270,000 people have been displaced by wildfires in France and Spain,
reports the Guardian. A wildfire even
forced evacuations in Scotland.
And wildfires "have now scorched four million acres of land in the U.S.,"
reports NPR, as tens of millions of people in North America "are continuing to endure hazardous smoke from out of control wildfires burning across Canada and the Western U.S."
At America's National Interagency Fire Center, NPR's wildfire correspondent says all of America's firefighting resources have now been deployed across the country. "So if we get another big fire, we're in trouble... International aid could be harder to come by if the situation in Southern Europe gets worse and firefighters are going to be needed there."
Meanwhile Toronto was blanketed this week "with eye-watering, cough-inducing soot," writes a climate-change reporter for the
Toronto Star newspaper, "briefly giving us the worst air quality in the world." But looking to the future after a wildfire that's 50% larger than any in Ontario's history (315,000 hectares or 778,331 acres), he had this to say about the eye-watering smoke. "It will be back." The article's headline warned of "Our smoke-filled future" and how Canada "must prepare for bigger wildfires, every summer — forever."
Even if global carbon emissions were cut dramatically, so long as any greenhouse gases are being put into the atmosphere, climate scientists say the world will continue to get hotter. And as the temperature rises, the forests dry out and the wildfires will get bigger, stronger and more frequent. "It's not going to get better. It's going to get worse," said Edward Struzik, a fellow with the Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy at Queen's University and the author of Dark Days at Noon: the Future of Fire . "These fires aren't going away. Toronto is going to get smoke every summer...."
The best solution would have been to dramatically cut emissions years ago. The harsh scientific reality is there's nothing we can do to stop wildfire smoke from blanketing cities for a few days every summer — and it's going to continue for decades to come. We're all going to need to buy air purifiers and masks and get used to it....
"The idea that we can thin our way through the boreal forest boggles the mind," [says Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, an independent non-profit research organization]. "There aren't enough people in Canada to do that." The boreal forest in Canada is an enormous and largely roadless expanse bigger than the entire European Union. In comparison, America's much smaller forests are criss-crossed by roads, making firefighter access much quicker and easier. And the nature of the forests is fundamentally different as well, said Hausfather, who wrote an article summarizing research on the subject. "Western U.S. forests have evolved for frequent low-level fires that burn out the undergrowth — usually every five to 30 years," he said. "Historically, before fire suppression, fires would burn through, and they wouldn't actually kill the trees. They'd just kill smaller trees and clear out the brush."
"The boreal forest is a fundamentally different beast," he said. "It's an ecosystem designed to burn." With smaller, more densely packed trees, the boreal is wetter and colder and doesn't burn anywhere near as often — every 100 to 200 years on average, Hausfather said. But when fire does erupt, it's often much more intense, burning up into the canopy and levelling everything in its path... Clearing out the dead wood on the ground wouldn't prevent, or even slow, the canopy fires that sweep the boreal, said Hausfather.
