During their daily updates, Alberta officials and politicians have frequently described this wildfire season as “unprecedented.”
On May 10, Christie Tucker, a manager with Alberta Wildfire, said so far this year, wildfires had burned about 410,000 hectares — double the average area burned for an entire wildfire season.
By May 17, that area had grown to 728,000 hectares across the province, and the season is nowhere near over yet.
While the wildfire seasons are getting more severe, that trend shouldn’t come as a surprise.
“Climate change is warming the climate across Canada,” said Nathan Gillett, a research scientist with Environment and Climate Change Canada. “It’s warming the climate in western Canada.
“We know it’s increasing the chance of heat waves,” he explained. “As the climate gets warmer, as we see more heat waves, that dries out the forest more quickly, it dries out the litter, and that increases the risk of wildfire.”
There will still be year-to-year variations, he added.
“But over time, we expect more heat waves, more extreme fire seasons like the one we’re seeing now in Alberta. These events are going to become more and more frequent into the future as the climate continues to warm.”
Gillett said studies have examined climate change’s effects on wildfires in both Alberta and B.C. and found it upped the risk in both provinces.
“Also, yes, climate change tends to make the wildfire season longer. In general, the snow melts earlier, the forest can dry out earlier and that lengthens the forest fire season.”
Not only is the trend “concerning,” Gillett says it has real impacts on people’s daily lives.
“People who have to evacuate their homes or even had homes destroyed. Also, it has impacts on air quality. The smoke from wildfires spreads across a much larger area (and) that has impacts for people who have respiratory diseases, for example.
“There’s a number of serious impacts from wildfire.”
People have a few options, Gillett said, including adapting and reducing emissions.
“We need to adapt to climate change generally and one of those changes is increased wildfire.”
He said governments could be looking at things like forest management practices, the types of trees that are planted, disaster response and urban planning.
“There are still going to be changes that we can’t adapt to,” Gillett added, “and wildfire has real impacts on people, some of which we can’t avoid.”
He said the climate is warming at a fast rate — approximately 0.2 degrees a decade.
“We know that’s going to continue for the next few decades.
“Where we end up near the end of this century will depend on whether we’re able to reduce emissions and how quickly we’re able to get emissions down to net zero,” Gillett said.
“If we’re able to do that rapidly, then we might see global temperatures stabilize between 1.5 and 2.0o degrees.
“Whatever we do, we’re going to see some additional climate change. The impacts that we’re seeing are going to get worse. We can limit how much worse they get if we’re able to get emissions down to net zero rapidly.”
Gillett says this means wildfire activity is going to increase in frequency and severity.
“We’re going to see more extreme wildfire seasons. How big those increases are will depend on how much warming we see on a global scale, which depends on how quickly we can get emissions to zero.”
And, Gillett says science connects human activity to climate change.
“Absolutely. We’ve done a study on the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, which was in the same region. We had a very clear signal of human-induced climate change increasing the risk of the weather that leads to these kinds of extreme wildfire seasons.”
Alberta’s minister of forestry Todd Loewen was asked Tuesday how climate change has affected Alberta’s wildfire season and the role humans play in that.
“There’s no doubt that a changing climate has changed things in Alberta and around the world,” he said.
“We look at the number and intensity of fires this year and the widespread fires that we have. It’s something that we haven’t seen before. In past years, we’ve had large fires that burned expansive areas, but this year we have multiple fires across the province.”
Loewen said Alberta was experiencing high heat and low humidity and needed to “be able to adapt.” He said the Alberta government would review its approach for this season and beyond.
“We’re doing really well with the hand we’ve been dealt, weather-wise, but we’ll be constantly improving.”
When asked if he, personally, agrees with most scientists that the changing climate is caused by humans releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, he replied: “Definitely, man has an effect on our environment here, there’s no doubt about that.
“I think we need to be careful as we go forward and be conscious of the environment. There’s widespread concerns on that and how we can improve that.”
During an agricultural announcement in Morinville Wednesday, NDP MLA Heather Sweet said a New Democrat government would bring back the Rapattack aerial firefighter program while also finding ways to transition to greener energy sources and reduce emissions.
“I think we have a responsibility to be looking at ensuring we have those programs in place for energy efficiency when it comes to bringing down our emissions… whether it be transiting to solar, whether it be looking at electric motors versus diesel, supporting producers in finding more efficiencies on their farm.”
Many Albertans experiencing the effects — wildfire evacuations, poor air quality — see the writing on the wall.
“Well, global warming, right? Climate change,” said Cathy Flood, who moved her outdoor workout indoors Tuesday because of the smoke.
“I’m worried that it’s going to get a lot worse. We were in Canmore last summer for a couple of days and we couldn’t even go outside it was so bad when the fires were bad down there,” she added.
“More than the air quality, I’m concerned about the continuing wildfires and people losing their homes.”
Mike Davidson was forced from his home in Swan Hills, Alta., when an evacuation order was issued Tuesday. It had him thinking about the human factor in all this.
“We need to care about our planet, Mother Earth.”