Sobering takes on Canadian wildfires

If you were in the Northeast US last week, you probably got at least a noseful of Canadian wildfire smoke. We’ve written before about the extraordinarily high health costs of wildfires, but Zeke Hausfather makes a convincing case that Canada’s fires – unlike many in the U.S. West – aren’t mainly driven by institutional mismanagement. Unlike in California, these Canadian fires are mostly occurring in boreal forests that have never been managed, so there’s no unnaturally accumulated detritus to burn. Devastating crown fires driven by weather (heat waves + lightning strikes) are the norm in these environments - so higher average temperatures directly drive more burning without additional human intervention.

Robinson Meyer makes a related case in Heatmap, arguing that the failure of climate research to integrate the potentially massive health effects of wildfire smoke is a potent illustration of how big the unknown-unknowns of climate change could be. While there was some pushback about the deep history of wildfire research, the fact that the resulting health effects weren’t integrated into flagship models of economic damages stands – as a result, policymakers had very little basis to understand and incorporate smoke risks before these types of fires became a regular occurrence. Part of this might be a map of science problem – wildfire risk, epidemiology (famously tricky for events like this), and mainstream climate modeling just didn’t overlap enough to stimulate research on their intersection until facts on the ground made the gap obvious. It’s worth wondering whether this is a problem that AI will help with, or one that the jagged frontier of scientific research will exacerbate.