather at the Climate Change Conference Bonn Conference in Germany to assess progress on climate action and look ahead to the Cop28 United Nations climate talks. Relevant scenario but little determinant in front of the flames that are understood without control. he
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