Everyone’s wrong about what’s behind the forest fires
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Summary
Forest fires, wildfires, whatever you call them, they've been impacting more people than usual this year and making the news more than ever. In some ways, it's because unlike most years, the smoke from wildfires has been floating down and hanging over major cities in Eastern Canada and the United States.
Transcript
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for what you need. TD, ready for you. Forest fires, wildfires, whatever you call them,
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they've been impacting more people than usual this year and making the news more than ever.
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In some ways, it's because unlike most years, the smoke from wildfires has been floating down and
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hanging over major cities in Eastern Canada and the United States, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, New
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York, Washington, DC. This is new to us. While residents of Western Canada are used to smoke
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from wildfires making an appearance, even in the cities of Western Canada, it just doesn't happen
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in places like Toronto and New York. Now, all the attention to this issue has turned wildfires into
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a bit of a culture war issue of late, with one side arguing, it's all climate change,
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and the other arguing, it's all arson, probably by those eco-terrorists. The truth, it's probably a
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lot more nuanced, and that's what we're going to try and get to today. Hello, I'm Brian Lilly. This
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is the Full Comment Podcast. Before we get to our next guest, a reminder to please, pretty please even,
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hit that subscribe button. Whichever app device you're listening to us on, hit the subscribe button.
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Leave a review as well, share with family and friends. They will want to know all about wildfires
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too. So, what is the truth on this front? Is this the worst year ever? Is it all climate change? Is it
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all eco-terrorists? Is it bad winds? What lessons should we learn? That's what Kenneth Green is going
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to try and help us with. He is a senior fellow with the Fraser Institute. He's also an author of many,
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many academic papers, and also the book, The Plague of Models, which looks at how computer modeling took
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over. And, well, what would you say, Ken? Manipulated, downgraded scientific research
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over the years? Disrupted is a good term. Disrupted? Okay. You've been looking at the
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newscast. You've been seeing the effects of wildfires across the country. As someone that's studied it,
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is it the worst year ever? Is it one issue that's driving it? Is it another? How do you react when you
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see this, both the scale of the fires and the fact that some people on either side of the extremes
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are trying to turn it into a political issue? Well, of course, the summer is long from over,
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and therefore, it's declaring it the worst year ever or not is premature. It's going to wait to
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be seen for what the actual number of fires and extent of fires are. And then, of course, it has to
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be interpreted in light of the natural variation we see in previous summers and previous years.
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But it's certainly a notable one. It's not going to be one of the lower ones, at least not according
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to what I've seen in terms of the historical record for fire number and extent in the last, say, 20 years.
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But it remains to be seen as to whether it'll set a record and in which area, just area extent burned,
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the nature of the fires, the number of the fires, the people endangered. There's a lot of different
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parameters to define worst of the year, worst of the record. Obviously, there's a long way to go
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before the year is over. It hasn't stopped some people from making declarations that are wild with
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speculation. There are differences across the country, though, in terms of wildfires and how
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they're fought, how they start, all of that. Do you think, though, to my point at the beginning,
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that it's getting as much attention as it does, is in part because the smoke came to us. The smoke
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came to the big smoke, and we don't normally get it. Other parts of the country are saying,
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why are you complaining? This happens every year. Well, not to us.
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Well, I think so. I mean, I think a large part of it is where you live and whether you're accustomed
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to this sort of thing. I actually grew up on the West Coast, and we took it for granted. I actually
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grew up in Los Angeles, and it was taken for granted that essentially every summer or late
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spring and early summer, everything in the vicinity would burst into flames. That's pretty
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much how things work in Los Angeles, right? It rains in the spring. The foliage grows. Foliage
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dries out in late spring, and then summertime comes on. The summer heat comes on. Heat, air,
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concentration, heat, sunlight, and boom, you have fire and people in the vicinity, and you have fire.
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So I think if you're from one of these biomes or ecosystems where fire is a natural element
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to you and you grew up in it, then you think, well, it's a little worse than normal, but you're
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not suddenly, it's not changing your worldview asking, oh my gosh, what's wrong with the entire
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planet that we're having fires here or having smoke here? I think it does have a lot to do
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with your experience and your cultural background, your geographic background.
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Let's talk about climate change. What role is climate change playing in this, if any?
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Well, of course, this is my opinion and my interpretation of climate data, but I think
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it's been measured that there has been a warming of the climate in the last 50 years, the last 100
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years, and that background level of warming has to be presumed to changing the baseline or the
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background level at which, you know, it's going to produce the increased frequency of fires. That being
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said, if you actually look at the number of fires over years in Canada, and you look at the extent
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burned in Canada, those trends are not following along with the measured increases in climate overall
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global average temperature from climate change. And so what I would say is what climate change is a real
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thing. I think the measurements suggest a milder warming than models do, which is a different
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story. But simply the correlation between the observed climate change and observed changes in
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fire number and extent, they're inversely correlated. The warming's going up, has been increasing,
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whereas the number of fires generally has been decreasing over time in Canada.
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So we've been having fewer fires, less of the country burned. But this year, you know, appears to
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be going up. We'll wait for the rest of the season. But if trends continue, it's looking like it's a bad
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year. We have short memories. We tend to think, oh, well, this is really horrible. It's never been like
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this. And then you look at the stats and you say, well, actually, it's just like five years ago.
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Well, I think that's a big problem. People do have short memories, as you say,
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and they're bombarded with information on a regular basis that helps to push some of their
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old memories into obscurity, I think. I think you were commenting earlier on the fact that
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people are shocked at grocery prices and trying to figure out how to deal with them. I also grew up in
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recessions and learned how to shop from my mother during recessions. And so having actual experience
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of these things does help. But people have a short attention span. And so they don't necessarily
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remember that these things happened five years or 10 years ago, and that it was the norm, because
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memories are short and lives are complex. And so old memories get displaced by more recent ones.
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In terms of the cause of the fires, it's interesting when you look at different provincial stats,
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and you'll see that in British Columbia, most common one for fires that they have determined
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how they started is lightning. In Alberta, it's often human-caused. And Alberta's got great database
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going back to, I think one is 2006 to 2018, and then they've got another chunk of years before that
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and a separate one. But you go through and it's human-caused doesn't mean arson.
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I was going through, and they're very detailed at times in what caused it. And the one that caught
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me in, I thought, oh, I didn't think of that, was hot exhaust from an ATV. It could be that,
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it could be a campfire getting out of control. That's what I meant when I said earlier, different
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regions seem to have different reasons for why the wildfires are starting. It's not one-size-fits-all
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No, that's right. And I think to use some quasi-scientific terms or some scientific terminology,
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you have to look at the proximal cause of the fire, the thing that ignites a fire, as opposed
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to the more the distal cause, which is what builds up the fuel for the fire. And I think
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there are differences in the proximal causes, like you said. In Alberta, it could be human
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cause, but that does not mean arson. It could mean somebody loses a lug nut on their truck as
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they're driving down the highway. It kicks off a bunch of sparks and starts a fire. Or
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it could be somebody throws a cigarette butt out the window of a car, that causes a fire.
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There are any number of things that can trigger the fire once the base of the fuel has been
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set, right? So you need to look at the two questions of what's the trigger to burst into
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flames, as opposed to what is the cause of the buildup of the fuel. And the buildup of the
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fuel problem seems to be more systemic in Canada. The proximal cause of what triggers the fuel
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to burst into flames is more regional. Wind here, lightning there, human sparks because
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of interacting with the environment in another place. Yeah, those are going to vary.
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I want to ask you about that fuel thing in a moment, but just to give some stats on the number
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of wildfires, according to the federal government, you go back to a year like 1989, huge number of
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fires, 11,000 they recorded. The year before, 1988, it was about 2,000. In 2020, there were just
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a few hundred across the country. Last year, about 7,500. They do tend to go up and down with
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no rhyme or reason. I mean, I'm sure that you would find it looking at weather patterns and
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other things, but the idea that we're on a trajectory one way or another just doesn't hold
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water when you look at the stats. Well, right, that's right. And I think, and, you know, climate
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is, we talk about climate change and people have, that gives people this idea that there's
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some calm, stately progression to the climate, that it's on this, they see the lovely charts and
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graphs showing the climate on a progressive change, moving upward on a nice flat slope and
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everything, nice smooth slope. But the climate is extremely variable year to year, and there are a
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lot of chaotic elements to it. There are a lot of non-linear, as the scientists would say, elements
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to it that can't be predicted. And then, of course, fires in one year will affect the fires in another
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year. If you have that really huge year where you've scorched vast quantities of forests, you're not
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likely to see the similar kind of, that similar kind of fire in the same place for several years
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Actually about, sorry, I said 11,000. Just looking at the chart, it's closer to 13. It's an odd chart.
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But the next year, less than 2,000 wildfires. So talk to me about the fuel, because I remember
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interviewing people about this years ago, and they were trying to put some blame for the fuel
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in the forests. We started with California, but it was a concept expanding into Canada,
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that we were having a buildup of fuel due to forest management practices that said,
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just leave everything wild. Do you put any stock in that?
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You know, it's actually, it's a great question. And it's one people don't, we don't really
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ponder too much. I mean, I too have been critical of forest management practices in terms of whether
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or not they can lead to more or less fires in the past. But there's a bigger question of sort
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of, do people accept that the downside of having such massively gorgeous boreal forests that we
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all love, is that forests burst into flames. It's a natural part of the cycle of the ecosystems.
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And so the question is whether or not, it's really less a question of, has the government
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mismanaged it, as opposed to, should the government have gotten into that, the idea of managing
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these things in the first place, to put themselves at risk of people pointing a finger and saying,
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you're getting this wrong. Well, is there a way to get it right?
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Hard to know. I mean, that really, it's a judgment call, because you have to decide,
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you know, do we accept, look, we live on a continent that is heavily forested. North America
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is forests and plains. It's right. And the odd city in between with the odd city stuck here or
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there in the other place. But really, I mean, it's going to go through the natural cycles of boom
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and bust and burn and grow. And there's a limit to how much that can be controlled. Now, I do think
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there's a balance to be struck between actually managing ecosystems around the little spots you
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talked about, we talked about, of development, cities and urban areas. That is a legitimate
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province, I should say, or providence of government. And there can be questions asked whether they're
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doing that well or not. But the bigger question of when you have have continent wide bursts of
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forest fires, I don't really know that that it's an appropriate frame of reference to say,
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look, we want the government to have the power to be able to control that. I'm not, I'm not really
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How would you in an area the of where you've got forest stretching from the far northern reaches of
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British Columbia, down into straight through Washington State and Oregon and down into
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California. And you've got the same thing in the Great Lakes basin around, you know, the unpopulated
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areas of central Canada, or central North America.
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Well, it's going to sound unsatisfying to people who are either, you know, pro-regulation or anti-regulation,
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pro-government or anti-government or whatever. But there are certain things that are simply beyond
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the scope of, of sane, of sane attempts to control. And I think continent wide fire is one of those
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things, which is you figure out how to adapt to it. You figure out how to live with it. You try to
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figure out how to live around it. You try to figure out how to recover from it. But, but the idea that
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you can control it, and as we've seen with other even larger issues of human contagion, the idea that
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you can control them is the first, first mistake. So, so I think there's, there's something to be said
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for the asking questions of, are we managing the adaptation, resilience aspects well, but, you know,
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trying to poke point blame for continent wide conflagrations, I think, I think it's kind of a waste of time.
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Well, I mean, one reason to try and make sure that we're, we're not dealing with such an abundance
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of forest fires is the fact that it's, it's not very good for our health to be breathing this stuff
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in. I mean, Toronto had the, the, the worst air quality of any major city in the world, according
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to one group out of Switzerland that monitors such things. And those were against, up against cities
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that you actually associate with pollution. So, you know, this is bad for, for our lungs. This is bad
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for long-term health if it continues. So are there things that, that can be done? If managing a forest
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that stretches, you know, either down the, the, the back of the Appalachian mountain range or down the,
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the, the, the, through the Rockies and, and along that spine, if doing that is unreasonable and
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impossible, what can governments do to, to try and manage it? Because, you know, as well as I do,
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bad things happen. Some people will demand, I don't care how conservative or, or libertarian
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leaning people are. At a certain point, they say, well, somebody's got to do something.
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Well, that's a good question. And again, not to overly personalize this. I grew up with asthma
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in California and the smog and the fires. And I agree. It's, uh, the, the, the, the levels of smoke
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are bad for people. It's going to trigger asthma attacks. If not, it's just, it's not causal, but
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it will irritate them, irritate, uh, asthma in people and, and other respiratory illnesses. Um,
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no question about that, I think, at least in my mind. Um, but the, the question that is,
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what do you do about it? And the question that is, if something is affecting my lungs and,
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and also I would, I would urge a little caution on saying, well, this is going to cause a lifetime
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harm. Short-term exposures are different than long-term exposures. So we need to be careful
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It was ongoing. If it was ongoing all the time at these levels, you would certainly want
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greater activity. I think, uh, really basically advising people at this point, uh, in terms of
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if somebody says, well, the government should do something, uh, I'd say weaving this, improving
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advisory systems that say, if you're vulnerable and vulnerable means these people,
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to make sure people are educated and know that they're going to be particularly vulnerable to,
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in this case, wood smoke in the air or fire smoke, forest fire smoke in the air,
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then you should take the following precautions. You should stay indoors, don't exercise outdoors,
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um, stay in air, in climate controlled, uh, to the extent you can, climate controlled, uh,
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buildings and facilities, things like that. Um, but, but I mean, beyond, going beyond that kind
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of advisory role, uh, this is just not something that governments, uh, um, well, they just can't
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do much about it really. Is there, are there practices such as, uh, preventative burns or
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clear cuts that could be used to, to try and, and, and help alleviate some of this?
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Again, this is mostly my, my, my opinion. I'm not a forester. I should give a caveat there. I'm not
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a forester, have never cut down a tree. Uh, so, um, you're, you grew up in California. You're
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legally not allowed. That's no, I would not have been allowed to grow up. Well, besides that, I was,
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I was living mostly near the, at the bottom end of the Mojave Desert, but, so I would have been
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cutting down somebody, some neighbor's tree more likely, uh, but no, you're not really allowed to do a
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lot of foresting there. Um, but I would say, you know, for, with regard to things affecting specific
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localities, um, in Los Angeles, uh, example, they have fire roads. Things just cut fire breaks. You
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would, you might want to use clear cuts to create breaks and wind breaks as we do in the middle of
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the prairies and everything. You create wind breaks, uh, to stop the, the flow of spread flowing,
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free flowing of wind, um, to control fire affecting people in where, where they are gathered,
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sure. Setting fires, backfires, control burns, barrier methods, highway, highway, uh, construction
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and highway width and things like that actually, uh, can, can play roles. Um, waterways, you know,
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routing waterways, things like that. Um, but, but again, a continent scale, um, I don't see that,
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uh, I don't know that anyone has the knowledge. It's a libertarian would say that it's a knowledge
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problem. Who has the knowledge of what that fire level is supposed to be from year to year,
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where it's supposed to be from year to year, uh, what extent you think should be burned in that year
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versus what extent you think shouldn't be burned in that year. I don't think anybody has the knowledge
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to actually stick hands on and start managing that. So I would say local level, probably there's a good,
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there's some good reason to think about it nationally. Not so much.
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All right. We'll talk more about who to blame and who people are blaming and whether they're right
00:20:22.440
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00:20:46.180
So Ken, we've talked about how governments can deal with it, what you, you know, what's causing
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wildfires in various places this time of year. What do you say to those people that are convinced
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that it is, this is all being caused by their pet political issue? What, what do you say to the
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people that say, this is proof that it's all climate change? Let's start there.
00:21:09.740
Well, I'm a, I'm a deep, deep disbeliever in, in conspiracy theories, uh, and also, um, grandiose
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pronouncements like that as assignment of, of blame to multi-factorial problems. Uh, I think it's,
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it's kind of a simplistic thing that it's either this or that, that it's either climate change or
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natural variability, uh, or, uh, you know, or human effect, human, human action, or pyromania.
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I mean, um, it's likely all of the above are involved, uh, some level of background warming,
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some level of natural variability in forest cycles, some, uh, and some actual criminality,
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uh, some government missteps, some industry missteps. Uh, I'm sure there's blame to go around,
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but I don't think any one group gets the prize for saying you did this.
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So you don't believe there's a group of eco-terrorists coordinated across the continent
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in various places, uh, speaking both French, English, and probably Spanish, uh, that are,
00:22:09.780
are lighting these forest fires to, um, achieve political goals?
00:22:13.820
No, I have several laws, several anti-conspiracist laws. Um, we could talk about it some, some length,
00:22:19.580
but no, I, I generally do not believe, uh, in conspiracy theories like that for, for a whole
00:22:24.100
bunch of reasons. Um, however, which is not to say that I do not think there are some people who
00:22:29.000
are setting fires. Some of the main motivations may be ecological. They could be eco-terrorists.
00:22:34.400
Some of them could be just run-of-the-mill pyromaniacs, which have always been among us. Um,
00:22:40.140
and there are opportunists that, that, that go out and commit crimes, uh, in the midst of any kind
00:22:45.280
of disasters, whether it's an earthquake, fires, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, there are, there
00:22:50.440
are opportunists who will go out and commit the crimes that they, they, they have a previously,
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previous desire to, to enact. So I'm sure some of that is going on, but, uh, overarching conspiracy
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theories, uh, no, I don't, I just generally don't believe in them. I don't believe people are
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smart enough to coordinate them. I believe that thieves, uh, do not, uh, have honor and they would
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rat each other out. The incentives to rat out the other conspirators grow, the bigger the
00:23:14.740
conspiracy gets. So as somebody says, you know, you can keep a secret, two people can keep a secret
00:23:19.580
if one of them is dead. Um, I don't, I don't think a hundred people can keep a secret or a thousand
00:23:24.520
people can keep a secret. So, uh, so no, I don't see broad conspiracies. I see multi-factors,
00:23:29.680
multi-factors. So people keep pointing to the, well, there was a guy arrested. I think it was up by
00:23:35.540
Cold Lake in Alberta and he's been charged with 10 counts. Well, yeah, there's, there's arsonists every
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year. I remember covering a trial of one guy outside of Ottawa in Eastern Ontario. He was in
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a rural area. He was a volunteer firefighter. He would go and set wildfires and then show up on
00:23:52.580
the truck to put them out. Sure. I mean, he wanted to be the hero. Sure. There are stories like that.
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There are also stories of people they see, they see a huge fire season. Uh, some, some, uh, business
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owner who's on, on the red and the big in the red side of the ledger thinks this would be a fine time
00:24:06.540
for his warehouse to go up, uh, in flames and, and, uh, right. So you have, you have, uh, some
00:24:11.800
criminality involved where people set their own fires for, for nefarious reasons, prosaic reasons,
00:24:18.120
pragmatic reasons, whatever. But, um, again, I don't think that defines the noise. It would be,
00:24:23.040
it would be, what would be unbelievable was if you could gather enough of those kinds of people
00:24:27.780
together, uh, and, uh, get them to work together to, to spread fires simultaneously across, uh, you
00:24:35.460
know, a 4,000 mile, 3,000, 4,000 mile expanse of Canadian boreal forests. Um, uh, if, if they were
00:24:44.540
that good at planning, actually, you probably should have made them your government because
00:24:47.560
most governments aren't that good at planning. The, uh, the Trudeau government has wasted no time
00:24:53.260
in, in using this as a political wedge issue. They have started to demand, uh, running an ad
00:24:59.320
demanding that conservative leader, Pierre Polyev show his climate plan. And they're using
00:25:03.860
the, uh, news footage and headlines of these wildfires as proof. And they are making the,
00:25:12.560
the definitive statement that this is due to climate change. And they do this on a regular basis.
00:25:17.280
They claim that, uh, Britain, British Columbia burning down was due to climate change as opposed,
00:25:22.100
as opposed to, uh, what I believe the official report was, um, uh, sparks in the woods caused by
00:25:28.040
a train. Uh, you know, they, they, they just continually point to, to climate change and then
00:25:35.160
they don't come up with a solution. They say climate change is the problem. They don't have a solution on
00:25:40.020
climate change. They just want to use it for a political issue. You've looked at the IPCC reports
00:25:45.980
as have I, and they, even when they raise the issue of extra flooding, extra forest fires,
00:25:55.720
extra storms, they're not definitive on this in, in, in laying blame, are they?
00:26:01.580
No, they're not. Uh, and, and in fact, the deeper you get into the technical side of the IPCC,
00:26:06.640
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that's, that's a UN entity that, that is sort of, uh,
00:26:11.680
the, uh, ultimate resource for all things climate change. The deeper you dig into the science of it,
00:26:16.920
the more caveat, heavily nuanced and caveat that it is, which is the, the tie between extreme weather
00:26:22.880
of different sorts, extreme, uh, changes in rainfall, flooding, drought, fire, hurricanes,
00:26:30.280
tornadoes, et cetera, um, are all very, very modest in terms of the, the strength of the correlation.
00:26:37.020
Nobody actually knows, uh, no one knows if any one specific set of events is caused by, uh, the long-term
00:26:44.440
pattern of, of climate change, whether, wherever, whatever you think that is. Um, but yes, unfortunately,
00:26:51.240
we have an unfortunate political dynamic now in which people seize upon a, um, unpleasant event or an,
00:26:58.900
undesired event, uh, disasters, floods, fires, uh, and just flat out, they attribute it to climate change
00:27:06.640
as if it is, and move forward to use that to batter their political opponents over, you know,
00:27:12.240
too much regulation, not enough regulation, uh, what happens.
00:27:16.880
See, but even what you're, you're saying here, that the actual report from the Intergovernmental
00:27:22.820
Panel on Climate Change at the UN has low-level confidence, you've got some people in our political
00:27:29.280
discourse now who would just say, well, that proves you're a climate change denier.
00:27:32.500
Uh, yes, but they, they would have said that no matter what you say, if you're not agreeing
00:27:38.240
with every element of the end point of the policy that they want, people call you a denier
00:27:45.560
because it's a Holocaust, it, uh, it echoes matters of the Holocaust. It's, it's a casual
00:27:52.720
and easy blood libel to throw at people. Uh, but really, uh, that's, that's really when
00:27:57.680
you disagree with what they want as a public policy. Um, if you, uh, if you actually look
00:28:02.500
at what the science, uh, look at the publications of the IPCC, they say, we, this body of scientists
00:28:10.320
who are assembled to write these reports assign only low or medium confidence into the idea
00:28:16.980
that there is a relationship between increased fire weather, as they call it, they refer to
00:28:22.180
fire weather. Uh, and that is a very odd term. Climate change. It's a, yeah. Fire weather
00:28:27.400
to me is a, it is an odd term. I agree. So it's a clearly a term of art, but, um, but if
00:28:33.060
you read there, the words of the group themselves in their technical documentation, when they're
00:28:36.800
talking to each other, not to you, the public and not through policymakers, these are, these
00:28:42.400
are, this is what it says. So, um, there's not no denying that.
00:28:46.580
But so whether we're talking forest fires or a larger issue like climate change, do we
00:28:54.180
need to have more nuanced discussions to get at better outcomes, better policies? Because
00:29:00.020
I, I standing up and screaming, basically it's the equivalent of walking around with the sign
00:29:05.960
on saying the end is nigh or yelling, we're all going to die. Um, I think people just tune
00:29:13.400
that out. Well, you know, and not to be, not to be a negative old guy, uh, but, but I've
00:29:21.760
noticed a distinct dwindling of nuance in society's discussion of policy matters ever since I got
00:29:28.400
into the field in the 1990s. Uh, so I would be the first one to say, yes, we need some more
00:29:33.200
nuance on these kinds of issues. We need more rigor in our, um, in people's understanding
00:29:38.840
of sciences. We need a vast increase in science literacy, uh, in, in both, uh, the U.S. and
00:29:46.760
Canada and around the world really, because increasingly policy issues are turning on matters
00:29:52.380
of science. And at the same time, if you want to see trends that are going in the wrong directions,
00:29:56.840
our, our dependence in policy on based, based on science is going up. Our actual science literacy
00:30:02.200
is in precipitous free fall and then going down. Uh, so yes, we need better discourse, uh, more
00:30:08.880
informed, uh, discourse, more nuanced discourse, more real world based discourse, uh, and less
00:30:14.880
theoretical and abstract and political. Um, if I had a way to promote that, I'd be promoting it,
00:30:20.800
but instead I write my, my little scribblings and publish them where I can and we all hope for the best.
00:30:26.480
Well, yeah, I mean, part of it have to be getting away from the models that you wrote about in your
00:30:33.000
book. Um, you know, models, um, said that we would have, uh, uh, clear Arctic ice, what, 15 years ago,
00:30:40.880
um, that we wouldn't have snow anymore. Uh, we, we've been making such grand pronouncements that
00:30:49.060
people just ignore what is a serious issue, but maybe it's been oversold to them and overhyped.
00:30:55.740
And so they no longer care because, well, we were all supposed to be dead by now. We were supposed
00:31:00.660
to be baking like it was, uh, uh, uh, you know, Canada was supposed to be like, uh, Southern
00:31:06.440
California at this point. Well, yeah, that's, that's a problem. I mean, as I, as, as I refer to
00:31:11.260
some of the models, computer models are, are sweet little lies. They, they, they, they paint very
00:31:16.460
pretty, very stark, very graphic images of reality, uh, that in fact has nothing to do with reality.
00:31:22.940
As I try to explain, you know, um, uh, Mickey Mouse is a model of a mouse, but he has remarkably
00:31:28.740
little to do with actual behavior of mice and biology of mice, but, but, uh, people would rather
00:31:34.700
watch Mickey than actually watch rice. And so, uh, so we, models are a problem. People have fixated
00:31:40.840
on them and they have allowed their under underlying level of science literacy to decline in favor of
00:31:47.680
the quick hit of looking at the model chart output and going, oh my God, I can, I can, you know, I can
00:31:52.960
relate to this. It, it, it, because humans are visual creatures. They're heavily influenced by that
00:31:58.600
in the immediate visual outputs of these models in a way that they're not of the dry numbers you
00:32:04.420
might give them in an Excel spreadsheet or a data table or the number of chart that shows the numbers
00:32:10.100
of fire frequency or an extent over time. These things don't motivate them to the way that
00:32:14.860
a big model of that. We have the climate that shows this nice steady line turning relative,
00:32:19.960
you're turning from green to yellow, the flaming red, and then skyrocketing in the world is bursting
00:32:25.200
into flames. People are moved by these model outputs in a way that they're not moved by data.
00:32:32.320
Well, I, I'm not sure what the answer is, but, um, we'll see how the rest of this forest fire season
00:32:37.720
goes. We'll see what it looks like next year. Perhaps this is the year that we, we burn all the
00:32:42.440
underbrush and next year there's next to no fires. Will we blame that on climate change or a lack
00:32:49.600
of eco-terrorists? I don't know. Uh, Ken Green, thanks so much for the time.
00:32:55.540
Full Comment is a post-media podcast. My name's Brian Lilly, your host. This
00:32:59.740
episode was produced by Andre Proulx with theme music by Bryce Hall. Kevin Libin is the executive
00:33:05.280
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00:33:10.020
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