February 5, 2024 Issue

This week’s issue contains a disturbing, depressing report by Elizabeth Kolbert. Titled “Burn Notice,” it’s a survey of recent books on the wildfire crisis. Kolbert asks what’s fuelling it. Her answer is climate change. She writes,

Another recent report, from the Federation of American Scientists, observed that the world is warming so fast that the models firefighters rely on to predict how blazes will behave have become obsolete. “Climate change is drying fuels and making forests more flammable,” the report said. “As a result, no matter how much money we spend on wildfire suppression, we will not be able to stop increasingly extreme wildfires.”

And, as Kolbert explains, these megafires are increasingly extreme because of the "CO2 feedback loop”:

When trees burn, they release the carbon they took up while growing. This carbon contributes to warming, which increases the likelihood of wildfires, which release more carbon, and so on. 

This cycle seems impossible to reverse. We’re fated to a flame-filled future. What happened in Canada last year (loss of nearly forty-six million acres to wildfire) is just a taste of what's coming. It's hard to avoid the feeling that we're doomed. 

Postscript: It's still winter here in Canada, but already there are over fifty wildfires burning in Alberta. The 2024 wildfire season is off to an early start.