Canadian wildfires are out of sight and out of mind for the most part. The fires only get press when the smoke affects human populations, particularly in the United States, such as New York City or Miami. Yes, all the way down to the Magic City.
Before I share what is unreported, I was hoping you would watch a clip from Donald Trump recently speaking at a fundraiser in California. It indicates what we are up against regarding effective climate action versus ignoramus Republicans.
Below is Trump blabbering on how to prevent forest fires. It is genuinely jaw-dropping for an individual who wants to become President again in an era of climate breakdown.
Wow. The stupid it burns.
Mathiew Leiser and Genevieve Norman write in Barons about what the wildfires have done to the wildlife of Canada. Wildlife always seems to get the short end of the stick regarding climate impact reporting. Their suffering and deaths are ignored by most of us.
No droppings, tracks, nests or other traces of wildlife—Canada's boreal forests were devastated by record wildfires this year.Canada's wildfires take devastating toll on wildlife.
The biologist notes that certain species can quickly become trapped because they do not have the capacity to fly or run fast enough and over long distances in the face of very intense and rapidly advancing fires.
And in certain regions, the fires struck very early in the season, therefore shortly after gestation, leaving no chance for hatchlings or sucklings to escape.
The consequences are severe also for aquatic fauna. In addition to ash that blankets lakes and rivers, soil erosion caused by the loss of vegetation alters water quality.
"Lakes with clear, clear water in the Canadian Shield will fill with algae which will suck the oxygen from the water, so there will be less for the animals," Langlois explains, referring to a large area of exposed rock.
The chemical composition of wildfire smoke particles is also different from particles from other sources of pollution, such as car emissions or industrial pollution.
It contains a greater proportion of carbon-based pollutants in various chemical forms that are sometimes deposited hundreds of kilometers from the fires.
Canada left battered by 'never before seen' wildfire season
"We have shattered all the records on a Canadian scale," says a shaken Yan Boulanger, a researcher for the country's natural resources ministry.
There had never been so many areas burned—18 million hectares (70,000 square miles), via 6,400 fires—or so many people evacuated, at more than 200,000.
"It's an impressive wake-up call because we didn't necessarily expect it so quickly, even if the potential was there," Boulanger, a forest fire specialist at Natural Resources Canada, told AFP.
In Quebec, hard hit and less accustomed than the west to very large fires, the shock is immense.
No more leaves on the branches, trunks blackened and roots charred: in the spruce forest of Abitibi-Temiscamingue,only a few tufts of moss managed to resist the onslaught of blazes that started in June. As far as the eye can see, there is the same desolate landscape.
"There is little chance that this forest will be able to regenerate. The trees are too young to have had time to form cones which ensure the next generation," says Maxence Martin, a professor of forest ecology at the University of Quebec in Abitibi-Temiscamingue.
Edit The explanation of the X-axis in the cover image graph from Copernicus.
The CAMS Global Fire Assimilation System (GFAS) assimilates fire radiative power (FRP) observations from satellite-based sensors to produce daily estimates of wildfire and biomass burning emissions. It also provides information about injection heights derived from fire observations and meteorological information from the operational weather forecasts of ECMWF.
The GFAS data output includes spatially gridded Fire Radiative Power (FRP), dry matter burnt and biomass burning emissions for a large set of chemical, greenhouse gas and aerosol species. Data are available globally on a regular latitude-longitude grid with horizontal resolution of 0.1 degrees from 2003 to present.