Full Comment - Everyone’s wrong about what’s behind the forest fires

00:00:00.000 Whether you own a bustling hair salon, or a hot new bakery, you need business insurance that can

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00:00:11.800 for what you need. TD, ready for you. Forest fires, wildfires, whatever you call them,

00:00:23.780 they've been impacting more people than usual this year and making the news more than ever.

00:00:28.460 In some ways, it's because unlike most years, the smoke from wildfires has been floating down and

00:00:34.560 hanging over major cities in Eastern Canada and the United States, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, New

00:00:40.120 York, Washington, DC. This is new to us. While residents of Western Canada are used to smoke

00:00:45.760 from wildfires making an appearance, even in the cities of Western Canada, it just doesn't happen

00:00:50.360 in places like Toronto and New York. Now, all the attention to this issue has turned wildfires into

00:00:56.560 a bit of a culture war issue of late, with one side arguing, it's all climate change,

00:01:00.880 and the other arguing, it's all arson, probably by those eco-terrorists. The truth, it's probably a

00:01:07.100 lot more nuanced, and that's what we're going to try and get to today. Hello, I'm Brian Lilly. This

00:01:11.700 is the Full Comment Podcast. Before we get to our next guest, a reminder to please, pretty please even,

00:01:17.500 hit that subscribe button. Whichever app device you're listening to us on, hit the subscribe button.

00:01:22.220 Leave a review as well, share with family and friends. They will want to know all about wildfires

00:01:26.720 too. So, what is the truth on this front? Is this the worst year ever? Is it all climate change? Is it

00:01:32.520 all eco-terrorists? Is it bad winds? What lessons should we learn? That's what Kenneth Green is going

00:01:38.420 to try and help us with. He is a senior fellow with the Fraser Institute. He's also an author of many,

00:01:43.600 many academic papers, and also the book, The Plague of Models, which looks at how computer modeling took

00:01:49.640 over. And, well, what would you say, Ken? Manipulated, downgraded scientific research

00:01:55.380 over the years? Disrupted is a good term. Disrupted? Okay. You've been looking at the

00:02:01.840 newscast. You've been seeing the effects of wildfires across the country. As someone that's studied it,

00:02:08.560 is it the worst year ever? Is it one issue that's driving it? Is it another? How do you react when you

00:02:15.760 see this, both the scale of the fires and the fact that some people on either side of the extremes

00:02:21.520 are trying to turn it into a political issue? Well, of course, the summer is long from over,

00:02:25.540 and therefore, it's declaring it the worst year ever or not is premature. It's going to wait to

00:02:31.420 be seen for what the actual number of fires and extent of fires are. And then, of course, it has to

00:02:37.700 be interpreted in light of the natural variation we see in previous summers and previous years.

00:02:44.640 But it's certainly a notable one. It's not going to be one of the lower ones, at least not according

00:02:51.640 to what I've seen in terms of the historical record for fire number and extent in the last, say, 20 years.

00:02:58.980 But it remains to be seen as to whether it'll set a record and in which area, just area extent burned,

00:03:07.400 the nature of the fires, the number of the fires, the people endangered. There's a lot of different

00:03:14.080 parameters to define worst of the year, worst of the record. Obviously, there's a long way to go

00:03:20.140 before the year is over. It hasn't stopped some people from making declarations that are wild with

00:03:25.460 speculation. There are differences across the country, though, in terms of wildfires and how

00:03:34.640 they're fought, how they start, all of that. Do you think, though, to my point at the beginning,

00:03:40.480 that it's getting as much attention as it does, is in part because the smoke came to us. The smoke

00:03:45.580 came to the big smoke, and we don't normally get it. Other parts of the country are saying,

00:03:51.780 why are you complaining? This happens every year. Well, not to us.

00:03:55.600 Well, I think so. I mean, I think a large part of it is where you live and whether you're accustomed

00:03:59.740 to this sort of thing. I actually grew up on the West Coast, and we took it for granted. I actually

00:04:05.820 grew up in Los Angeles, and it was taken for granted that essentially every summer or late

00:04:11.780 spring and early summer, everything in the vicinity would burst into flames. That's pretty

00:04:16.600 much how things work in Los Angeles, right? It rains in the spring. The foliage grows. Foliage

00:04:21.260 dries out in late spring, and then summertime comes on. The summer heat comes on. Heat, air,

00:04:28.080 concentration, heat, sunlight, and boom, you have fire and people in the vicinity, and you have fire.

00:04:33.300 So I think if you're from one of these biomes or ecosystems where fire is a natural element

00:04:40.660 to you and you grew up in it, then you think, well, it's a little worse than normal, but you're

00:04:46.000 not suddenly, it's not changing your worldview asking, oh my gosh, what's wrong with the entire

00:04:50.660 planet that we're having fires here or having smoke here? I think it does have a lot to do

00:04:55.740 with your experience and your cultural background, your geographic background.

00:04:59.780 Let's talk about climate change. What role is climate change playing in this, if any?

00:05:08.340 Well, of course, this is my opinion and my interpretation of climate data, but I think

00:05:13.180 it's been measured that there has been a warming of the climate in the last 50 years, the last 100

00:05:18.000 years, and that background level of warming has to be presumed to changing the baseline or the

00:05:25.860 background level at which, you know, it's going to produce the increased frequency of fires. That being

00:05:32.220 said, if you actually look at the number of fires over years in Canada, and you look at the extent

00:05:38.820 burned in Canada, those trends are not following along with the measured increases in climate overall

00:05:47.520 global average temperature from climate change. And so what I would say is what climate change is a real

00:05:53.580 thing. I think the measurements suggest a milder warming than models do, which is a different

00:05:58.740 story. But simply the correlation between the observed climate change and observed changes in

00:06:05.780 fire number and extent, they're inversely correlated. The warming's going up, has been increasing,

00:06:11.540 whereas the number of fires generally has been decreasing over time in Canada.

00:06:15.480 So we've been having fewer fires, less of the country burned. But this year, you know, appears to

00:06:28.740 be going up. We'll wait for the rest of the season. But if trends continue, it's looking like it's a bad

00:06:33.980 year. We have short memories. We tend to think, oh, well, this is really horrible. It's never been like

00:06:40.680 this. And then you look at the stats and you say, well, actually, it's just like five years ago.

00:06:45.380 How much of that is at play?

00:06:47.440 Well, I think that's a big problem. People do have short memories, as you say,

00:06:50.160 and they're bombarded with information on a regular basis that helps to push some of their

00:06:54.640 old memories into obscurity, I think. I think you were commenting earlier on the fact that

00:06:58.620 people are shocked at grocery prices and trying to figure out how to deal with them. I also grew up in

00:07:03.360 recessions and learned how to shop from my mother during recessions. And so having actual experience

00:07:09.160 of these things does help. But people have a short attention span. And so they don't necessarily

00:07:14.700 remember that these things happened five years or 10 years ago, and that it was the norm, because

00:07:19.980 memories are short and lives are complex. And so old memories get displaced by more recent ones.

00:07:27.480 In terms of the cause of the fires, it's interesting when you look at different provincial stats,

00:07:33.820 and you'll see that in British Columbia, most common one for fires that they have determined

00:07:39.680 how they started is lightning. In Alberta, it's often human-caused. And Alberta's got great database

00:07:46.980 going back to, I think one is 2006 to 2018, and then they've got another chunk of years before that

00:07:53.180 and a separate one. But you go through and it's human-caused doesn't mean arson.

00:07:58.280 I was going through, and they're very detailed at times in what caused it. And the one that caught

00:08:04.820 me in, I thought, oh, I didn't think of that, was hot exhaust from an ATV. It could be that,

00:08:10.420 it could be a campfire getting out of control. That's what I meant when I said earlier, different

00:08:16.260 regions seem to have different reasons for why the wildfires are starting. It's not one-size-fits-all

00:08:22.280 across a country like Canada.

00:08:23.500 No, that's right. And I think to use some quasi-scientific terms or some scientific terminology,

00:08:28.920 you have to look at the proximal cause of the fire, the thing that ignites a fire, as opposed

00:08:36.080 to the more the distal cause, which is what builds up the fuel for the fire. And I think

00:08:40.420 there are differences in the proximal causes, like you said. In Alberta, it could be human

00:08:46.420 cause, but that does not mean arson. It could mean somebody loses a lug nut on their truck as

00:08:51.680 they're driving down the highway. It kicks off a bunch of sparks and starts a fire. Or

00:08:56.680 it could be somebody throws a cigarette butt out the window of a car, that causes a fire.

00:09:03.560 There are any number of things that can trigger the fire once the base of the fuel has been

00:09:08.240 set, right? So you need to look at the two questions of what's the trigger to burst into

00:09:13.860 flames, as opposed to what is the cause of the buildup of the fuel. And the buildup of the

00:09:19.800 fuel problem seems to be more systemic in Canada. The proximal cause of what triggers the fuel

00:09:24.920 to burst into flames is more regional. Wind here, lightning there, human sparks because

00:09:32.220 of interacting with the environment in another place. Yeah, those are going to vary.

00:09:38.220 I want to ask you about that fuel thing in a moment, but just to give some stats on the number

00:09:42.860 of wildfires, according to the federal government, you go back to a year like 1989, huge number of

00:09:51.620 fires, 11,000 they recorded. The year before, 1988, it was about 2,000. In 2020, there were just

00:10:00.420 a few hundred across the country. Last year, about 7,500. They do tend to go up and down with

00:10:08.040 no rhyme or reason. I mean, I'm sure that you would find it looking at weather patterns and

00:10:13.900 other things, but the idea that we're on a trajectory one way or another just doesn't hold

00:10:19.640 water when you look at the stats. Well, right, that's right. And I think, and, you know, climate

00:10:23.640 is, we talk about climate change and people have, that gives people this idea that there's

00:10:29.660 some calm, stately progression to the climate, that it's on this, they see the lovely charts and

00:10:35.680 graphs showing the climate on a progressive change, moving upward on a nice flat slope and

00:10:41.960 everything, nice smooth slope. But the climate is extremely variable year to year, and there are a

00:10:46.880 lot of chaotic elements to it. There are a lot of non-linear, as the scientists would say, elements

00:10:52.220 to it that can't be predicted. And then, of course, fires in one year will affect the fires in another

00:10:57.900 year. If you have that really huge year where you've scorched vast quantities of forests, you're not

00:11:03.940 likely to see the similar kind of, that similar kind of fire in the same place for several years

00:11:08.480 because no fuel, right?

00:11:10.580 In 1990.

00:11:11.960 In 1990, yeah.

00:11:12.500 So I said 1989.

00:11:15.740 Actually about, sorry, I said 11,000. Just looking at the chart, it's closer to 13. It's an odd chart.

00:11:22.920 But the next year, less than 2,000 wildfires. So talk to me about the fuel, because I remember

00:11:28.700 interviewing people about this years ago, and they were trying to put some blame for the fuel

00:11:36.020 in the forests. We started with California, but it was a concept expanding into Canada,

00:11:44.180 that we were having a buildup of fuel due to forest management practices that said,

00:11:48.460 just leave everything wild. Do you put any stock in that?

00:11:51.920 You know, it's actually, it's a great question. And it's one people don't, we don't really

00:11:58.200 ponder too much. I mean, I too have been critical of forest management practices in terms of whether

00:12:04.600 or not they can lead to more or less fires in the past. But there's a bigger question of sort

00:12:11.580 of, do people accept that the downside of having such massively gorgeous boreal forests that we

00:12:18.240 all love, is that forests burst into flames. It's a natural part of the cycle of the ecosystems.

00:12:26.180 And so the question is whether or not, it's really less a question of, has the government

00:12:30.000 mismanaged it, as opposed to, should the government have gotten into that, the idea of managing

00:12:35.600 these things in the first place, to put themselves at risk of people pointing a finger and saying,

00:12:41.460 you're getting this wrong. Well, is there a way to get it right?

00:12:44.260 Hard to know. I mean, that really, it's a judgment call, because you have to decide,

00:12:50.220 you know, do we accept, look, we live on a continent that is heavily forested. North America

00:12:56.620 is forests and plains. It's right. And the odd city in between with the odd city stuck here or

00:13:05.140 there in the other place. But really, I mean, it's going to go through the natural cycles of boom

00:13:09.140 and bust and burn and grow. And there's a limit to how much that can be controlled. Now, I do think

00:13:14.980 there's a balance to be struck between actually managing ecosystems around the little spots you

00:13:20.840 talked about, we talked about, of development, cities and urban areas. That is a legitimate

00:13:27.100 province, I should say, or providence of government. And there can be questions asked whether they're

00:13:34.520 doing that well or not. But the bigger question of when you have have continent wide bursts of

00:13:40.340 forest fires, I don't really know that that it's an appropriate frame of reference to say,

00:13:46.140 look, we want the government to have the power to be able to control that. I'm not, I'm not really

00:13:51.440 sure we do.

00:13:53.480 How would you in an area the of where you've got forest stretching from the far northern reaches of

00:14:00.080 British Columbia, down into straight through Washington State and Oregon and down into

00:14:06.520 California. And you've got the same thing in the Great Lakes basin around, you know, the unpopulated

00:14:13.160 areas of central Canada, or central North America.

00:14:17.860 Well, it's going to sound unsatisfying to people who are either, you know, pro-regulation or anti-regulation,

00:14:22.760 pro-government or anti-government or whatever. But there are certain things that are simply beyond

00:14:26.940 the scope of, of sane, of sane attempts to control. And I think continent wide fire is one of those

00:14:35.940 things, which is you figure out how to adapt to it. You figure out how to live with it. You try to

00:14:40.720 figure out how to live around it. You try to figure out how to recover from it. But, but the idea that

00:14:46.800 you can control it, and as we've seen with other even larger issues of human contagion, the idea that

00:14:53.380 you can control them is the first, first mistake. So, so I think there's, there's something to be said

00:15:00.420 for the asking questions of, are we managing the adaptation, resilience aspects well, but, you know,

00:15:09.240 trying to poke point blame for continent wide conflagrations, I think, I think it's kind of a waste of time.

00:15:14.560 Well, I mean, one reason to try and make sure that we're, we're not dealing with such an abundance

00:15:22.680 of forest fires is the fact that it's, it's not very good for our health to be breathing this stuff

00:15:27.540 in. I mean, Toronto had the, the, the worst air quality of any major city in the world, according

00:15:34.160 to one group out of Switzerland that monitors such things. And those were against, up against cities

00:15:41.040 that you actually associate with pollution. So, you know, this is bad for, for our lungs. This is bad

00:15:49.200 for long-term health if it continues. So are there things that, that can be done? If managing a forest

00:15:56.780 that stretches, you know, either down the, the, the back of the Appalachian mountain range or down the,

00:16:02.660 the, the, the, through the Rockies and, and along that spine, if doing that is unreasonable and

00:16:09.520 impossible, what can governments do to, to try and manage it? Because, you know, as well as I do,

00:16:17.240 bad things happen. Some people will demand, I don't care how conservative or, or libertarian

00:16:23.400 leaning people are. At a certain point, they say, well, somebody's got to do something.

00:16:27.860 What, what, if anything can be done?

00:16:30.540 Well, that's a good question. And again, not to overly personalize this. I grew up with asthma

00:16:33.560 in California and the smog and the fires. And I agree. It's, uh, the, the, the, the levels of smoke

00:16:39.520 are bad for people. It's going to trigger asthma attacks. If not, it's just, it's not causal, but

00:16:44.860 it will irritate them, irritate, uh, asthma in people and, and other respiratory illnesses. Um,

00:16:51.400 no question about that, I think, at least in my mind. Um, but the, the question that is,

00:16:57.280 what do you do about it? And the question that is, if something is affecting my lungs and,

00:17:01.960 and also I would, I would urge a little caution on saying, well, this is going to cause a lifetime

00:17:05.720 harm. Short-term exposures are different than long-term exposures. So we need to be careful

00:17:10.160 about that. I mean, if it's ongoing.

00:17:12.580 It was ongoing. If it was ongoing all the time at these levels, you would certainly want

00:17:16.500 greater activity. I think, uh, really basically advising people at this point, uh, in terms of

00:17:22.060 if somebody says, well, the government should do something, uh, I'd say weaving this, improving

00:17:26.520 advisory systems that say, if you're vulnerable and vulnerable means these people,

00:17:31.960 to make sure people are educated and know that they're going to be particularly vulnerable to,

00:17:36.540 in this case, wood smoke in the air or fire smoke, forest fire smoke in the air,

00:17:41.420 then you should take the following precautions. You should stay indoors, don't exercise outdoors,

00:17:48.000 um, stay in air, in climate controlled, uh, to the extent you can, climate controlled, uh,

00:17:53.460 buildings and facilities, things like that. Um, but, but I mean, beyond, going beyond that kind

00:17:59.300 of advisory role, uh, this is just not something that governments, uh, um, well, they just can't

00:18:06.120 do much about it really. Is there, are there practices such as, uh, preventative burns or

00:18:13.300 clear cuts that could be used to, to try and, and, and help alleviate some of this?

00:18:18.560 Again, this is mostly my, my, my opinion. I'm not a forester. I should give a caveat there. I'm not

00:18:24.840 a forester, have never cut down a tree. Uh, so, um, you're, you grew up in California. You're

00:18:31.320 legally not allowed. That's no, I would not have been allowed to grow up. Well, besides that, I was,

00:18:35.360 I was living mostly near the, at the bottom end of the Mojave Desert, but, so I would have been

00:18:38.960 cutting down somebody, some neighbor's tree more likely, uh, but no, you're not really allowed to do a

00:18:42.920 lot of foresting there. Um, but I would say, you know, for, with regard to things affecting specific

00:18:48.160 localities, um, in Los Angeles, uh, example, they have fire roads. Things just cut fire breaks. You

00:18:54.800 would, you might want to use clear cuts to create breaks and wind breaks as we do in the middle of

00:19:00.200 the prairies and everything. You create wind breaks, uh, to stop the, the flow of spread flowing,

00:19:05.360 free flowing of wind, um, to control fire affecting people in where, where they are gathered,

00:19:12.920 sure. Setting fires, backfires, control burns, barrier methods, highway, highway, uh, construction

00:19:21.580 and highway width and things like that actually, uh, can, can play roles. Um, waterways, you know,

00:19:27.720 routing waterways, things like that. Um, but, but again, a continent scale, um, I don't see that,

00:19:36.200 uh, I don't know that anyone has the knowledge. It's a libertarian would say that it's a knowledge

00:19:42.140 problem. Who has the knowledge of what that fire level is supposed to be from year to year,

00:19:47.540 where it's supposed to be from year to year, uh, what extent you think should be burned in that year

00:19:53.180 versus what extent you think shouldn't be burned in that year. I don't think anybody has the knowledge

00:19:57.700 to actually stick hands on and start managing that. So I would say local level, probably there's a good,

00:20:03.920 there's some good reason to think about it nationally. Not so much.

00:20:07.200 All right. We'll talk more about who to blame and who people are blaming and whether they're right

00:20:13.300 when it comes to wildfires, when we come back.

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00:20:25.940 No.

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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

00:20:52.200 wildfires in various places this time of year. What do you say to those people that are convinced

00:20:58.140 that it is, this is all being caused by their pet political issue? What, what do you say to the

00:21:05.440 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

00:21:17.160 pronouncements like that as assignment of, of blame to multi-factorial problems. Uh, I think it's,

00:21:23.240 it's kind of a simplistic thing that it's either this or that, that it's either climate change or

00:21:27.140 natural variability, uh, or, uh, you know, or human effect, human, human action, or pyromania.

00:21:34.040 I mean, um, it's likely all of the above are involved, uh, some level of background warming,

00:21:40.860 some level of natural variability in forest cycles, some, uh, and some actual criminality,

00:21:48.900 uh, some government missteps, some industry missteps. Uh, I'm sure there's blame to go around,

00:21:54.900 but I don't think any one group gets the prize for saying you did this.

00:21:59.040 So you don't believe there's a group of eco-terrorists coordinated across the continent

00:22:04.020 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,

00:22:55.780 previous desire to, to enact. So I'm sure some of that is going on, but, uh, overarching conspiracy

00:23:01.360 theories, uh, no, I don't, I just generally don't believe in them. I don't believe people are

00:23:05.200 smart enough to coordinate them. I believe that thieves, uh, do not, uh, have honor and they would

00:23:10.160 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

00:23:41.220 year. I remember covering a trial of one guy outside of Ottawa in Eastern Ontario. He was in

00:23:47.460 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.

00:23:56.880 There are also stories of people they see, they see a huge fire season. Uh, some, some, uh, business

00:24:02.520 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 0.98

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.

00:32:30.000 And that's unfortunate.

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.

00:32:53.220 My pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

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

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00:33:16.000 tell your friends about us, email your Aunt May and Whitby. Thanks for listening. Remember,

00:33:21.520 I'm on your side.

Full Comment - July 10, 2023

Everyone’s wrong about what’s behind the forest fires

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