Canada’s forest burning because of bad forest policy and management, not climate change

Here is another blog post on this topic! It is shameful how these latest Canadian forest fires were exploited again by the usual and opportunistic demagoguery of climate change!

Here is my Global Warming hoax and Climate Change religion in a nutshell

Government likes to blame climate change to cover up government failure! As if some Western governments intentionally allow e.g. wildfires to happen in support of the climate change ideology!

What happened in Canada lately is also typical for other Western countries!

"... Here at home, our usual opportunistic climate alarmists including Prime Minister Trudeau, Environment Minister Guilbeault  ...  blame the flames on climate change   ...
As the Royal Society, an independent scientific academy in the United Kingdom, summarizes in a 2020 blog post updating its 2016 research on global wildfire extent, "Fire activity is on the rise in some regions, but when considering the total area burned at the ground level, we are not seeing an increase an overall increase.” The 2016 report was more explicit, finding: “Instead, global area burned appears to have overall declined over past decades, and there is increasing evidence that there is less fire in the global landscape today than centuries ago.” ...

That’s according to a 2020 study in the journal Progress in Disaster Science where authors Tymstra et al. show a fairly sharp declining trend in the number of fires (annually) over time, and a mixed record of areas burned, though the authors note an apparent increase in areas burned over the last two decades.

In fact, as average atmospheric temperatures have risen from 1970 to 2017, Canadian forest fires have declined sharply in number and show little obvious trend in areas burnt.

Crucially, Tymstra’s study also finds that wildfire management policy in Canada comes up short. “A major barrier in Canada… is the inadequate funding to support the vision of an innovative and integrated approach to wildfire management. Mitigation funding has followed wildfire disasters but not at the same level to mitigate flood and earthquake disasters. Despite the increasing occurrence of wildfire disasters in Canada, funding to support wildfire prevention, mitigation and preparedness have not kept pace with the increasing need to mitigate the impacts from wildfires, and be better prepared when they do arrive.”

More specifically, Tymstra et al. find that Canada has failed to fund the proactive management of forest fires sufficiently and is not poised to do better moving forward. “Wildfire management agencies in Canada are at a tipping point. Presuppression [sic] and suppression costs are increasing but program budgets are not.” But clearly, a lack of fire suppression is also a problem: “Wildfire suppression contributes to a wildfire problem but paradoxically it is wildfire use that will help to solve this problem. The wildfire management toolbox must include wildfire use to manage wildfires at the landscape scale because it is not feasible to effectively use prescribed burns and/or fuel management treatments alone to restore expansive wildfire-dependent ecosystems.” ... you need to fight fire with fire ..."

From the abstract:

"Wildfire management agencies in Canada are at a tipping point. Presuppression and suppression costs are increasing but program budgets are not. ... To co-exist with wildfire, agencies in Canada must also strengthen and adjust their wildfire management capacity and capability. This necessitates stronger horizontal collaboration, enhanced resource sharing, investments to develop innovative decision support tools, and an increased focus on prevention and mitigation."

Canada’s burning because of bad forest policy, not climate change | Fraser Institute

Wildfire management in Canada: Review, challenges and opportunities Author links open overlay panel (open access)

Fig. 1. Number of wildfires and area burned in Canada 1970–2017. The red line is a linear trend of the number of wildfires.