To the editor:
Fires have burnt forests since the earth’s plant life first appeared millions of years ago and fires will continue to rage long after humans are gone. Ice ages will come and go, heatwaves and droughts as well. Climate is due to one primary factor, that massive ball of hydrogen you see in the sky above you measuring a million times larger than the earth.
Temperature extremes are nothing new. In Lillooet, B.C. in 1941, the mercury reached a staggering 44.4 C and yet, the earth’s human population registered only 2.5 billion. The fires in British Columbia and California are not solely the result of climate change. Climate has always changed.
Hawaii’s current eruption of the Kilauea volcano is belching 13,000 metric tonnes of gas each day. Undersea volcanoes have a far greater methane and carbon dioxide emission impact than all the factories in China. Surprisingly, scientists still don’t know how many of these fissures there are and to what effect they have on measuring human impact (or lack thereof) on rising average atmospheric temperatures.
Our forests have been ignored and mismanaged for decades. The “firebreaks” which prevent fires from spreading out of control are ignored and overgrown. This ensures any blaze is able to spread past these lines of scrimmage and burn out of control wasting millions more dollars fighting them, then it would cost preventing them. Once firebreaks are up to par, it’s much easier to keep fires in check. Too much dead underbrush has been allowed to collect like kindling, making our precious forests dangerous a powder keg. Our current ability to extinguish fires is an national embarrassment.
California is absolutely no different, save for the fact some of their fires have been attributed to arson. The Russian federation has giant water bombers able to skim across the surface of lake and collect enough water to douse an impressive four acres of forest in a single pass. Putin even offered to help Alberta contain the Fort MacMurray disaster, but his offer was rejected by the Trudeau government. A Canadian manufacturer, Bombardier, makes similar water bombers, but we seem unable to see the need to deploy entire squadrons of them, perhaps due to the smoke in our eyes, or perhaps due to our collective blame on climate change.
Other factors are in play in this equation, such as the fact that many high paying jobs are created and many key individuals are enriched by fat contracts for thousands of litres of expensive fire retardants, which, although somewhat effective, end up altering the delicate ph balance for spawning salmon roe in our rivers and streams. We need to manage our forests with much greater attention to clearing brush and extinguish these fires quickly with increased technologies like Russia does in their own forests, which happen to sit in the same hemisphere and biosphere as ours do. This wildfire prevention strategy should be the new normal. Instead we are being foolishly led to believe by climate alarmists and carbon tax grabbers that the fires are proof that out of control wildfires are our fault and that somehow riding a bicycle to drop off our children at daycare will magically clear our skies.
Daniel Janus
Kelowna