This is bad and only getting to get much worse. The opening paragraph just grazes the issue but doesn’t bring it up in the rest of the article:
> The US Forest Service deputy fire chief had been deployed thousands of miles from home to battle an out-of-control blaze in the wooded bogs and swampland of Alberta, Canada.
These bogs and swampland are nothing like California. These are ecosystems so wet and cold most of the year that the detritus doesn’t fully decompose and instead builds up into a layer of peat meters thick that has been growing since the glaciers started receding. Imagine millions of square miles of wetlands and forest sitting on top of the largest contiguous carbon sink on the surface of the planet… and it burns so well humans have used it as a source of cheap and dirty fuel since ancient times.
This is it: this is one of those climate change death spirals. As the summers get hotter and drier, the peats dries out and becomes combustible. When it burns, it further dries out surrounding peat, increasing the amount of fuel available instead of burning it away. It can even burn underground between fire seasons, surviving rainy seasons! There is no stopping it and active control measures like controlled burns will do nothing but make it worse. Fire breaks? Can’t dig deep enough. Suppressant? Won’t penetrate the top layer of peat.
Siberia shares much of the same problems with peatlands and it’s been going rapidly downhill since the massive wildfires started in the early 2000s. Since 2010 [1], things have rapidly accelerated and now giant wildfires rip through Siberia on an annual basis. Canada is starting to enter that same death spiral.
When it comes to climate change I’m more of a techno-optimist than a doomer but this is one of those consequences that we can’t possibly stop, only mitigate. These fires are going to be the new normal for peatland ecosystems the world over. We should all get used to a northern hemisphere wrapped in smoke parts of the year.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Russian_wildfires
> The US Forest Service deputy fire chief had been deployed thousands of miles from home to battle an out-of-control blaze in the wooded bogs and swampland of Alberta, Canada.
These bogs and swampland are nothing like California. These are ecosystems so wet and cold most of the year that the detritus doesn’t fully decompose and instead builds up into a layer of peat meters thick that has been growing since the glaciers started receding. Imagine millions of square miles of wetlands and forest sitting on top of the largest contiguous carbon sink on the surface of the planet… and it burns so well humans have used it as a source of cheap and dirty fuel since ancient times.
This is it: this is one of those climate change death spirals. As the summers get hotter and drier, the peats dries out and becomes combustible. When it burns, it further dries out surrounding peat, increasing the amount of fuel available instead of burning it away. It can even burn underground between fire seasons, surviving rainy seasons! There is no stopping it and active control measures like controlled burns will do nothing but make it worse. Fire breaks? Can’t dig deep enough. Suppressant? Won’t penetrate the top layer of peat.
Siberia shares much of the same problems with peatlands and it’s been going rapidly downhill since the massive wildfires started in the early 2000s. Since 2010 [1], things have rapidly accelerated and now giant wildfires rip through Siberia on an annual basis. Canada is starting to enter that same death spiral.
When it comes to climate change I’m more of a techno-optimist than a doomer but this is one of those consequences that we can’t possibly stop, only mitigate. These fires are going to be the new normal for peatland ecosystems the world over. We should all get used to a northern hemisphere wrapped in smoke parts of the year.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Russian_wildfires