Perhaps I’m beating a dead horse in the eyes of some here, but when I see a headline like this – Fort McMurray: Fire could double in size, Canadian official says – from CNN, I find it more than a little disturbing.
Dry, windy conditions are fueling the blaze, which has already raged over 1,010 square kilometers (389 square miles). By Saturday, it might be twice as big.
“It’s extremely dry out there. Wind continues to push from the southwest, to push the fire to the northeast into the forested areas,” Alberta Wildfire official Chad Morrison said Friday afternoon. “There is a high potential that this fire could double in size by the end of the day tomorrow.”
This is just one of forty (40) wildfires ravaging Alberta. And it’s only May. As for those who see this as just another strange weather event that we should not tie to anthropogenic climate change, well, again, that’s not what the experts at Climate Central, a popular and respected climate science website, are saying in their article: “Here’s the Climate Context For the Fort McMurray Wildfire.”
The wildfire is the latest in a lengthening lineage of early wildfires in the northern reaches of the globe that are indicative of a changing climate. As the planet continues to warm, these types of fires will likely only become more common and intense as spring snowpack disappears and temperatures warm.
If you followed the links from the excerpt of article above, you would see references to a series of massive, disastrous wildfires across the upper Northern hemisphere, including boreal forests in Siberia, Alaska and the Northwest Territories in Canada since 2013, which predates the current extreme El Nino event. This sharp increase in both the extent and intensity of wildfires this far north, and the lengthening of the wildfire season overall
