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Fort McMurray fires turn climate change into hot button issue

As the flames engulfing the Fort McMurray area officially spread across more than 1,000 square kilometres (and counting) on Friday, May 6, environmental groups across the country issued messages of support.

Executive directors of a coalition of 10 environmental groups, including the David Suzuki Foundation, Environmental Defence, Greenpeace, Equiterre and Leadnow, asked their members to donate to the Red Cross to “show the people of Fort McMurray and surrounding First Nations communities that Canada has their back.”

“This is not a time for blame,” they added.

It needed to be said in light of comments from tweeters – among them, former NDP and Green party candidates – about the town at the centre of tar sands development getting its “karmic” come-uppance. 

Canadian Press labelled them “eco-trolls.” CTV, the National Post and Huffington Post quickly picked up on the chorus of condemnation.

All of a sudden, the term “climate change” became contentious when talking about Alberta’s catastrophic blaze, even though the province is suffering one of its hottest, driest springs on record. 

Making the connection has caused some blowback for journalists covering the story, who’ve been inundated with angry emails (see Slate’s Eric Holthaus and Climate Central’s Brian Kahn). 

Green party leader Elizabeth May got burned for pointing out that forest fire season has arrived earlier than usual in northern Alberta and telling reporters the fire “is very likely a climate event, very likely related to extreme high temperatures and very low humidity.”

She quickly clarified that the wildfires can’t be directly blamed on climate change.

In truth, there’s no way to definitively peg any one extreme event, like the Fort Mac blaze, on climate change, says David Martell, a professor at U of T’s Fire Management Systems Laboratory.

“The answer is always ‘We don’t know,’” Martell says. “We can only really look at patterning over time.”

That patterning has shown a doubling in the area burned by forest fires in Canada over the last decade, according to a recent study published in Climatic Change, with more than two million hectares going up in flames, on average, each year. 

Tellingly, Alberta officially marked the start of its forest fire season on March 1 this year, a full month earlier than usual. The number of official heat wave days in the region has tripled since 1950, last week’s 30 degree temps in Fort Mac adding to that tally. 

Combined with the influence of El Nino, forest floors in the region are essentially a tinderbox of dry pine needles and dead grass that can rapidly fuel fires. 

But other factors are fanning the flames. 

The Alberta government’s wildfire review committee warned four years ago that an aging boreal forest could spark “catastrophic fires.” The practice of wildfire suppression has been getting in the way of natural forest regeneration, with older, drier trees dominating the landscape. 

The committee also issued its “strongest warning to date” that increased residential and industrial development in Alberta’s wildlands should put fire control organizations on high alert. The annual number of human-caused fires in the province climbed to more than 1,100 in 2011 from 200 in 1993.

Natural Resources Canada has predicted that the effects of climate change could result “in a doubling of the amount of area burned by [forest fires in Canada] by the end of the century.” 

It may be too soon, too touchy a subject in Alberta, especially when Fort Mac has recently fallen on such hard economic times.

It may also be too soon to assess the damage, environmental and otherwise, from the disaster, be it the number of homes lost, trees burned, wildlife killed and carbon released into the atmosphere from the blaze, now covering almost 1,500 square kilometres.

But enviro groups likely won’t sit back and accept remarks like those made by BC premier Christy Clark that the Alberta wildfires should be more motivation to speed up pipeline approvals to help the province’s economy.

As the coalition of green groups said, “Eventually the rebuilding will begin. That includes rebuilding Fort McMurray and ensuring we take the necessary steps… to figure out how we can adapt our communities [and] reduce the risk of climate change.” 

ecoholic@nowtoronto.com | @ecoholicnation

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