In “Wildfires Not Caused by Climate Change; Here Are the Facts,” part 1 of this two-part series, I explained that our politicians, media, and environmental groups are wrong to blame the recent increase in wildfires on climate change. I showed the statistics that demonstrate that generally speaking, there is no increase in either area burned or the number of fires. In fact, since we now put out fires that would have burned for weeks in centuries past, there has been a significant decline in forest fires over the past 100 years. The analysis of sediment cores off the Pacific coast of Canada reveals that the incidence of wildfires has reduced since Europeans settled in North America. I also discussed the real reasons for the ignition of fires, a combination of natural (mainly lightning) and human causes (mainly carelessness).

In this part, I discuss how it is our lack of proper forest management that is contributing to the intensity and spread of wildfires. In fact, despite Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s predictable attempts to link the fires to climate change, it is his own government that is largely to blame.

So, why did the wildfires in Nova Scotia, for example, spread so quickly, once started? Along the east shore of the province, where many of the most dangerous forest fires occurred in the past month, there are stands of balsam fir at a density of over 10,000 stems per hectare. This is in contrast with most commercial forests, which would have a tenth of that density, which is far healthier for the forest. Today’s high forest density has created the most dangerous fuel type in Canada, with an extremely rapid rate of spread and high head fire intensity, the energy output of the fire at the front or head of the fire.

The really dangerous thing about these sorts of “overstocked stands” is that there is a lot of standing dead trees that serve to spread the fire from tree to tree, called “ladder fuels.”  Also, the canopy of these stands is so dense that it is difficult for rain to get to the understory of the forest.

Also, when balsam fir catches fire, the resins volatilize like oily rags, and the stems explode, spreading the fire even more.

In the below post-fire image from Hammond Plains, Nova Scotia, we see the fire was constrained to the grossly over-stocked and damaged conifer fuel type. Based upon Google Earth 2015 aerial imagery, the surviving clump of trees are deciduous that have grown back from 10 years ago, when much of the forest was cleared.

As I explained in Part 1, the natural cycle of forest fires creates crown fires, which move through quickly, burning off dead debris but leaving most of the plants alive. When governments decided to stop forest fires, they upset the natural dynamics completely. The bureaucracies, now populated by graduates of the woke environmental education system, willingly allowed the environmental extremists’ demands to end the former sensible practice of cleaning the undergrowth. Activists complained that such forest tending was not ‘natural,’ when it was, in fact, a reasonable facsimile of ‘nature’.

So, the debris built up, leaving the forest a tinderbox ready to ignite. Making matters worse, when a fire takes hold, it now often creates a “base fire.” These fires are very difficult to extinguish—the heat allows such fires to burn into the ground, and days after a fire is supposedly out, it will flare up again.

There are literally millions of ignition events every year. But only some “catch” and become significant wildfires. Once this happens, how wildfires burn is a function of two metrics, head fire intensity, and speed. Since head fire intensity is proportional to the fourth power of the amount of fuel engaged, small increases in fuel have enormous consequences. The speed of wildfire spread is a function of a combination of windspeed and continuity of fuels. And overstocked forests certainly provide a high degree of fuel continuity once a fire starts.

And, of course, there is the issue of inappropriate land use planning and building codes that ignore the risks, allowing residents to not only build into forest environments but to do so without safe setback distances, construction, and housing materials. We need to take a far better inventory of housing in the wildland-urban interface.

None of this has anything to do with climate change, of course. Forestry officials have been warning for years that better forest management is required to avoid such a catastrophe. Following wildfires in 2017, various scientific reports recommended enhanced forest management in Canada, with increased dedication of resources, to combat the risk. That should have included controlled burns to clear out young trees, dry shrubs, and grass. But the Trudeau government didn’t do much of this, and indigenous groups were forbidden by government officials from carrying out controlled burns.

In the June 8, Daily Mail (UK) article, “Nothing to do with me! Trudeau blames wildfires on ‘climate change’ despite being warned for YEARS that Canada needed better forest management to avoid disaster that is now playing out,” the real culprit is exposed:

“Parks Canada had only scheduled 23 controlled burns this year. By comparison, there were 150,000 in America in 2019…In 2016, Mark Heathcott, who ran the Parks Canada burns division for 23 years, said Canada was ‘way behind American counterparts’ when it came to controlled fires. ‘A lot of lip service is paid to it, but very few agencies do it. People don’t understand the benefit of fire,’ he said.” 

So, thanks, Prime Minister. The wildfires are largely your government’s fault.

Cover Image: Xinhua