With a couple of instant lightning-caused fires over the weekend, and my house being roared over by water bombers, my initial reaction was: are those climate guys and global warming experts really right? Is my province really burning up?
But I read an interesting opinion piece by Tristin Hopper of the National Post this morning: "Forests used to catch fire like this all the time." He goes back 100 to 200 years and quotes oral histories of Indigenous people and other sources and talks about forest fire reality in Canada. According to Hopper, "a Canadian wildfire season of this size is pretty normal for the pre-industrial era." He goes on to talk about a fire deficit. There is too much debris on the forest floor. The large fires of recent years are starting to clear up some of the excess fire load, but more needs to be burned.