Right now, eastern North America sits under a blanket of choking smoke and an eerie orange haze more appropriate to the surface of Mars. Authorities must determine what locations might be vulnerable in the future, writes Brian Banks in Opinions.
for the same period is 1,624 fires and 254,429 hectares burned — about 13 times less. Mike Flannigan, a fire sciences professor at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia, points out that this year’s strong early fire season even includes Northwest Territories, where snow cover typically delays large outbreaks until later.
It’s a theme that connects Canada’s current wildfire season with a global trend: evident in Britain in 2022, where wildfire destroyed homes in London for the first time; during Australia’s epic bush fires in 2019, which burned millions of hectares of vegetation, including in the Gondwana rainforest, where fire was rare; and in recent fires on the Oregon coast in 2020, where it’s typically too moist to burn.
Clearly, many people in places that never had to think about wildfire before need to start doing so now.In the United States, the greatest increase in future wildfire threat will be — perhaps counterintuitively — in the verdant, humid states in the Southeast, according to data scientists at First Street Foundation, a New York nonprofit that models climate-related risks.
for their expanding reach. As well as drying things out, a warmer world leads to more of what fire scientists call “fire weather” — hot, dry, windy days that can turn a small, early-winter grass fire into a racing inferno, such as the 2021 Marshall Fire in Boulder County, Colo. First detected the, within 12 hours it was the most destructive fire in the state’s history, causing $2 billion in property damage.
There are efforts to prepare for the surge in fires. A team in Britain, for instance, is working to develop the country’s first
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