The Latest in Mod-Cons, a Wildfire Smoke Tracker

California Redwood burning

What will they think of next? Canadians now have a website devoted to wildfire smoke. A quick click shows you where the smoke is coming from and where it's headed. It also shows the pm 2.5 particulate density in the smoke heading your way.

So far this year it hasn't been too bad, save perhaps for Calgary. Out my way the winds off the Pacific have kept us clear of smoke. I suppose we need some reward for our dreary, cold and damp summer.

The western United States have not fared so well.  California, already dealing with a fresh outbreak of the Covid pandemic, is being swept by wildfires caused by the lethal mixture of tinder dry forests and lightning. What began in the south now threatens the Bay Area, even (heaven forbid) Napa. The majestic redwood forests are said to be in peril. Meanwhile Californians endure the worst air quality in the world.

Think of it as Climate Breakdown 101.

There’s an idea that when the climate crisis begins, we will know it. Movies present it as a moment when the world’s weather suddenly turns apocalyptic: winds howl, sea levels surge, capital cities are decimated. Climate messaging can bolster this notion, implying that we have a certain number of years to save the day before reaching a cataclysmic point of no return.

Living in expectation of a definitive global break can blind us to the fact that gradually, insidiously, the climate crisis has already arrived. 

In few places is this as clear as California, where extreme wildfires have become the new abnormal. There is currently a “fire siege” in northern California, with wildfires burning in every one of the nine Bay Area counties except for San Francisco, which is entirely urbanized. Tens of thousands of residents have evacuated and people are choking on smoke.

In the last decade, amid drought and searing heat, California has entered the “era of megafires”. Our new book, Fire in Paradise, tells the story of a town that was almost entirely wiped out by a fire of unheralded speed in 2018. It killed 85 people, making it the deadliest ever fire in California. Other notable blazes include a 1,000-ft wide fire tornado that churned through the town of Redding a few months before the Paradise catastrophe, and fires in California’s Wine Country that killed 44 people.
All of this is why, as we scan the headlines for the planetary shift that will mark the true arrival of the climate crisis, we risk losing sight of the fact that places like California are already experiencing it.

This is not entirely surprising. According to the ecological theory of “shifting baselines”, we do not notice the degradation of the natural world because little by little we get used to it, like a frog in hot water. We think that it has always been this way.

What the writers are referring to is more commonly called "creeping normalcy" and it has been bringing civilizations to collapse at least as far back as the Mesopotamians. The Mesos saw what was happening. They looked the other way. They destroyed the 'fertile crescent' of the Tigris and Euphrates by using too much brackish water and then their crops failed. Slam, bam, thank you Ma'am.

For a couple of decades we've been talking about 'global warming.' In the early part of the last decade research came out predicting the arrival of something more insidious, more immediate - global heating. Studies emerged warning that in this current decade, the 2020s, we would see heating on scales never experienced by mankind. Never, as in not ever. Guess what? It's here.

It takes many forms including the loss of Arctic sea ice, wildfires in the Tundra, the accelerated melting of the major ice caps and major glaciers, the massive and usually unnoticed migration of marine life (fish, mammals and sea birds) poleward to escape warming oceans, the wildfires sweeping our forests, pest infestations, flash droughts, on and on  and on.

Climate breakdown has arrived and there's no grace period. You either meet it, stay ahead of it, or you fall behind and take your lumps. At the moment we're opting for the lumps. Sucks to be us, I suppose.

When it comes to California wildfires, the ground has been moving under our feet for decades, as heat rises, snowpacks shrink, and plants dry out. The baseline has shifted. How long before we forget that it was ever otherwise?

How long? Not very long. We've got this place called a Memory Hole.

Just be grateful you live at such a temperate latitude. Be even more grateful no country lies between you and the pole.