Fires raise temperature of climate crisis

Last Sunday night, as my phone blared with the bonejarring sounds of emergency alerts, I was anxiously searching for information on the wildfires raging through the suburbs of Halifax.

When I clicked on a credible news site with a story on the fires, I was required to watch a couple of advertisements before accessing the content.

On this night, I was presented with a commercial showing a muscular pickup truck tearing down a road. It was presented as a tank-like vehicle, lifted high off the ground, and shot from a low angle to magnify its size and power.

The brand of this vehicle doesn’t really matter. It is a category of big, bad-ass trucks produced by many automakers in North America.

As I watched video footage showing tongues of flame lurching skyward as if straight from hell, the mushroomshaped plumes of smoke rising in the air like nuclear explosions and the serpentine lines of cars filled with evacuees trying to escape, I couldn’t help but spot the irony.

The commercial glorifying a gas-guzzling vehicle belching greenhouse gases into the atmosphere was the price you had to pay to witness a tragic outcome of climate change.

I don’t know if the news website had any control over how this particular ad was placed or if they even noticed the stomach-turning juxtaposition of these two pieces of content.

Of course, it’s difficult to nail climate change as the direct cause of these wildfires in Halifax, Shelburne or any other part of the province.

In the same way, we can’t say for sure that post-tropical storm Fiona was a direct cause of global warming. Certainly, the carnage of fallen trees resulting from Fiona fuelled the fires.

But it cannot be denied that fires and hundred-year storms are the kind of catastrophes we will face more often as we enter the Anthropocene, which is the new epoch of human-influenced climate change.

It’s no coincidence that we have multiple wildfires erupting at the same time. A winter with little snow left the earth parched, and a spring with very little rain contributed to the tinder box that enabled these fires.

Add to that a spate of unseasonably hot weather and gusty winds and you have the ingredients for disaster.

All it takes is one little spark to ignite a conflagration that can destroy woodlands, homes, wildlife and their habitats. In most cases that spark was the work of a human, whether by accident or through some mendacious act of vandalism.

This week’s fires have destroyed and damaged hundreds of homes in Nova Scotia and created 20,000 refugees, many of whom went for days not knowing if their homes were still standing.

The fire near Shelburne is a monster, the largest in recorded Nova Scotia history.

Firefighting resources are stretched beyond the capacity to deal with these infernos. The official description of these fires is “out of control.” This is not something you ever expect or want to hear from professionals.

And this is happening in May and June, well before the typical season of wildfires. There is also a prediction of a hot summer ahead.

There are already questions about why Nova Scotia has to borrow firebombing aircraft, the availability of fire hydrants and suburban development that provides only one road to get in and out. When the immediate danger has passed, there will be time for these questions.

Climate change alone did not inflict this hell upon our province this week. We will search for villains to blame, the people who flick cigarette butts out the car window or set fires to burn tires or garbage.

But climate change did create the conditions to propel these fires into neighbourhoods and homes.

We are now living firsthand the predictions scientists have warned us about for years. I have to wonder if this week will change anything about the way we live.