Canada’s revenge: land of the red sun
Canada may not want to become part of the US, but its smoke does. The Canadian wildfires have created haze in much of the northern midwest of this country as well as New England.
This is a somewhat new phenomenon in recent years; I’ve lived in New England for a long time and have only noticed the problem for maybe five or ten years. If one does research on why this is happening more often – as I have – what emerges in each article is climate change, climate change, climate change, in the form of more drought and heat.
Well, perhaps. But if so, wouldn’t there also be more wildfires in New England itself? I don’t see evidence of that.
Articles about Canadian wildfires also mention arson, and I wonder if that’s a larger part of the picture than we know. Also lightning strikes, but I don’t see why that would be increasing. There’s also forestry: less logging, more fires? It’s hard to get objective data on this – at least, in the time I tried to research the issue in order to write this piece, every single article I found appeared to have a bias of some type (for example, this one).
Meanwhile, the haze continues …
It’s pretty rough in Minnesota. I’m in the Twin Cities suburbs and for the last few weeks, there have been days where there’s a quite visible haze and a smoky smell. I’ve still been going on walks, but sometimes my eyes will start to burn by the afternoon and evening. I can imagine it’s a lot rougher on people with asthma and COPD.
They say you should never ascribe to malevolence what can be otherwise explained by incompetence, but this is an aggressive incompetence. Their conservation methods are as effective as California’s, their leftist government going all in on allowing deadfall to build up. Whatever the animosity between their government and President Trump, they’re not winning any converts by imposing externalities on regular citizens. They’ll get a lot of slack from the leftists in the Twin Cities, but outstate Minnesota is pretty red, and I’m sure they’re fighting mad. Justifiably so, too.
Ninety percent of Canada’s citizens live within a hundred miles of the US border. Most of those in the Ontario peninsula and up the St. Lawrence Valley and its tributaries.
An exception is the grain belt running north from Montana and North Dakota to Edmonton and other wide-open spaces. Looks like Kansas.
Where there are no people, there is no infrastructure. You don’t put out forest fires with shovels and chain saws. Talked to a guy who fought in CA a couple of years ago. They never got very far from their water sources, as he said, maybe ten minuts for the water tender to get to a source and ten back. Those are mostly hydrants.
Was in downstate IL a couple of years ago, near the Shawnee National Forest. Even outside it, along two-lane roads with no homes or other buildings for miles, there’d be a hydrant sticking up here or there.
The RCMP caught four arsonists a couple of years ago when the first big one in recent times hit. Were looking for more. Guys who’d followed it from the get-go said there was a suspicious simultaneity in about a hundred places when the fires started in Quebec. Maybe a hundred places, they said.
Big fire in Australia four-five years ago, twelve arsonists and a multiple of that morons burning trash on hot, windy days.
Palisades fire, a combination of the above and PG&E losing a couple of hot lines into the piles of deadfall surrounding their lines. Instead of cleared easements as in forty-nine other states.
Richard Aubrey–
That makes sense. Tough to fight fires set in the wilds of Saskatchewan or Manitoba. Probably all airplanes at that point, either scooping up water from a lake or dropping fire retardant.
Canada may not want to become part of the US, but its smoke does.
Good one.
In the summer of 1998, wide swaths of Texas were inundated with smoky air. The smoke came from forest fires in Mexico’s Yucatan, a thousand miles south. I don’t believe there has been such massive smoke from the Yucatan since 1998.
I believe that a big factor in Orange County not being hit with massive fires was that in Orange County, brush got cleared and/or destroyed w controlled burns.
Canada’s larger cities south and east of the fires have also been affected.
(Not just the cities, of course.)
Might this elide with the Labour Party’s general policies of subverting and damaging Canada?…
…the “bonus” being that the hated Country of Trump should also—deservedly—suffer…?
(Oh but that’s ridiculous! Mature countries don’t behave in such fashion…!!!)
Anybody else see the picture of Canadian PM Carney getting a hug from the queer dude wearing a pink thong at the Vancouver Pride Parade? New York Post has it up. O Canada, indeed!
They haven’t come up with a plausible way to blame Trump yet. But top minds are trying.
Top minds.
The Super Scooper aircraft that skim water off lakes and then dispatch to drop it on fires, are a Canadian invention and manufacture. I think the company that operates them, usually on a long-term lease where they’re parked ‘ready’, is also Canadian.
The coordinated arson story is a disturbing one, and it’s one that I suspect would trace back to climate activism. The punishments for those should be very harsh indeed, if true.
I suspect that poor forest management practices, again with roots in climate activism, are probably to blame as the setup for these fires.
We live in Michigan and found this fact today fitting our recollection and awareness of the smoke from Canadian wildfires being a new phenomena in our area:
“In Michigan, we had our first alert for air quality due to smoke in 2023. Since then, we have had 28 days of advisory or alert-level air quality due to wildfire smoke…Several times over the past week, we’ve been in the top five for worst air quality on the planet, according to IQAir”.
I live in Northwestern Montana surrounded by National Forests and just south of Canada. I can be in British Columbia in less than 1 hour.
On our national forests we can not log much at all. As soon as bids from the Forest Service go out, 3 to 5 lawsuits are filed by Leftist NGO’s and the local judge in Missoula says no logging. So the only thing is for the forests to burn. This has been going on for decades. Our forests are totally mismanaged.
Canada used to have lots of mills. The mills were supported by local logging restrictions except for the local mill, so they could get timber. Those laws are gone and so now are the mills. Banff and Jasper NP’s are run by idiots so last year 1/3 of the town of Jasper got burned up as well as 50,000 park acres.
Why? A number of years ago The Northern Pine Beetle killed every pine in the Jasper area in less than a year. They should have logged it, but the park admin said no. The dead lodgepole and other pines had very low sapwood/hardwood moisture content so they were just match sticks waiting for a match to say nothing of crown fires.
The local Indian tribes (1st Nations in Canuck speak) are not allowing any natural resource extraction unless they themselves are paid Big Wampum. BC just passed a law basically saying the BC tribes are now allowed to shut down any mining, pipeline or energy project any time they want.
Canada is a mess run by a much smarter version of Marxist Trudeau. Carney (Carnage the right wing Canadians call him) will destroy what is left of Canada. The provinces except AB and SK are just copies of CA, OR, IL, MA and NY.
Yes, the AQI has been touching 150 around here this week. The haze is quite noticeable when looking across the Hudson. I reflect on the fact that I breathe in a little bit of Canada every time I’m outside now.
Here in CO we are getting smoke from AZ and Utah ( I think both). Tonight the Sun was red from the smoke. We have had haze for over a week. We sometimes get Canadian smoke, and Pacific NW
NBC news tonight showed a coming high pressure area rotating clockwise and moving into the New England area, so perhaps the smoke will be pushed back into Canada later this week?
In FL I have more concern for the future dreaded Polar Vortex, also a Canadian import that demands its own tariff of a sort.
Well, that explains why it’s so hazy while the weather site is insisting it’s fair.
Canadian arsonist giving Florida Man a run for his money.
https://notthebee.com/article/canadian-officials-announce-that-a-recent-brush-fire-was-caused-by-a-fish-that-fell-out-of-the-sky
Notice that this is from NOT the Bee.
Wildfires are the new boogeymen for climate change. Starting in April the local news stations in Puget Sound begin warning that it’s going to be a hot, dry summer and that many wildfires can be expected.
As the summer gores along they ramp up expectations with every warm day or days without rain. To hear them carryon you would think that fires can be started by spontaneous combustion. 🙂
They also warn about lightning causing fires. Of course, we almost never have any lightning west of the Cascade summits. Fires in the Puget Sound area are almost exclusively started by humans.
And these days when a fire does get going, they don’t seem in any hurry to get it under control. We have a fire near Lake Cushman in Mason County that’s been burnb9jngfor a month but is only 3% contained. There are homes and businesses in danger, but they seem in no hurry to get it controlled. Lake Cushman is a ready supply of water for helicopters and tankers to drop water on the blaze, but they’re not being employed. The smoke is causing haze in the I-5 corridor from Tacoma to Mount Vernon. These climate change cultists seem to believe that letting the fires burn will scare more people into accepting the climate change restrictions.
I long for the days when we were still logging our forests. The loggers built roads to get the logs out and those roads allowed firefighters to get to the fires. The logging companies were also eager to help pit out the fires. Less merchantable timber was burned, there was less fuel, and everyone was safer.
Last summer the Department of Natural Resources allowed a fire to burn along the north shore of Lake Chelan all summer. Plenty of water in the Lake to put the fire out, but they let it burn until it threatened the town of Stehekin when they finally put it out. Just.Plain.Dumb!