I live in the woods. The conifers have been limbed up 30+ feet and there is a 30 foot buffer around my house and some of the other structures. I have no illusion that this action would save my house, because I expect a hot east wind flaming a crown inferno, but I hope it gives me time to evacuate out to the slough.
In the 20 years I’ve lived here the climate has changed immensely. It is so much hotter and dryer. And yes, I tracked climate as part of my job, before I retired.
Then you should know that 'climate change' is a natural, cyclic occurrence '. Earth's climate is dictated by our orbit around the Sun, our distance from the Sun, the tilt of Earth's axis, solar activity (sun spots), and.volcanic eruptions. THE ONLY WAY humans could affect 'climate change' is via nuclear war.
Thank you for your analysis. An additional component to consider in future analyses is the fact that starting in the 1600s, indigenous fire management of the landscapes in question were actively suppressed across much of the boreal forest region, and yet those fire management traditions are still alive in many of the 600 predominantly indigenous communities across the north woods. There has been a quiet revolution that has been going on, with the realization that those indigenous burns, small in scale and well timed earlier in the year, can head off much of the large scale dangers that are inherent in boreal forests that are not logged or otherwise accessed by western lumber/agricultural interests. It is a misnomer to say that these boreal forests were not actively managed just because they weren't being logged. For an excellent research paper outlining these practices and their results on biodiversity, forest composition, wildfire management and human's relationship to these forests, I recommend reading "Centering Indigenous Voices: The Role of Fire in the Boreal Forest of North America" in the journal Fire Science and Management: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40725-022-00168-9
FWIW, both the Hagmann+(2021) and the Prichard+(2021) papers that he cited mention the suppression of indigenous practices.
One factor that makes deliberate human-induced fire ("prescribed burn") problematic is the introduction of →liability litigation← into the system. 🙄 It's especially fraught now that there are fewer safe opportunities to execute a prescribed burn on stressed landscapes, such that they are more likely to get out of hand.
It's a Dear Prudence 🙏. I really believe at this stage of the Earth burn we gotta desal and pipe water inland. Aquifers are dried. Ground is not absorbing. Excited water molecules refuse to bind to form clouds.
Well, there aren't any Respectagains and few WhyNotcrats and loads of Whinocrats so yes.. it is a political battle. Dang, King Trump in his burning Earth throne flipping the coin with his image. Heads we lose Tails we lose
"This is just the 'CO2 is plant food' fallacy repackaged for the water cycle...
"Concluding 'we need more of it' is like saying your garden is a bit dry, so you'd like the fire department to blast your tomatoes with a high-pressure hose. "
Somehow, we think we are smarter than the years of expertise that the indigenous amassed and evolution itself. We approach Earth as a commodity and ask "Nature.. what is nature?"
These megafires that are constantly occuring are a new feature of climate change. John Vaillant has written a terrific book, 'Fire Weather', which describes the Fort McMurray megafire which will blow your socks off.
Later next week, here in the UK we will enter our fourth consecutive heatwave of the summer and July isn't over yet. Very few of our homes and buildings have air-conditioning and most of our infrastructure is not built for ever-hotter summers. Study in 2021 predicted that we were not likely to experience 40C temperatures until 2050, but we hit that mark the following year.
Worse still, we are already into an El Nino event that will be one of the strongest in recent years which promises yet more misery for millions of people.
We have failed to pay attention to the predictions of changes that would occur from CO2 accumulation for adaption, not just for mitigation. Infrastructure is supposed to be build for expected conditions, not historic conditions.
Very nice Zeke. I would like to emphasize though that it is increased heating from increased greenhouse gases that both increase drying and raise temperatures. In particular increased heat increases evapotranspiration that increases wilting and fire risk. I wrote about this here:
What is alarming about the response of the climate change deniers who are coming up with every bogus excuse other than anthropogenic climate change to explain the wildfires, is the mass psychosis that philosopher Slavoj Žižek (taking from Freud) calls "Fetishistic disavowal".
The restrictions on 'burning off' here in Australia (permits, strict conditions, fire bans) are not primarily because of environmental activism, they are because of public safety and legal liability fears. A lightning triggered wildfire (our last bad fires started that way) made worse by not having 'burned off' is no-one's legal responsibility. A fire lit on purpose is the legal responsibility of the person lighting it.
Such burning off that gets out of control (and some inevitably does) does not respect land and property ownership boundaries but those doing it leave themselves open to legal and emotional responsibility. For a lot of decent people 'causing' a fire that destroys a neighbor's home can be worse than losing their own.
The opening up of fire prone landscapes to residential occupation - to people with little experience of use of fire as vegetation management, lacking skills as well as equipment - only makes it harder to do. NOT burning off becomes the default safe choice - exacerbating the problems later.
Traditional burning practices were community wide and without expectation that any unintended property damage would be the responsibility of the person lighting it - it would be the responsibility of the property owner for failing to be prepared and not participating in a necessary community activity.
It's the same in the US, Ken. I'm currently unable to burn 5 acres of former Oregon White Oak savanna on my rural-residential property, due to those admittedly reasonable fears, which prominently include respiratory impacts. While there is an innovative partnership of land-management agencies seeking to restore fire to remaining native prairie and savanna habitats in the southern Willamette Valley, there's a profound shortage of resources to manage controlled fire on the scale required, and a fundamental cultural resistance to any deliberate burning at all; at the least, the latter severely limits the seasonal weather windows for it.
That is independent of the climate change influences, which unfortunately also limit the windows of opportunity to do such burning in cool seasons safely as well as - more obviously - exacerbate the hot season conditions. The flip-side of 'warmer air holds more water vapor causing heavier rain' is warmer air needs more water vapor for rain to occur at all; dry regions and seasons get less rainfall.
The cool season effects are less obvious but can include less dew and frost.
I think there was a lot of reliance in Australia (and I suspect elsewhere) on choosing cool, low wind overnight conditions with expectation of early morning dew or frost to limit the spread of cool weather fires; fires lit in the afternoon/evening could be expected to slow from that natural fire suppressant - enough to make remnants easier to put out to prevent further spread, or even go out on their own. Warmer overnight temperatures in cool seasons are shrinking those hazard reduction opportunities here.
Part of the resistance is because of field burning in the 1970's/80's. The grass fields in the valley were burned in late summer and because of the northerly winds the smoke ended up suffocating Eugene. When field burning was banned, other ways were found to eliminate the nematodes.
I hardly view all hu-mankind as a 'plight' [sic] on earth: everyone's marginal blight is proportional to the fossil carbon they put into the climatically-active pool! Even motivated science deniers - that means you - are only marginally more destructive than self-aware but economically driven fossil carbon consumers. I assign a large portion of the blame for anthropogenic - that means by humankind - global warming, though not all, to fossil carbon producers and investors (i.e. some of humankind) who relentlessly disinform the willfully ignorant in an effort to obstruct collective (i.e. by the rest of humankind) decarbonization of the global economy, even as the green vortex of public investment and market response accelerates the transition to global carbon-neutrality: huzzahs for humankind!
"Therefore you can reduce your carbon footprint by not posting non-essential, non-scientific commentary on this platform."
Your logical fallacy is *tu quoque* (https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/tu-quoque). We're all at liberty to disconnect from the global marketplace (i.e. 'the grid') entirely. If you did, we wouldn't be 'debating'. Mission accomplished!
"It's a science platform."
So what are you doing here? AFAICT, any science more advanced than Archimedes is indistinguishable from magic to you (h/t AC Clarke).
Meanwhile, PJM (interconnected grid in the US Northeast, largest grid in the country) can't keep up with demand, while Texas' ERCOT grid is sitting pretty with cheaper power (despite growing population and higher temps) due to wind, solar and batteries. How's that for a political paradox?
Canada’s recent seasonal dry spells are not historically unique. According to agriculture.canada.ca, the multi-year drought of 1929–1937 and the extreme drought of 1961 remain the most severe hydrological deficits on record. During the 1961 event, precipitation across the Canadian Prairies dropped up to 60% below normal, causing widespread agricultural collapse that exceeded the spatial severity of 2020s dry spells. The droughts of the current decade fall within these documented historical baselines of natural weather variability.
The structural change in fire management occurred in 2005, when the Canadian Council of Forest Ministers formalized the natural-resources.canad…. This policy ended the mid-20th-century mandate of universal full suppression, which attempted to extinguish every fire immediately. Agencies transitioned to a three-tiered "appropriate response" framework that categorizes landscapes into full response zones (immediate attack to protect life and infrastructure), modified response zones (managed containment), and monitored response zones (observing remote fires via satellite to allow natural ecological burning).
When a severe but historically precedented drought occurs under this framework—as seen in 2023—the policy design structurally drives up total burned acreage. Because firefighting assets are legally prioritized to defend high-value populated zones, thousands of lightning ignitions in remote, monitored zones are left unstaffed. Under dry summer conditions, these unsuppressed remote blazes expand unchecked into massive mega-fires. The direct outcome of this policy shift during the 2020s is an intentional operational trade-off: successful community protection at the expense of millions of hectares of burned backcountry timber and widespread seasonal smoke.
Temperatures are clearly increasing and likely contribute, but to attribute the last several years of Canadian burn to climate when it is far more influenced by wildfire policy change is a lie we tell ourselves that others are believing less and less.
Well said Scott Grout. Lets also observe that under a regime of longer and warmer growing seaons and enhanced CO2 availibilty there will be more biomass to support fire. Severity must increase.
Great article, and very timely. I posted a link on my Facebook, quoting your summary for those unable to access the article, or unable/unwilling to read big words and science-y things.
I live in the woods. The conifers have been limbed up 30+ feet and there is a 30 foot buffer around my house and some of the other structures. I have no illusion that this action would save my house, because I expect a hot east wind flaming a crown inferno, but I hope it gives me time to evacuate out to the slough.
In the 20 years I’ve lived here the climate has changed immensely. It is so much hotter and dryer. And yes, I tracked climate as part of my job, before I retired.
Then you should know that 'climate change' is a natural, cyclic occurrence '. Earth's climate is dictated by our orbit around the Sun, our distance from the Sun, the tilt of Earth's axis, solar activity (sun spots), and.volcanic eruptions. THE ONLY WAY humans could affect 'climate change' is via nuclear war.
The rate of change is wholly inexplicable without humans burning fossil fuels adding CO2. It's that simple. Not sure why this is hard to grasp.
You conveniently ignore CO2
?? You do not think the accumulation of CO2 has anything to do with geophysical changes?
Thank you for your analysis. An additional component to consider in future analyses is the fact that starting in the 1600s, indigenous fire management of the landscapes in question were actively suppressed across much of the boreal forest region, and yet those fire management traditions are still alive in many of the 600 predominantly indigenous communities across the north woods. There has been a quiet revolution that has been going on, with the realization that those indigenous burns, small in scale and well timed earlier in the year, can head off much of the large scale dangers that are inherent in boreal forests that are not logged or otherwise accessed by western lumber/agricultural interests. It is a misnomer to say that these boreal forests were not actively managed just because they weren't being logged. For an excellent research paper outlining these practices and their results on biodiversity, forest composition, wildfire management and human's relationship to these forests, I recommend reading "Centering Indigenous Voices: The Role of Fire in the Boreal Forest of North America" in the journal Fire Science and Management: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40725-022-00168-9
FWIW, both the Hagmann+(2021) and the Prichard+(2021) papers that he cited mention the suppression of indigenous practices.
One factor that makes deliberate human-induced fire ("prescribed burn") problematic is the introduction of →liability litigation← into the system. 🙄 It's especially fraught now that there are fewer safe opportunities to execute a prescribed burn on stressed landscapes, such that they are more likely to get out of hand.
The boreals need more water availability for growth, fire protection, and fire fighting.
We gotta deliver water prudently to the area.
They will burn.. but don't have to nearly as much.
"We gotta deliver water prudently to the area."
Shirley, you can't be sherioush!
It's a Dear Prudence 🙏. I really believe at this stage of the Earth burn we gotta desal and pipe water inland. Aquifers are dried. Ground is not absorbing. Excited water molecules refuse to bind to form clouds.
Soytently
OK, but who's 'we'? Republicans?
Well, there aren't any Respectagains and few WhyNotcrats and loads of Whinocrats so yes.. it is a political battle. Dang, King Trump in his burning Earth throne flipping the coin with his image. Heads we lose Tails we lose
My yes was to the political mess. My hands down no is to anything good coming from maghgats/republicans( cannot capitalize the r for them).
There is a megadought for years in the west. Colorado can not quench and fill up Powell and Meade. The great aquifer in the Midwest is drying up.
Glaciers melt too early to supply summer 💧.
We are drying up. 1C = 7% more water in the air and that does not mean it comes back down on you. Also, excited h20 molecules do not like condensing.
We are seriously water strapped.
Smokey
We can't fix stupid
LOL, I won't even try to outdo Gemini:
"This is just the 'CO2 is plant food' fallacy repackaged for the water cycle...
"Concluding 'we need more of it' is like saying your garden is a bit dry, so you'd like the fire department to blast your tomatoes with a high-pressure hose. "
While the tomatoes get deluged, the zucchini, cukes, peppers, and dill broil in the sun as there is no water left for them
Somehow, we think we are smarter than the years of expertise that the indigenous amassed and evolution itself. We approach Earth as a commodity and ask "Nature.. what is nature?"
As Earth 🔥
These megafires that are constantly occuring are a new feature of climate change. John Vaillant has written a terrific book, 'Fire Weather', which describes the Fort McMurray megafire which will blow your socks off.
Later next week, here in the UK we will enter our fourth consecutive heatwave of the summer and July isn't over yet. Very few of our homes and buildings have air-conditioning and most of our infrastructure is not built for ever-hotter summers. Study in 2021 predicted that we were not likely to experience 40C temperatures until 2050, but we hit that mark the following year.
https://www.ukclimaterisk.org/publications/technical-report-ccra3-ia/chapter-1/#section-1-authors
https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/articles/cwyq0k3nq2yo
Worse still, we are already into an El Nino event that will be one of the strongest in recent years which promises yet more misery for millions of people.
Dammit, that's another book to put on my to-read mountain!
We have failed to pay attention to the predictions of changes that would occur from CO2 accumulation for adaption, not just for mitigation. Infrastructure is supposed to be build for expected conditions, not historic conditions.
Agree it is a great book with much knowledge. It also has much history regarding how we got to this point.
Very nice Zeke. I would like to emphasize though that it is increased heating from increased greenhouse gases that both increase drying and raise temperatures. In particular increased heat increases evapotranspiration that increases wilting and fire risk. I wrote about this here:
Climate change and wildfires – how do we know if there is a link? US Edition 10 August 2018. https://doi.org/10.64628/AAI.h3xhvwcfm
https://doi.org/theconversation.com/climate-change-and-wildfires-how-do-we-know-if-there-is-a-link-101304
Kevin
What is alarming about the response of the climate change deniers who are coming up with every bogus excuse other than anthropogenic climate change to explain the wildfires, is the mass psychosis that philosopher Slavoj Žižek (taking from Freud) calls "Fetishistic disavowal".
The restrictions on 'burning off' here in Australia (permits, strict conditions, fire bans) are not primarily because of environmental activism, they are because of public safety and legal liability fears. A lightning triggered wildfire (our last bad fires started that way) made worse by not having 'burned off' is no-one's legal responsibility. A fire lit on purpose is the legal responsibility of the person lighting it.
Such burning off that gets out of control (and some inevitably does) does not respect land and property ownership boundaries but those doing it leave themselves open to legal and emotional responsibility. For a lot of decent people 'causing' a fire that destroys a neighbor's home can be worse than losing their own.
The opening up of fire prone landscapes to residential occupation - to people with little experience of use of fire as vegetation management, lacking skills as well as equipment - only makes it harder to do. NOT burning off becomes the default safe choice - exacerbating the problems later.
Traditional burning practices were community wide and without expectation that any unintended property damage would be the responsibility of the person lighting it - it would be the responsibility of the property owner for failing to be prepared and not participating in a necessary community activity.
It's the same in the US, Ken. I'm currently unable to burn 5 acres of former Oregon White Oak savanna on my rural-residential property, due to those admittedly reasonable fears, which prominently include respiratory impacts. While there is an innovative partnership of land-management agencies seeking to restore fire to remaining native prairie and savanna habitats in the southern Willamette Valley, there's a profound shortage of resources to manage controlled fire on the scale required, and a fundamental cultural resistance to any deliberate burning at all; at the least, the latter severely limits the seasonal weather windows for it.
That is independent of the climate change influences, which unfortunately also limit the windows of opportunity to do such burning in cool seasons safely as well as - more obviously - exacerbate the hot season conditions. The flip-side of 'warmer air holds more water vapor causing heavier rain' is warmer air needs more water vapor for rain to occur at all; dry regions and seasons get less rainfall.
The cool season effects are less obvious but can include less dew and frost.
I think there was a lot of reliance in Australia (and I suspect elsewhere) on choosing cool, low wind overnight conditions with expectation of early morning dew or frost to limit the spread of cool weather fires; fires lit in the afternoon/evening could be expected to slow from that natural fire suppressant - enough to make remnants easier to put out to prevent further spread, or even go out on their own. Warmer overnight temperatures in cool seasons are shrinking those hazard reduction opportunities here.
Part of the resistance is because of field burning in the 1970's/80's. The grass fields in the valley were burned in late summer and because of the northerly winds the smoke ended up suffocating Eugene. When field burning was banned, other ways were found to eliminate the nematodes.
Since your burning will have positive extenal effets as well as negtive ones, Oregon could subsidize your libility insurance.
Heh. Sure they could. Why don't they 8^D?
I hardly view all hu-mankind as a 'plight' [sic] on earth: everyone's marginal blight is proportional to the fossil carbon they put into the climatically-active pool! Even motivated science deniers - that means you - are only marginally more destructive than self-aware but economically driven fossil carbon consumers. I assign a large portion of the blame for anthropogenic - that means by humankind - global warming, though not all, to fossil carbon producers and investors (i.e. some of humankind) who relentlessly disinform the willfully ignorant in an effort to obstruct collective (i.e. by the rest of humankind) decarbonization of the global economy, even as the green vortex of public investment and market response accelerates the transition to global carbon-neutrality: huzzahs for humankind!
[Last edited 1430 PDT 7/17/2026. I'm having fun with this one! MA]
"New data centers will be/are predominantly powered by fossil fuels because wind and solar are too chaotic for a modern society to depend upon."
Not even science-y, merely denial-y. 'Are' is far from 100% true now, and 'will be' is less true day by day. Want data-center data? See "Data centre electricity use surged in 2025, even with tightening bottlenecks driving a scramble for solutions" (https://www.iea.org/news/data-centre-electricity-use-surged-in-2025-even-with-tightening-bottlenecks-driving-a-scramble-for-solutions).
"Therefore you can reduce your carbon footprint by not posting non-essential, non-scientific commentary on this platform."
Your logical fallacy is *tu quoque* (https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/tu-quoque). We're all at liberty to disconnect from the global marketplace (i.e. 'the grid') entirely. If you did, we wouldn't be 'debating'. Mission accomplished!
"It's a science platform."
So what are you doing here? AFAICT, any science more advanced than Archimedes is indistinguishable from magic to you (h/t AC Clarke).
Solve that with libility insurance.
Thank you Zeke, I was happy to see a real scientific analysis of this situation. Something to counter the nonsense coming out of the USA. Good job!
Hell, we here in the USofA can generate nonsense much faster than Zeke can counter it!
Don't forget..
With heat comes madness
An excellent learned analysis, well done, and thank you for bringing clarity in the fog/smoke!
Great climate attribution to wildfires Zeke!
I call it the climate change duck.
If it dries up, burns, floods, quacks, and looks like 👍 it's caused by clinate change then..
It probably is. Occam's climate razor.
When your house is on fire the famous advice of William of Ockham becomes redundant.
We actually debate if it really is burning as the last cinders get swooped up in the pyre driven winds.. As Earth 🔥
Good point 👉
We have lead climate feet. Heavy and slow to react to climate change. We never proactive because of the inertia.
We delayed drawdown mitigation. Now we have to adapt. We delay adaptation.
We might be best at crying😢 in time. As Earth 🔥.
Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow
Everything is possible tomorrow
Fusion will save us. Let's ✋️
AI will save us. Let's ✋️
As we perch ourselves on higher ground with face masks and goggles on inside our air conditioned caves in the skies.
There's always those cities on Mars that Elon Musk is proposing.
A ·perfect· place to send all of our tech billionaires.
With the attire of us common folk. Hello new Martians.
That we'll f up.
Elon if you read this.. the best project is..
R E V I S I T E A R T H
Yeah! Nice analyse. Now what are we doing?
Your government is spending billions of tax dollars blocking offshore windfarm projects and instead investing in coal.
Meanwhile, PJM (interconnected grid in the US Northeast, largest grid in the country) can't keep up with demand, while Texas' ERCOT grid is sitting pretty with cheaper power (despite growing population and higher temps) due to wind, solar and batteries. How's that for a political paradox?
They say we live in democracy, but they adopt decisions favourable only for the corrupted exployters. This is criminal.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/2077850693961236854.html
Canada’s recent seasonal dry spells are not historically unique. According to agriculture.canada.ca, the multi-year drought of 1929–1937 and the extreme drought of 1961 remain the most severe hydrological deficits on record. During the 1961 event, precipitation across the Canadian Prairies dropped up to 60% below normal, causing widespread agricultural collapse that exceeded the spatial severity of 2020s dry spells. The droughts of the current decade fall within these documented historical baselines of natural weather variability.
The structural change in fire management occurred in 2005, when the Canadian Council of Forest Ministers formalized the natural-resources.canad…. This policy ended the mid-20th-century mandate of universal full suppression, which attempted to extinguish every fire immediately. Agencies transitioned to a three-tiered "appropriate response" framework that categorizes landscapes into full response zones (immediate attack to protect life and infrastructure), modified response zones (managed containment), and monitored response zones (observing remote fires via satellite to allow natural ecological burning).
When a severe but historically precedented drought occurs under this framework—as seen in 2023—the policy design structurally drives up total burned acreage. Because firefighting assets are legally prioritized to defend high-value populated zones, thousands of lightning ignitions in remote, monitored zones are left unstaffed. Under dry summer conditions, these unsuppressed remote blazes expand unchecked into massive mega-fires. The direct outcome of this policy shift during the 2020s is an intentional operational trade-off: successful community protection at the expense of millions of hectares of burned backcountry timber and widespread seasonal smoke.
Temperatures are clearly increasing and likely contribute, but to attribute the last several years of Canadian burn to climate when it is far more influenced by wildfire policy change is a lie we tell ourselves that others are believing less and less.
Well said Scott Grout. Lets also observe that under a regime of longer and warmer growing seaons and enhanced CO2 availibilty there will be more biomass to support fire. Severity must increase.
Great article, and very timely. I posted a link on my Facebook, quoting your summary for those unable to access the article, or unable/unwilling to read big words and science-y things.
In Latin: Ignis Borealis
On this day, 7/17/26, the news declared:
Major Diarrhea, smoke, and heatwaves have crippled America.
Carbongeddon?
Diarrhea is Kennedygeddon, if anything.
Probably. The Zetgeist though of a maddening, heating world.
The heat caused the people to elect Trump. Fried brain cells.
A possible zeitgeist
thank you for the excellent reporting