The wildfires in the North and West of North America this summer during a period of extreme heat served to focus the attention of Canadians on the human and financial cost of these extreme events related to the warming planet.
Kathryn Blaze Baum, Globe and Mail Environment Reporter, and Matthew McLearn report that extreme, deadly heat in Canada is going to come back. In 2021, Canadians sweated through oppressive temperatures that killed hundreds in the West. The heat also showed us where we must adapt to survive, from emergency responses to urban design and climate policy
“It was a war,” a still-shaken Chief Bertuzzi told The Globe and Mail, describing the chaos in Vancouver at the peak of the heat wave. “We did what we had to do. It was surreal.” The June heat wave was the most deadly weather event in Canadian history, according to statistical analysis from the B.C. Centre for Disease Control. It’s also estimated to be a once-in-a-thousand-years event, made 150 times more likely due to human-caused climate change. Preliminary data from the B.C. Coroners Service has found at least 569 people died in B.C. due to the extreme heat that settled over the Pacific Northwest for about a week. Hundreds more died in Oregon and Washington... July of 2021 was the world’s hottest month ever recorded, according to global data recently released by U.S. federal scientists. And unless we take steps now, heat will claim more lives as the Earth continues to warm.1
During the June heat wave, humans were pushed past their limits. The body functions best at a core temperature of around 37C. If that temperature reaches 40C and continues to warm, critical systems start shutting down. The brain stops processing normally. The body loses its ability to thermoregulate through sweating. The blood thickens, forcing the heart to beat harder and faster. Breathing becomes rapid and shallow. Organ systems eventually fail.
Cities have long dedicated resources to protecting residents from floods or wildfires. Heat should be no different, according to Ladd Keith, a University of Arizona assistant professor of planning. “We should treat heat as a hazard,” Dr. Keith said. Heat governance, as he calls it, is necessary for tackling acute heat events as well as day-to-day chronic heat, which can be even more deadly than heat waves… For Dr. Keith, the time to start adapting was yesterday. Maybe this summer’s record-breaking temperatures will finally convince us to take heat seriously. “This was a landmark summer,” he said. “We’re already so far behind in planning for heat, compared to other hazards. We’re at risk of repeating mistakes next summer if we don’t catch up quickly.”1
Randi Jandt, a fire ecologist, wildlife biologist and occasional firefighter at the International Arctic Research Center and the Alaska Fire Science Consortium at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, comments in the Scientific American, that wildfire Is transforming Alaska and amplifying climate change. Conflagrations in lower latitudes get more attention, but wildfires across the high north are affecting the planet even more.
Extensive wildfire is accelerating climate change, too. Large fires throw a stunning amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Most of it comes from the duff, not the trees. The thick duff layers across high latitudes store 30 to 40 percent of all the soil carbon on Earth. In 2015 severe wildfires in interior Alaska burned 5.1 million acres, releasing about nine million metric tons of carbon from standing vegetation—and 154 million tons from the duff, according to Christopher Potter of NASA's Earth Sciences Division. (That calculation includes carbon lost to decomposition and erosion for two subsequent years.) The total amount of CO2 is equal to that emitted by all of California's cars and trucks in 2017. As more ground thaws, ice in the lower layers of duff melts and drains away, drying the duff farther down, making it more ready to burn deeply. This feedback loop most likely will expand the acres burned, aggravate health for millions of people and make the climate change faster than ever. Feedbacks may even convert the entire region from one that absorbs more carbon than it emits to one that emits more carbon than it absorbs.2
Chris Hatch considers five ways, in the National Observer, that the election has changed climate politics.
In the dying days of the last Parliament, we got a climate accountability act. It requires the government to bring forward a plan to meet Canada’s 2030 targets by the end of this year (and also interim objectives for 2026, thanks to pressure from the opposition parties). Many of the big-ticket items for such a plan had never been run by the electorate. None of us had ever voted in an election where oil and gas regulations or a $170 carbon price were on the table. So, the next few months will be important in climate politics. We will find out very soon how many of the new campaign promises the Liberals and opposition parties will deliver.3
We are realizing that the cost of not addressing climate change will be greater than the cost of transition in energy production, transportation, and building retrofits. World leaders are beginning to direct funds to enable these changes.
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