Transcript
Speaker: I'm Jane Williams, this is the Red Eye Podcast, produced at the studios of Vancouver Cooperative Radio. Today, a conversation with geographer and climate scientist Simon Donner. We talk about what's driving catastrophic forest fire seasons in California and in British Columbia.
Speaker: Massive wildfires raged through California this month. The North Complex Fire in Northern California broke out in August following lightning strikes. It became the largest wildfire in state history and ripped across 32 kilometers in one night.
Speaker: Research over the past 15 years shows that climate change has drastically amplified the conditions that help wildfires ignite and spread. Simon Donner is a climate scientist and professor of geography at the University of British Columbia, and he's joined me to discuss the recent wildfires in California. Hello, Simon.
Speaker: Hi Jane, thanks for having me on. It's our pleasure. Is climate change directly to blame for the destructiveness of the blazes in California right now?
Speaker: Climate change definitely has played a role. Directly to blame is a difficult terminology that always makes scientists squeamish. But you can pretty fairly say that we don't get fires that would look to this extent, to this size, happening this year without the human influence on the climate system.
Speaker: I know that scientists don't like to make statements like that, but I understand there's a new kind of a scientific technique called event attribution science. Could you tell me about that?
Speaker: Well, so the idea, it's actually kind of borrowed from medical science. And so it's the idea that we use our knowledge of the system, in this case, the climate, but you could do it with the human body, to ask how a particular behavior, climate change or smoking, will change the odds of an event occurring. And so you could ask the same question in medical science, what are the odds that if I spend a lifetime smoking two packs a day, then I'm going to get lung cancer?
Speaker: And we can use similar sort of statistical analysis to ask the question, what are the odds that we are gonna have this climate event with or without climate change? And we've come to call this event attribution work. And really what's changed in the past 15 years is the confidence in the methods that are being used and the speed of the computing. I did a study, an event attribution study in the mid 2000s on a heat wave in the Caribbean.
Speaker: And that study took us almost a year to do. But now, because the methods are really down pat and computers are faster, it's possible to do this analysis much faster in the order of a week sometimes. And what has this technique shown about climate change and forest fires and the changing odds? So the really key thing to think about is what causes the fire to happen and what causes it to spread.
Speaker: Obviously climate change isn't going to influence whether somebody decides to discard a cigarette in a forest and start a fire. But what climate change could influence is how dry the forest is, how warm the conditions are, and how much the fire might spread. And so the fire researchers refer to that as fire weather.
Speaker: basically. And climate change basically finds that fire weather is more likely to happen. Now, by how much, it depends on where you are, what part of the Western US, what part of Western Canada, or other parts of the world. And so the statistics are going to be different everywhere. But just to give you an example, there was a study of the 2017 fires in BC that were pretty extreme. People here in Vancouver experienced a smoke from it for sure.
Speaker: And the study found that climate change made the weather that led to those fires two to four times more likely and increased the area that was burned by those fires by seven to 11 times. So climate change may not have caused the fire, but certainly the fire was worse and more likely to happen because of climate change. So talk to me a little bit about the area that's burned and how that is influenced possibly by climate change.
Speaker: Well, there's another level of attribution where instead of focusing on the individual event, you think just about the basic physical conditions and the physical principles underlying climate change. And so one thing that we expect is as the climate is warming, we should see in Western North America earlier snow melt.
Speaker: So the snow's melting out of the mountains a little bit earlier. We also expect the summers to be warmer and drier. And so if you add those two things together, it means the soils are a lot drier at the beginning of the summer. And they're particularly dry as you go later in the summer. You can have more severe drought conditions. And that really sets the stage for wildfires. And so it's having those conditions that allows the fire to spread. Now, the other piece of the equation is, of course, how much fuel do you have?
Speaker: much dry wood is available. And that's where fire suppression practices done over the years have had an influence. And I guess also insect damage, which has been related to climate change. Yeah, absolutely. And certainly in Canada, I think not as much so in California, but certainly in Canada and in parts of the Rockies in the US.
Speaker: There's been discussion about the Santa Ana winds in California and their impact on fire, and I believe that this year they came earlier, if I remember rightly. Is that also something that can be attributed to climate change?
Speaker: I'm not aware of studies that specifically say whether the Santa Ana winds have shifted because of climate change, but I think the thing that's concerning to see this year is that this was actually early for fires in California.
Speaker: You know, here in British Columbia, we expect, you know, if there's going to be forest fires that happen in July and August, but actually fires often happen in California in September and October. And so this was actually a bit early. The winds developed a little bit early. And although I'm not sure whether there's research, as I said, specifically pointing to the Santa Ana winds shifting because of climate change, there is certainly evidence for like more extensive dry conditions extending into the fall and California being a concern.
Speaker: Now, we've had, I guess, a couple of lucky years in BC in 2019 and 2020, but would it be fair to say that nothing actually has changed in BC in terms of the conditions for forest fires?
Speaker: Right. And so the one thing to always remember is that the climate does have natural variability to it. And so when we say the climate is warming, that doesn't mean that every year will necessarily be warmer than the previous year. Or that if there were fires this year, next year's fires are going to be worse. That variability comes into play. So British Columbia, we were a little bit lucky this year. I think a lot of people were expecting this to be a bad fire season, but climate warming together with a reasonably dry winter
Speaker: But then we kind of lucked out and had a pretty wet start to the summer in July and that spared us. But then, you know, we go to late, late summer in August, there were, there were fires in the interior. There was somewhat limited compared to what we've seen in previous years. But those fires were caused by the type of weather system that we usually see during the summer, like during July in British Columbia, still being there at the end of August and into the early September.
Speaker: How is Canada's rate of warming compared to other places in the world?
Speaker: That's a great question, Jane. So Canada is actually warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world. And this is not a surprise to the scientific community. This is what the physics tells us should happen. You can go back to the earliest climate models back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And they said, well, the climate, if it's warming because of greenhouse gas emissions, it should warm faster in the north because
Speaker: when you melt snow and ice, it leaves behind a darker surface and that causes a sort of run -on effect. And then there's also an influence of how thick the atmosphere is at different latitudes. And you put all that together and scientists predict Canada should be warming faster than the rest of the world, and it is. And that will also impact us here in the south of BC.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely. So we're seeing the warming on average for Canada as a whole is about twice the rate of the rest of the world. So we've warmed about two degrees since the Industrial Revolution, since the mid to late 1800s. On average for Canada, then you'll see those numbers being much higher in the North. So there's stations in Yukon, in the Yukon, where you can see warming of five degrees in less than a century.
Speaker: Now, obviously the issue is to tackle climate change, but I just wanted to set that aside for a moment and ask if there's anything else that can be done to reduce the mounting destruction from wildfires, both in Canada and in the US.
Speaker: Well, and one thing that is a historical problem was all of the efforts to suppress fires in the past that in some parts of North America have left a lot of more dead wood available. Fires are actually a good thing for forests.
Speaker: They're just not a good thing for people that are living close to them. And we need to allow for some sort of regular fire frequency. But while being obviously careful to not let fires spread to the extent that they're affecting humans. And so one of the things for us to think about is land use decisions. For one, are we building further and further into forested areas? That's one of the challenges.
Speaker: in parts of Oregon and parts of California during these fire seasons as you have a lot of communities that are built into areas that have a lot of dry wood available. And I guess there's also issues of how people use the forest, how much time people are in the forest and the kinds of activities that they do when they are in the forest.
Speaker: Oh, certainly that what's actually causing the fires to ignite is very, is obviously extremely important. And so people being responsible, if there's a fire ban on, don't have a fire when you're camping because there's a risk, even if you're the best, most experienced outdoors person of that fire accidentally spreading also takes us a couple of sparks to do that. If the force is dry enough. What about the technique of controlled burns? Is that something that we should be looking at bringing back?
Speaker: Well, it's a good strategy. It's used very successfully in all over the world, basically. And it is something to consider in places where there is a lot of fuel load available. And we know that the threat of climate change is looming. If you can have a controlled burn to avoid a worse fire, that can be a good strategy. But that's something I'll say that you have to leave up to the forest management experts in each individual location who will know what frequency is available and whether a controlled burn is safe.
Speaker: And how about the role of clear cut logging? To be honest, I don't actually really study it personally myself, but one of the concerns with clear cutting forests is you leave a lot of debris on the ground.
Speaker: And so there is still, even though I think the image people have as a clear cut forest is like this barren wasteland afterwards, but also mostly what's removed is the trunk, but there's still a lot of wood available on the ground that can allow fires to spread, not as seriously as they would with standing trees, but it is still a concern. I mean, really, we can do a lot with our forest management practices.
Speaker: to try to reduce the spread of fires. But we need to really, but if we want to think about like what the force are going to look like in 2050 forward, we really need to think about climate change. So climate change is a key. I mean, I set it aside when we went into talking about other areas of how to manage things, but climate change is the key. Well, long -term climate change is the key, right? Reducing emissions this year isn't going to stop a fire from happening next year, but reducing emissions now is
Speaker: you know, making a legacy decision for the long -term future. What do we want the province to look like in the coming decades? Good to talk to you, Simon. Thanks so much, Jane. I've been speaking with Simon Donner. He's a Climate Scientist and Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia. The Red Eye podcast is produced at the studios of Vancouver Co -op Radio. You can support us by supporting Co -op Radio.
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