Worsening wildfire seasons the new normal

‘Climate anxiety’ is at an all-time high in Canada

“How’s the smoke in Ottawa?” I texted my friend early Wednesday morning. “It’s so bad,” came the response. “Climate anxiety is at an all-time high. It feels apocalyptic.”

Ottawa’s Air Quality Health Index, a measure of the health risk floating by on the breeze at a given hour, was off the charts at 6 a.m., measuring 28 out of 10. Local hospitals were already seeing a surge in patients.

It’s hard to ignore climate change when it’s scratching the back of your throat and making it hard to breathe.

The smoke spreading through eastern Ontario was coming from Quebec, where 149 active fires were burning as of Wednesday afternoon, mostly out of control. Federal officials counted 414 blazes across the country, with 239 raging uncontrollably.

In Canada, the wildfire season typically spans April to October and peaks in July. On average, more than 8,000 fires occur annually, burning about 2.1 million hectares across the country. This year, more than 3.8 million hectares of forest have already been torched.

Wildfires aren’t unusual in Canada. They’re key to clearing dead leaf litter from the forest floor to allow new growth and to return nutrients to the soil.

Some pine trees can’t reproduce unless fire melts the resin in their cones and releases the seeds.

But climate change has exaggerated the wildfire season. Severe drought, hot weather and low humidity are drying out vegetation and leaving landscapes more vulnerable to ignition. Dry, windy weather allows fires to burn longer and hotter and to spread. And lightning strikes, which ignite half of all wildfires in Canada, are increasingly frequent.

A few years ago, researchers found the wildfire season had already lengthened by two weeks since 1959, beginning a week earlier and lasting a week longer.

Extreme heat over Eastern Canada and Quebec in late May helped sparked the fires we’re smelling today. Climate change made those high temperatures three to five times more likely, according to the U.s.-based non-profit Climate Central.

Fires are also becoming less predictable. They’re burning through the night, upsetting their long-established “active day, quiet night” pattern as drought conditions persist. By mid-century, Canada could see twice as much wildland area consumed by fire due to human-caused climate change.

I stayed inside with my windows shut, studying the National Wildfire Smoke Model’s projections. Its map showed oxblood pixels, evidence of extremely high levels of fine particulates, staggering counterclockwise from the fires in Quebec, over Lake Ontario and into the United States. As the animation ticked through to the end on Saturday morning, the air over Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal began to clear up. Then black pixels erupted again in northern Quebec and the animation reached its end.

Tools like this can warn us of the health risks that come with climate change, but they can only do so much. It would be far better if wildfires weren’t raging out of control in the first place. Decades from now, after focused efforts to eliminate carbon emissions, the wildfire season might return to something resembling the past. But for many of us, the smoke will seep into spring and fall, for the rest of our lives.