Editor,
An open letter to the Prime Minister of Canada and Premier of B.C.:
I would love an explanation for your rationale in advancing fossil fuel extraction and use in the face of deadly and destructive climate changes; with taxpayer funds. It appears that your decisions are promoting and funding the increasing mortality, morbidity and infrastructure destruction due principally to global temperature rise.
The only justification for this behaviour would be: 1) you feel the activity of the fossil fuel corporations is enhancing the quality of life of citizens using a very short-term horizon or, more rudely put, you personally are receiving a short-term benefit either in political or financial terms. In either case: not a good look for the citizens of Canada or your children and grandchildren.
You are ignoring and denying the evidence. The flames are closing in. It’s hard to imagine a more terrifying and excruciating way to die — trapped by wildfire as the flames close in. Richard and Sue Nowell were killed this week by the Manitoba wildfires, leaving two sons orphaned and homeless. The deaths turned “an emergency into a tragedy,” said Premier Wab Kinew.
It had seemed to be a relatively subdued beginning to fire season in Canada compared to the past couple of years. There have been a few more fires than last year but significantly less area burned across the country by this date. The most striking exception is Manitoba, where fires have claimed over 161,000 hectares — four times more than last year.
In Manitoba, over 1,000 people have been evacuated and our news feeds are beginning to fill with evacuation orders in other provinces. It has barely cracked Canadian news, but the boreal forests elsewhere in the world are up in flames, too.
Over 600,000 hectares have burned in the Lake Baikal region of Russia, just since late April. More than 1.4 million hectares have burned in Siberia since the beginning of the year. Smoke is expected to spread as far as Beijing and the Korean peninsula this weekend.
South Korea is just recovering from the worst wildfires in its history — simultaneous outbreaks that killed 32 people, displaced 37,000 and burned about 5,000 buildings, including temples dating to the seventh century.
“The scale and speed of the fires were unlike anything we’ve ever experienced in South Korea,” said June-Yi Lee, an atmospheric scientist at Pusan National University. Scientists at World Weather Attribution calculated that climate change made the fire conditions about twice as likely.
It’s only May, and it’s always impossible to know what will happen in any given year, but Canadian wildfire experts are warning us not to be complacent.
“The dice are loaded,“ says Mike Flannigan, one of Canada’s foremost experts and a professor at Thompson Rivers University. How many fires and where they occur “will depend on the day-to-day weather and the ignitions we get.”
Here’s how the forecasters at Natural Resources Canada see the outlook for fire weather severity into August. By late summer, they expect Level 5 (on a scale of 5) fire weather severity over most of the population centres across Western Canada). Also not a good look.
I hope you will begin to turn this container ship around — you may be sacrificed, but it may begin a real and urgent transition to a low/zero carbon life which may begin to mitigate the collision course that we are on. We have the technology and skills to do this.
Or you may be a hero...
Robert Winston, MD, Surrey
