Unless you’ve been away from all screens this past week, you’ve likely seen the videos of America’ Northeast covered in layers of ash-filled smoke, the product of wildfires in the Canadian province of Quebec. These apocalyptic images of a smoke-shrouded New York City skyline and the endless air quality alerts have given climate alarmists yet another occasion to point to current events partially driven by weather and declare in somber tones that this is what climate change looks like.
But is that the truth? Are large swaths of Quebec on fire because of anthropogenic climate change?
Even the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has hesitated to connect wildfires with climate change. Instead, the IPCC has chosen to emphasize “fire weather,” not the fires themselves.
“[Fire weather is] weather conditions conducive to triggering and sustaining wildfires, usually based on a set of indicators and combinations of indicators including temperature, soil moisture, humidity and wind. Fire weather does not include the presence or absence of fuel load,” The IPCC notes in its Sixth Assessment Report.
However, the IPCC’s reticence to blame wildfires on climate change alone hasn’t stopped climate hysterics from claiming that the darkened skies in the Northeast are a forerunner of a much darker wildfire future when it comes to climate change.
Vermont Independent Senator Bernie Sanders chimed in breathlessly on Twitter: “I hope my colleagues in Washington are breathing in the air and finally waking up to the reality that if we don’t act boldly to address climate change we won’t be leaving much of a planet for future generations.”
Not to be outdone over her signature issue, New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat, used the smoky New York sky to shill for her Green New Deal.
“Between NYC in wildfire smoke and this [supposedly life-threatening heat in Puerto Rico], it bears repeating how unprepared we are for the climate crisis,” AOC tweeted. “We must adapt our food systems, energy grids, infrastructure, healthcare, etc ASAP to prepare for what’s to come and catch up to what is already here.”
Other left-wing politicians also sounded the climate change alarm in discussing Canada’s wildfires.
“Climate change is not a hoax,” said New York Democratic Representative Adriano Espaillat on the House floor. “We’re not only seeing the haze from these fires, we’re also feeling it in our very own lungs.”
Fellow New York Democratic Senator Charles Schumer likewise connected the Canadian wildfires with what he called “the climate crisis.”
“The climate crisis is real and it is here to stay,” Schumer said in a pitch to send more American resources to battle the Canadian blazes. “We must take action against the climate crisis both short term and long term. Short term: this morning I’m calling on [Agriculture] Secretary Tom Vilsack to double the number of forest service personnel deployed to fight these fires in Canada.”
Of course, this is the modus operandi for the climate cult. Glom onto a dire situation (or even a situation that can be spun to appear dire) and spin it as a climate change-induced emergency, whether the climate has anything to do with it or not.
The fact of the matter is, over the long haul, wildfires have decreased greatly from their historical highs in the United States. Even the U.S. federal government’s own data prove that the number and scale of wildfires have decreased dramatically since the 1930s. Wildfires in the United States destroyed more than 50 million acres in 1930. There has been an uptick in fires in the past decade in the U.S., but that can be attributed largely to forest mismanagement by the federal government.
The same can be said for Canada, although the 2023 season, having started so early, is so far on pace to be one of the worst fire seasons in the nation’s history.
Part of the reason for that is because 20th-century fire suppression techniques have allowed vast amounts of fuel to build up in heavily forested areas. In a more natural ecosystem, wildfires are an integral part of forest management, with such kindling burning off periodically.
“There’s three things that make wildfires possible. It’s the right conditions, fuel load and an ignition source. All that kindling that’s built up, that adds to the fuel load,” said H. Sterling Burnett on Watts Up With That’s Climate Change Roundtable. “In part that’s why wildfires have become so large in recent years.”
So, due to the buildup of fuel for the fires — dead trees and other forest detritus — in Quebec, it was inevitable that large fires would occur eventually in the region. But, of course, that’s not the headline, and so much of America — and the world in general — doesn’t read beyond the headlines.
Fear sells and, because that’s true, politicians such as AOC, Sanders, and Schumer, who have relatively little knowledge of the wildfires in Canada, need only to show the shrouded New York skyline to insinuate that it’s climate change-related, even though evidence strongly suggests otherwise.
