On the menu today: More than you ever thought you would need to know about forest fires in Quebec, dispelling the notion that there’s some human being to blame for the fires, and how a lot of people will want to turn the murky orange miasma tormenting the East Coast into a lesson about climate change. Meanwhile, golfer Greg Norman uses an absolutely terrible cliché to defend Saudi Arabia.
We Didn’t Start the Fire
It’s not hard to find voices who want the smoky orange haze over the northeastern U.S. and Canada to be an environmental morality tale with a human villain, and a somewhat-overlapping group of people are speculating, without any supporting evidence, that these forest fires were deliberately set by someone in some sinister plot.
I’m having a hard time finding any Canadian official who is attributing these massive forest fires to human activity. Keep in mind, as of this morning, there are 437 active fires across Canada, so it is conceivable that different fires have different causes. The Quebec equivalent of the state police, the Sûreté du Québec, told the Toronto Sun that it is investigating the possibility of arson.
But the haze that has bedeviled so many of us over the past few days appears attributable to what local officials in Quebec are calling a “perfect storm” of conditions for creating a forest fire: “Very low humidity, no rain, strong winds and many thunderstorms and lightning strikes.” The whole spring has been hot and dry in much of Quebec; a week ago, the provincial government asked “the entire population to cooperate in avoiding or restricting travel by road as much as possible [in] forest[s] over the next few days due to the extreme flammability rating and the concerning fires underway in parts of the province.”
Take a dry forest, add some lightning strikes with minimal rain, and you’ve got a formula for bad forest fires — no human beings needed.
Before we go any further, “human activity” is not a synonym for “intentional fires,” and even the term “intentional fire” covers a wide variety of actions and circumstances. The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency states, “Intentional fires are those fires that are deliberately set and include fires that result from deliberate misuse of a heat source, fires of an incendiary nature (arson), as well as controlled burn fires, such as crop clearing, that required fire service intervention.”
Your campfire is an intentionally set fire. Those idiots who started the 2021 El Dorado fire in California with their gender-reveal party are on the hook for an intentional fire, too. The four wildfires set in national forests by a former university professor on an “arson spree” in 2021 were also intentional.
There are also human activities that can start fires without intent. Sparks from trains can start fires. Power lines can start fires — from downed lines, vegetation growth, or conductor lines slapping together.
And then there’s lightning. The U.S. National Interagency Fire Center has tracked fires caused by lightning since 2001, and each year, lightning strikes cause anywhere from 5,300 to more than 14,000 fires in the U.S., and those fires burn anywhere from 1.7 million to 8 million acres.
It is worth noting that fires caused by human activity usually do much more damage to people’s lives and property, because they tend to start closer to homes and communities. As the U.S. population grows, people move into new communities in what the U.S. Fire Administration calls the “wildland-urban interface,” where people live close to large areas of wildland vegetation — anything from national forests and parklands to the dry, shrub-covered hills of California. You will notice that Quebec has large swaths of forest with few people living in or near it. One more reason to be skeptical that these fires were started by human activity is that many places where these wildfires started have very few human beings living there.
You would be surprised at how effectively fire investigators can track down how a wildfire started. Back in 2017, the Poudre Fire Authority in Fort Collins, Colo., tracked a 150-acre grass fire back to a cigarette butt:
“We had piles and piles of cigarette butts, and they were the only ignition source on scene,” Koppes said. “People throw cigarettes out the window all the time and don’t start fires, but it’s usually because the conditions aren’t quite right. This time, the conditions were kind of a perfect storm for this particular fire.”
Grasses were so dry you could snap them between your fingers. Winds blew upward of 25 mph, with gusts of 60 mph. Perhaps most importantly, the fire started near a heavily trafficked road where more than 50 cars pass each minute.
I am not wowed by some other news institutions’ attempts to write an “explainer” on the fires. For example, Reuters wrote:
The forest fires started in late April in British Columbia and Alberta, displacing more than 30,000 people at its peak, and shutting down oil and gas production. While most fires in the western provinces are under control, the fires have now opened new fronts spreading to the eastern provinces of Nova Scotia, Quebec and Ontario.
Your mileage may vary, but to me, that makes it sound like the fires currently blanketing the U.S. East Coast in haze started in Canada’s western provinces and then moved to the east.
For those of you who have never looked at a map of Canada, British Columbia and Alberta are above the states of Washington, Idaho, and Montana. The Ontario border doesn’t begin until above Minnesota, the Quebec border doesn’t begin until above Pennsylvania, and Nova Scotia is east of Maine. We’re talking about opposite sides of a vast country and continent. The Rocky Mountains are in the way. Yes, this is the same fire season, with similar environmental conditions of drought and dry tinder across Canada, but the western provinces and eastern provinces are fighting different fires.
If my job required me to risk life and limb to fight fires that traced back to gender-reveal parties and nutjob professors on arson sprees, I’d be livid about the persistent pattern of bad judgment around fire in heavily wooded areas, too. So I can’t entirely begrudge Clare Frank, who served as California’s first female chief of fire protection, for writing an op-ed in the New York Times, with the headline, “We Suffer Too Many Fools Who Start Wildfires.”
At least she acknowledges early on, “Many of the current fires in Canada were caused by lightning that landed on dry forests.” Frank’s op-ed calls upon law-enforcement agencies to charge people who start fires with reckless arson; that’s occurring in the case of the Caldor Fire in California, where the district attorney says the fire was “set accidentally but in a reckless manner.” (Note that in some states such as Virginia, carelessly or negligently starting a wildfire is a misdemeanor, but the person who sets the fire can be liable for the full amount of all expenses incurred in fighting the fire.)
But Frank closes with, “It’s not too late to alter our future. We can pay attention to what is happening today in Canada’s forests so the same won’t happen in ours tomorrow.”
But . . . what is happening today in Canada’s forests was caused by lightning strikes as far as anyone can tell right now. We can’t stop lightning strikes, and the district attorney can’t charge the lightning with reckless arson, either.
In fact, perhaps it’s a little awkward for the Times to run an op-ed denouncing fools who start wildfires using the Quebec forest fires as the news hook, when Rolling Stone is warning about crazy conspiracy theories that the Quebec fires were deliberately set:
“The tinfoil-hat brigade has already ginned up myriad conspiracy theories to cast this disaster, not as an act of God, but part of a nefarious plot — or two, or three. So what really caused those fires? Was it space lasers? Antifa arsonists? The deep-state cabal? Aliens?!
Rolling Stone’s piece is a spectacular example of “nutpicking”: looking for the craziest comments and spotlighting them, closing with the chuckle, “You know what? Maybe it’s a good thing the sun is hidden for now — otherwise these dopes would probably be staring right into it.”
But with the air quality over the northeastern states going to hell and major U.S. cities looking like a scene from the Blade Runner sequel, lots of people are in a mood to find a scapegoat.
And you’ll hear a lot of arguments that because climate change can disrupt established weather patterns, we’re more likely to experience hot, dry summers intermittently punctuated by more intense thunderstorms that will bring more lightning strikes — a formula for more frequent wildfires. That’s not quite saying that climate change caused the Quebec wildfires, but I suspect some greens don’t mind leaving that misleading impression.
But we’ve always had lightning strikes and we’ve always had dryer seasons and heat waves. It is impossible to prove that if the Earth had the carbon emissions of the year 2000 instead of the year 2023, these forest fires never would have started, or never would have grown large enough to create this much smoke. Drought periods have always existed, and few modern droughts are as intense as the one that turned the center of the United States into the “Dust Bowl” in the 1930s. (Or, for that matter, the six-year drought in the 1950s or the three-year drought in the late 1980s.) Global carbon emissions were way, way lower then; declaring that higher carbon emissions cause droughts is a vast oversimplification.
But when things are bad, people want a villain and a scapegoat.
ADDENDUM: Discussing the Saudi kingdom effectively purchasing professional golf, our Jay Nordlinger reminds us:
A lot of PGA Tour players jumped to the Saudi tour, for big paydays. One of those players was Phil Mickelson — who made an interesting admission to his biographer: “They’re scary motherf***ers to get involved with. We know they killed Khashoggi and have a horrible record on human rights. They execute people over there for being gay.”
Pressed on this question in an interview, Greg Norman, the Saudis’ CEO for their tour, said, “Every country has got a cross to bear.”
Yeah, but in Saudi Arabia, that cross that they bear is used in literal crucifixions of prisoners.
Norman knows that the Saudis banned Christianity, right?