Weather and Wildfires of 2023

Weather and Wildfires of 2023 - climate change?

Weather of 2023 - Wikipedia

The seven weather and climate disaster events in the United States with losses exceeding $1 billion in 2023

Wildfires

This is a timeline of weather events during 2023.

Wildfires in 2023 - Wikipedia

The 2023 wildfire season involves wildfires on multiple continents.

Canada

United States

2023 Canadian wildfires - Wikipedia

As of June 28, 3,003 fires had burned 7,974,000 hectares (19,704,183 acres) and there were 487 active wildfires, 253 of which were deemed "uncontrolled". International aid has helped reduce the impact of the fires.

The World’s Wildfire Models Are Getting Torched

Canada is still burning at an unprecedented rate.

fires

Flannigan has researched fires for over four decades. During that time, he found that fire’s overall behavior would shift toward more destructive levels, thanks to climate change, by mid-century. But what he and his colleagues fear now, however, is that these end-of-century-levels are already here

It’s worth pointing out, though, that it isn’t clear whether the Canadian fire are connected to climate change.

One solution might be better fire management

Yet over the past few decades, governments have done the opposite

But what if the world can’t nail down fire management? Experts say: Look for more extremes ahead.

Almost Everyone Got the Smoke Wrong

More than 128 million Americans were under an air-quality alert on Wednesday night — roughly the population of Germany and Spain combined — but scarcely 36 hours earlier, nobody had known to prepare for anything worse than a moderate haze.

the smoke had come from the boreal forests of northern Quebec, more than 500 miles from New York City. (smoke in nyc)

While Quebec had suffered a warm May, it was not in drought.

There’s no doubt, to be clear, that climate change will make wildfires worse across North America

But, again, Quebec is not in drought. As for today, no climate-change signal has appeared in eastern Canadian wildfire data. Their connection to climate change is far less clear cut than it is in, say, California’s blazes.

Not that we completely lack an example for this. In 1780, the sun was blotted out across New England.

Not until a decade ago did we finally learn that the “dark day” was caused by Canadian wildfire smoke drifting south.

If it wasn’t climate change, would it matter? The pandemic has already taught us that indoor air quality matters

Perhaps the right lesson from this outbreak should be to change our expectations, and think of indoor air filtering like brushing your teeth — a habit essential to our hygiene

Maybe that’s prudent climate adaptation. Or maybe — in the wake of COVID, Canadian smoke, and who-knows-what-comes-next — it’s just new common sense.