"This Canadian wildfire season is unprecedented, the most damaging on record in terms of area burnt," Fischer said. Short Wave This is Canada's worst fire season in modern history - but it's not new And there's not that much we can do about it now, which isn't to say that firefighters aren't putting in a lot of effort. But it is climate change, and it is much worse than we've seen before," he added.Īs for the smoke, he said, "we haven't been able to do much about it for hundreds of years. We've never seen this before.' That's wrong. "Some people are like, 'Well, this is climate change. You get this mosaic of different age classes and different forest types, which is what you want." "It does things like helping with nutrients cycling through the soil and overall landscape resilience. "It's actually beneficial," Perrakis said. "Even if we could stop all the fires it would be a profound mistake for the ecology of the forest, and would just lead to bigger fires down the road." "Those forests are actually adapted to burn, they are evolved to burn, very approximately every 100-200 years," Barber said. Many of Canada's fires are in the boreal forest, in remote areas north of the zone that contains the country's biggest cities. So it's been one of these things we've just kind of had to deal with," Perrakis said. "We have papers from the early 1900s talking about smoky days over American cities, going back to the 1700s. Massive plumes of smoke have also reached Europe, but in most cases, particulates have stayed high in the atmosphere, easing health concerns there. When it reaches the U.S., much of the smoke lingers at low altitudes, triggering orange and red alerts. So things are really sticking around more, and the jet stream is weaker." So we've got drier fuels, and the smoke and circulation patterns are less dynamic. Now we're seeing these big ridges stick around for much longer. "If you get a blocking ridge, a big mass of summer air that dries out all your fuels, in the past that might sit over top of an area for a week. "I think the most insidious kind of effect is the persistence of these weather patterns," Perrakis said. is under red and purple air quality alerts from Canada's smoke "A lot of that forest is remote, untouched wilderness, and it's very difficult to manage wildfire in those areas where there is no road access or any of the infrastructure needed to support firefighting activity." "Canada is the second-largest country in the world, and almost half of that is forest," Barber said. Many of the fires have sprung to life in very remote areas, leaving Canadian provinces to decide which fires can and should be fought. has enough firefighters for these fires, and Canada most certainly does not," Perrakis said. Here is their analysis of the wildfires, edited for length and clarity: No, Canada can't simply put out all the fires
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