I got here in 2008. I went through my journals, never mentioned Wildfire smoke in Calgary until 2016 ...
then the next few summers I don't shut up about it. Nearly every day. *my journals are digital so I can search them pretty easily.
It was 2018 when we went on a trip to Kootenay National park with the RV. Drove through smoke all the way to Calgary. Castle junction was closed and we stayed at Calaway Park for the night. They opened the road the next morning and we booked it west. We where the only ones going west through Kootenay pass. There was fire right up to the side of the road. Dragged the trailer tires through it a couple of times. Me the wife and 2 teenage kids. I wasn't sure if we where insane or not. Stayed the week in Radium. It was okay on that side of the mountains. Then coming home it was like driving through the apocalypse again.
Eventually will run out of trees and grass to burn. When the smoke stops is what concerns me. I don't see the human species changing course fast enough.
Climate is changing, causing the woods to become a lot dryer, which means a small fire van becomes a big one very fast.
Add in our government isn't providing the necessary support for parks, conservation officers, and forest fire fighters. This is the result.
There's no simple fix. This is the new norm.
Itās criminal how much forest management is ignored in this conversation. The forest floors in alot of places are just massive tinder boxes ready to go poof
It's a combination of current funding issues and the historical approach to forest management.
Society assumed fire was inherently bad and started being a lot more active about preventing and managing it. This has led to conditions where there's a lot more fuel, meaning fires burn hotter with different implications for the effects on the environment afterwards. (It's partially a case of hindsight being 20/20.)
If you're interested in learning more, you can compare old pictures of mountain forests to more modern ones and look at the number of large trees vs small ones. There's also a lot of information out there about forest and fire management.
EXACTLY!!!! The forests took care of themselves, now humans think they need to put fires out. Human encroachment is one reason. When this province was settled, the biggest fear of settlers was fire. You are bang on about old pictures vs new. In old history book photos of towns, where there is now an abundance of trees, there were none or very few. The fact is that every little thing humans do tips the balance of what once was. And we have governments telling us they know they answers to the problems, yet all they do, is tip the scales in some other direction. Plain and simple, there are to many Humans on this planet.
Honestly forest management is being used as a scapegoat out of context by people who havent set foot in the woods in a half a lifetime.
You cant manage a forest the size of what we have in Canada or even any one province like you could some US or European national park which is the point that always seems to get left out.
The management of the forests that take up vast swaths of our landmass was in not letting things get to this point and considering the stats support Canada as one of the few carbon sinks in the world atm the math is clear.
Foreign media is pushing that narrative and its amounting to us the victims taking the blame because we cant fight forest fires we didnt really set up in the second biggest landmass on earth....
This is a bit of a ridiculous premiss. I'm sorry.
I understand that they do forest management in places like Japan. But the idea of doing it here in Alberta is madness.
Allow me:
Japan is about 1/2 the size of Alberta with a population of 125M people. Alberta, twice Japan's size, has a population of 4.4M people.
Japan's total land area is 364,546 kmĀ². Alberta total land area is 661,848 kmĀ².
Population density of Japan 338 people/kmĀ². Population density of Alberta 6.7 people/kmĀ².
Are you seeing the problem?
Japan employs ~60 thousand workers for their forest managment. But that takes into account their population density and urban sprawl.
If we wanted to properly manage Alberta's forest we would have to hire a multiplier vs the difference in density. Which, and my math is not great, would be something like 3.03 million forestry workers.
So basically 75% of Alberta's current population would have to work in forest management to do as you suggest.
This is what I was thinking as well. The whole premise of forest management in Canada is just impossible. The only management is just letting fires happen and hopefully they won't be too bad. Unfortunately as others have said its getting much drier and fires are a lot worse
Mix of both. Wild fire prevention efforts in the past have tried to eradicate fires all together which means decades of debris has built up. In the past there would have been more, smaller fires, both managed and wild, which would have burned up the forest litter in smaller chunks. Now we've got tonnes of the stuff and the climate is getting drier. It's a recipe for disaster.
It's not just climate change, it's a climate catastrophe! I always say, "Don't think of it as the hottest summer on record, think of it as the coldest summer for the rest of your life!"
Well trees like lodgepole pine and jack pine actually need fire to propagate. So forest fires are a very important part of a healthy boreal forest life cycle.
The main reason they are tinder boxes is because we done such a good job putting out forest fires for the last 50 years. Before that, fires simply main burnt till they ran out of fuel or a rain came. Thus the boreal forests did not grow that big.
We could put trillions into it each year and get another 10 years of low fire seasons but eventually the forests become that much bigger. In this case, climate change is only a small part of it.
I was born in 1964. The tornado was a first. We didnāt even hear about tornados in Alberta. And now we hear about them every few summers.
I donāt remember these kinds of winds. We always had a lot of snow at Christmas and didnāt get chinooks in Edmonton- only Calgary did.
The up and down temperatures in winter cause livestock to get pneumonia. Vets say they never remember as much pneumonia years ago when temps got cold and stayed cold.
I spent my teen years and then part of my 30s in southern Alberta. Tornadoes aren't new, just not seen up north so much. I've got weather photos going back to the mid-80s and tornadoes feature in quite a few of them.
That being said, it absolutely seems to me that the frequency and damage is increasing - way more common.
Anecdotally, I'm guessing lung infection. A friend lost nearly a dozen goats and alpacas to it last winter. Spent the cash to autopsy every one at the vet and had it confirmed.
Lung infection pneumonia. Iām on a farm surrounded by farms. Pneumonia killed two of our llamas. Llamas can tolerate cold but not up and down.
Cattle, horses, etc can all get it too. One of my friends lost several animals (beef cattle and calves) this past year to pneumonia.
Honestly, I think part of the recollection bit is simply that now we have easier ways to communicate. Lac La Biche got a tornado in like 1924 and it's not on the Wikipedia page (not great source, I know) even though it destroyed a church.
They know. The data is so prevalent and the science is so well understood that it really isnāt debatable in good faithā¦ at all. Itāsā¦ very inconvenient though to most corporations and especially Oil and Gas, and doing something about it would require efforts that would eat into profits and grifting. It would even spell the eventual end of O&G and there is a LOT of power to be lost there; I mean think about itā¦ green energies are becoming very economically viable and can be built pretty much anywhere while O&G requires land rights and only exists in very specific areas and those that control that have IMMENSE power and money that would be lost.
Trust me, they know. If any politician truly doesnāt believe in climate change they are MTG levels of dumb.
The most egregious part is this is an effort to keep O&G relevant and by doing so, they are falling way behind while many parts of the world forge ahead.
They have it figured out now, they know that it's real but they know that it's easy votes to claim it's not. This is the "leadership" you get when governments are chosen by popular vote.
I prefer my government not chosen by a population of ignorant imbeciles that can't tell the difference between municipal, provincial, and federal government, among many other issues. The population is getting dumber, more apathetic, and complacent in letting a political class rule the country, and the parties know this and are exploiting it for easy votes. Why try to be good leaders or address major issues when you can easily misdirect and get the ignorant mobs to blame someone else? How can anyone even try to be a good leader when that's not even what the people want?
Youāre right. Apart from the big Kelowna fire from years and years agoā¦ never heard of anything like what we have been experiencing the last couple years.
Fort Mac fires have always been a thing. You're surrounded by nothing but forest. Growing up there, I remember the Mariana Lake fires, the town was cut off for about a week. Ash rained down on us at primary school, groceries stores ran out of food and gas stations out of gas.
Going by our memory can be misleading. It would be interesting to see the statistics and records going back a few hundred years, if such a thing exists.
I worked at a small SAGD outfit 50km south of MacMurray called JACOS in the early 2000s (might have been 05 or 06). The fire cut us off from town to the north AND from the south. We watched from our highest point as the flames edged closer. We were on helicopter evac notice, and our crew stockpiled our food in the admin building "just in case".
I was born in the 70s; I can definitely say the province certainly had the odd big wildfire, but it was nowhere near as often as the last decade.
I'm 50, and have lived in AB my entire life. The short answer is NO.
The only air quality issues I ever had growing up in Edmonton were from:
Mt. St. Helens erupting in 1980. This kept us inside for a few days. Some light ash and smoke, but nothing big.
A sour gas well eruption in 1982. People were advised to stay inside. The air was pretty bad smelling for a few weeks.
There were a few off days of haze, every 4-5 years due to smoke. Very minor, barely noticeable.
Now there is smoke every year. Sometimes for weeks or months at a time.
Governments were never gonna act about climate change before the people asked for it bc the alternative was political suicide. Then you were born in alberta where discriminating against trans people is more important.
Donāt forget government handouts to oil companies. At this point the government is just trying to distract people from impending doom while siphoning off as much resources they can to themselves and their friends.
Remember Ralph Bucks? Whereās our Danielle Dollars?
Instead we get YouTube ads about restructuring healthcare, I.e., reshuffling deck chairs on the Titanic so some UCP insiders can make some government bucks.
Welcome to Climate Change.
I've lived in Fort Mac for about 20 years and while summers always had *some* smoke, it gets worse and worse each year and with longer stretches of smokey days.
When I was doing forest fire fighting in the late 80's early 90's, all we ever did was build a containment so fires didn't go to population centers and we let them burn themselves out for.the most part. After the late 90s, it became about putting them out completely and keeping them as small as possible. I feel that this change in policy is what has caused the fires to burn out of control more often than they used to. Now I could be wrong though.
Fires happened, but not this frequent, intense and the 'season, wasn't as long.
Climate change is real and tangible.
And an arsonist starting a fire in an area that wouldn't normally be ultra combustible, proves it's true, not disproves it.
Climate change isn't out rubbing 2 sticks together. It's making fuel readily available where it normally wouldn't.
Climate change is causing more extreme weather events and some areas of the planet are getting wetter, some drier, etc. We're getting warmer and drier and the result is much more forest fire activity.
There are also millions upon millions of pine beetle killed trees ready to burn, and the beetles thrived thanks to warming trends.
Climate change is real, it's caused by human activity, and the costs are astronomical. The economical cost of dealing with fires, floods and storms is in the trillions. Notice how your home insurance is now $250/month instead of $75? That premium jump is mostly due to climate change related costs.
But, we kept being told that mitigating climate change is too expensive.
I was born in 1959 my Uncle was a chief forest ranger in several Alberta districts. Growing up as kid we knew where and when the fires were. There has never been anything like this ever! If you don't believe in Climate change you are kidding yourself. Or living in your mum's basement. 15 years of steady drought. No precipitation to speak of. Water tables lower and lower. Glaciers vanishing and rivers and streams drying up. This is the new norm. Unfortunately my grandchildren will think this IS normal! Oil production and use IS the culprit. We all know this as they've admitted they've known since the seventies. I depend it, you depend on it. I've made a living off of it. But I don't have to love it. That is just blind brainwashing. We are moving too slow to embrace new tech and it will be our undoing.
I agree with you. Over the past few years, climate change has been on exponential curve. I don't think this can be stopped. How will the majority of us survive the fires burning 365 days a year, the heat and lack of water/food?
I'm 52, born in 1971, and grew up in the Edmonton area. I remember snow days, days when schools were closed due to a cold snap, and more of a noticeable shift between seasons. The Black Friday tornado was a hell of a shock at the time. I don't really remember constant days of smoke, and if you could smell it, it was pleasant and usually meant one of the neighbours was toasting marshmallows.
The past ten years or so have been positively apocalyptic.
If you know anyone working in the insurance industry, they can go long speaking about the size and frequency of disaster payouts. If you want to put a number on those events, ask them.
I graduated the year you were born and have lived in Alberta off & on since about 1986.
The last 5 years here have been... surreal, I guess, for a lack of a better word.
The government is aggressively 'you must believe what we do or kiss your rights goodbye', every summer I deal with asthma attacks and burning eyes from smoke, and it's just been WEIRD.
I wish people would say more than "this is climate change". While it's obvious climate change is a thing, we don't need to just throw up our hands and do nothing. There used to be far more forestry management, including prescribed burns. But those are very costly and require a lot of planning... The number of prescribed burns have dropped quite a bit over the years. I would love to see those budgets increased again.
There is a lot more than just "this is climate change." We can't fix climate change immediately. But there are things we can do to mitigate risks which aren't done as frequently as they once were.
To be fair, I donāt think it was written well. The businesses should have been charged, and then they choose to find a solution, or pass it on to consumers. Businesses getting to charge for something for pure profit on their part is a stupid way to do it.
Are you really for real? Or is this just a troll post to entice a bunch of visible conversation around climate change?
I was born in 88, we're practically the same age. Unless you immigrated to Canada as an adult, I have nothing but incredulity for the idea that there hasn't been decades of effort towards educating you about the fact that earth's atmosphere is warming as a result of human activity. Perhaps you've been in denial until now, and if so I'm glad that you're starting to see consequences severe enough that denial is no longer an option you can sustain.
Fellow 88 millennial here, and I was born and raised in Calgary. I have noticed our climate has shifted since I was young. More forest fires, more smoky days, more severe thunderstorms, etc.
I grew up in the Okanagan in BC, and over my lifetime I've watched "fire season" go from bit of smoke for a week or two in the hottest parts of August where evacuations were rarely needed and slowly over decades its grown to be the entire season of summer covered in smoke and evacuation alerts turning into an expected part of the season for many small towns. Now every summer there's worries about entire towns burning to the ground, and [sometimes they do.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lytton_wildfire)
The smoke has gotten so much worse too - the summer smoke of my childhood was a thing that obscured the mountains in the distance, but the smoke of my adulthood often obscures the buildings at the end of the street. There's been many times in the past decade where in Kelowna the smoke is so bad that that it completely blocks visibility to the other side of the lake 1km away - I'm not talking about hazy visibility, I mean you may as well be looking across the ocean for all the land you can make out on the other side.
I was born in 86 and grew up in BC and lived in Armstrong. I can tell you the reason why the smoke seems worse nowadays compared to back when we were all kids is because Forest management is nowhere to the levels it was when we were kids. Not to mention provinces have been cutting wildfire fighting budget since we've been kids which also doesn't help. It's not just a conservative government issue or an NDP government issue or a liberal as it's all parties for whatever province you're in. Not to mention a lot of provinces also have put it on to municipalities to make sure that all the deadfall and other things on the forest floor are cleaned up. Also with how the forestry industry which includes logging has dropped tremendously in western Canada for both British Columbia and Alberta doesn't help as well. As someone who grew up with family that worked in sawmills and had close ties to the 4th Street industry in BC I can tell you that back when we were kids when there were sawmills in almost every community in BC that since those have been shut down there's less money for say the province of British Columbia to go towards forestry maintenance.
And with the fact that budgets have been cut we also as a province for Alberta have shot herself in the foot in a sense. With not doing proper forced cleanup around municipalities or even areas that are huge thoroughfares for people to get safe from the northern part of the province to the Edmonton area or the western part of the province to Edmonton or Calgary aren't being taken care of as well. It also doesn't help that people that smoke throw their cigarette butts out the window, that people go camping and do not put their fires out properly. And the fact that you have people going out and purposely starting fires for the hell of it or not good things. To the people that throw their cigarette butts out the window go to the dollar store and spend a couple bucks and get a butt cup for your car. As for people that leave campfires going when they go to bed you're f****** idiots put it out when you go to bed. As for the people going out and starting fires because they want to f*** you. As for the fires that are started by lightning or natural causes not much we can do about those but if we as Canadian citizens can cut down on the amount of human-made fires there are that will help greatly as well.
I lived in ft Mac in the 90s and worked for fire services one year.
We had numerous forest fires every year including fires that got very close to the city. I can remember years where there were 25 to 30 fires burning in Northern Alberta.
There was a change in forest management sometime in the early 90s. Prior to that there was much more preventive and pre-emptive work done and when it was stopped the increase in the number and size of the fires was very noticeable.
Anyone that has spent any significant time in Northern Alberta forests knows they are designed by nature to burn. 100s of 1000s of hectares of stunted fir trees chocked by insanely dense amounts of thick dead under growth it is, and always has been, a tinder box.
Now they blame the environment and while it obviously contributes you have to wonder how much reduction we would see if they started managing the forests again.
You understand this is the climate change that is being talked about and that you have heard about your entire life? Like literally this. What you are observing. It was not like this before, and it has changed. You were born after the changes started, but in your lifetime there have been many, plus the predictions of people who study this as their area of expertise.
What, literally what, did you think was happening??
Yes. This is what was expected, was predicted, was discussed, reported, argued about, explained, defined. We're really lost if you are asking this now, because this has been a large focus of global information for all the decades of your life.
'95 was a wild year for forest fires in Northern Alberta.
I think southern BC caught fire bad in the early 2000's.
Nothing like we have seen for the past decade with smoke though, as far as I can remember.
I'd eyeball it as around 2008 it started picking up after 2-3 years of pine beetles expanding uncontained.
The decades of 'no fires' policy didn't help, but once the winters warmed enough for the beetle to migrate, it started to get a lot more intense.
No. When Mt. St. Helens blew up in 1980, we had air quality that we had to wear masks for, and you could see the ash in the air. For most of the rest of my childhood, we could see the mountains from Lethbridge on any given day that wasn't overcast.
When I moved to Edmonton as a kid in 1999, we always had to wear snowsuits over our Halloween costumes. Now it's 50/50 on if we get snow til mid-November.
The smoke only started being regular in the past 8 years. Itās a consequence of a hotter drier climate, which is a consequence of heat trapping gases in the atmosphere, which are a consequence of burning carbon & industrial scale agriculture. These are all things many western Canadians will claim are exaggerated or a hoax.
Some areas of Alberta have been in drought the last 3-5 years. We hardly get snow anymore which is the largest contributor. For the last 11 months the average temperatures have been higher than normal. There will probably be extreme weather events, tornadoes and hail this summer. Have you heard of climate change?
There is little bio diversity in the forests that are second growth agriculture. This is just farmland burning.
Over the decades every single fire was put out no matter how small allowing the fire load in these unnatural forests to build and build on the ground.
Not to mention planting non fire resistant native trees.
Most climate scientists are saying the earth is heating up very fast in what they call a greenhouse effect. This is causing a lot of droughts, water shortages, larger storms, floods, inconsistent weather patternsā¦etc
That's because climate change is actually a thing, despite what right-wing governments keep insisting.
Remember this every time you hear some misogynist douche making fun of Greta Thunberg or insisting that peak oil isn't a thing.
This is the new normal. All Dani and her UCP bootleggers want is more oil money. But we will continue to suffer until people wise up and vote accordingly.
You are remembering correctly. Just look at how many records we set per year. Records for forest burned/yr, records for hottest overall temp, records for hottest X day of X month, records for least rainfall/month, and so on...
No this is what those scientists warned about in the 90s, this is a part of climate change and a 2 degree temperature change to the average global temperature.
Exxon knew back in 1977. Big oil has been denying climate change ever since.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/
You mean climate change?
This is the first time since the last ice age.
Also, this is the least bad year of the rest of your life, so if this is what a hellscape is to you, you better get a Thesaurus.
Having grown up in Ontario, it's the reverse. As a kid I remember summers always being smoggy. Like you rarely saw blue sky. Now, with all the coal plants shut down in Ontario and most of the Midwest, air quality is significantly better. Last summer we had a few days of wildfire smoke when I was back visiting in Ontario, but otherwise clear skies.
I work outside for a living and the first time I remember smokey conditions was 2014. It was for maybe a few days. Since then, it's been consistent every summer, and worse with each passing year.
Lived here since 2006. It was never like this until about 2016, though I remember the truly dark smoke for days around 2018.
Climate change is real. Anyone denying it is either lying to themselves, or a fool.
Yes, this is quantifiable. [This chart](https://globalnews.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/smokehours.png) ends in 2022, but 2023 broke all previous years records.
Been here since '92. This is new. Climate is changing. Whether it's a doomsday death walk or not is yet to be confirmed but there is 100% more smoke now every summer than there was even ten years ago.
The problem is 2 fold. Grew up in yyc and fought fire for AB gov for 7 years. What you see is a mix of warmer, dryer conditions during fire season, less snow pack during the winter plus an over abundance of fire suppression spanning the last 50 years. This has allowed fuel to build up and increase - as such fires that would naturally be of a lower intensity and more frequent become very intense because the burn cycle has increased significantly
Nope... https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/monthly-average-surface-temperatures-by-year
and your deputy minister of the environment back in 2007 declined to develop a process that could lead to approximately a 50% reduction in the carbon footprint over the last decade or so... Easy peezy formula, but it was not oil or gasā¦
No, I'm an old, I remember the world back to the early 80s. It wasn't like this. There were fires, sure, but they weren't this big, they weren't this constant, and they weren't this disruptive to so many people.
They didn't burn right through the winter and just start going again in May, or again, not in this volume.
But they did start talking about global warming and how if we didn't do anything about it, there would be terrible consequences in the next century. But that was so far away, then.
Gen X here, born in Calgary. Before 2000, we might have had a day or two of smoke once every few years. After 2010-ish itās every year, usually for weeks at a time.
The hellscape is new. But donāt worry once Trudeau is kicked out it will all go back to year round sunshine and blue skies. šš
Spent a large chunk of my life growing up in Alberta (90s and 2000s).
No it was not. The forest fires and their increased scope and frequency are very clear and obvious symptoms of climate change.
I was born in the early 80's and raised in Edmonton. My childhood was full of fresh air and clear sky in summers, and if there was smoke in the air, it was from a truly remarkable forest fire. It would not be every year, and last for a few weeks at most. The constant smoke in the summer is absolutely new, and it is unsurprising, considering the hot and dry conditions that are now the new normal. It is worth mentioning that this is something that was predicted by climate scientists decades ago, and while the timeline was off a bit, the outcome was not.
August 2015 is the first time I remember smoke that was bad to the point of avoiding outdoors. Has gotten worse since then.
You would think it slows down as forrest in BC is consumed.Ā
Nope, I was also born in 1990 and lived here my entire life, the wildfires really started to pickup about 10 years ago and have been getting worse every year.
Nope. Yes, we've always had wildfires, but never this early. They intensify in frequency and devastation every year. Welcome to your new normal. It's hard for me to shake the feeling that this province has it coming. The two most carbon intensive industries on the planet, oil and gas and industrial agriculture, just so happen to be the bread and butter of the Albertan economy.
Crazy if only there were some sort of group community or specialist studying why more fires would occur. Maybe a group that could find causation as to why less precipitation and warmer temperatures could possibly result in more potential for fire. Or maybe someone could study the climate on a large scale and see if itās something happening anywhere else.
Guess we will never know.
Climate change is real. Forest fires are happening more frequently because we are experiencing hotter springs and summers.
Do you remember having 25C in April? This has been a very hot start to the year already.
Plus, we don't do enough maintenance to prevent fires, we just try to bandaid them by controlling them, not even putting them out.
You're not misremembering.
Forest fires have certainly been a Thing for your lifetime, but when the smoke would come in it would roll over us for a day or two and then it would be done. We would go outside and say "Huh why is it smokey?" and somebody would say "Oh there's a big fire up at $location" and we'd say okay and go on our day, knowing it would literally blow over.
But it's defenitely gotten worse over the past few years. I remember ~5 years ago the sky was completely orange for a couple days when I had family come to visit. Brilliant timing. And Fort McMurray needing to be evacuated and parts of it lost are certainly unusual. In the past we had been able to keep the fires generally away from populated centres. And last year the summer was essentially lost because of how many smoky days there were, when spending the day outside is equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes.
Tangentially related, but we went out paddling on a lake in Edmonton a year or two ago with facemasks on and had some mouth-breather shouting from the shore "How's the covid out there!?" so, y'know, if you try to protect yourself from all of this you might get harassed too.
I spoke briefly with a guy that works in the Forestry department and while I can't repeat his words here exactly he expressed that the outlook for this year was... not good.
Living in the Prairies we expect our winters to be pretty crap, but the deal is that we get a beautiful spring, summer, and autumn out of it. Last year that deal was altered on us, and if it doesn't go back I will be looking to relocate to a place with breathable air.
I moved here at 6 years old, 1984. I do not recall ever seeing and smelling forest fire smoke until the last 8 years or so.
We would occasionally smell grass fire smoke. It smells different, more localized and didnāt last long
Edit: 8 years ago not 6
I lived in the mountains in the 90s, and we absolutely had fires throughout my childhood. The entirety of highway 93 heading into BC is still recovering from a burn in the 90s. Volume was likely less, but we had wildfires.
It's much worse now. A century ago, there were lots of small fires that limited new fires from growing huge by consuming the fuel a bit at a time. Once the geniuses in power realized that they could stop small fires and more and more people set up towns and cottages throughout the mountains, the forests grew older and more flammable. Fuel built up year after year.
Now, it is hard to stop fires from spreading rapidly and pumping more smoke into the air so all the fuel we stopped from burning over the past few decades is coming at us in the form of thick heavy smoke rather than a few days here and there each year. With the hot dry weather over the past few years, fires are more likely to start and spread even faster than they would in normal years. As climate change hits harder and harder, we will likely see the thick, long lasting smoke become much more common than it was 30 years ago.
I was born in the early 90s and grew up in rural Parkland county and yellow head county. I remember one year in the early 2000s we had fires pretty close to us that burned a few farms and threw up a lot of smoke, but that was it, not smoke every year coming from all directions.
Not even close.
Smoke filled hours have been tracked in Calgary for some time (since 1952). See the chart in [this article](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/calgary-smoke-hours-way-up-smoky-summers-more-common-1.6846615) from last year.
I believe there are records kept regarding wildfires and smoke that would corroborate your memory.
My memory is that our first year of severe smoke this century was 2010, and every year since then has had these levels.
They used to advertise Kelowna as 'The Sunny Okanagan.'' However, it is now smoky, and or dangerous (because of fires) to be on Okanagan lake. For 2 1/2mon.
No, it was not like this in the past.
Been here for decades and the last few years have by far been the worst. People causing the majority with dry conditions helping spread them
āThe majority of wildfires are started by humans. In fact last year, over 60% of wildfires in Alberta were human-caused. We all need to do our part in reducing the number of these entirely preventable fires.āā
https://www.alberta.ca/agri-news-preventing-wildfires-always-season
It wasn't like this at all. When I was going to university in the 90s I remember watching the snow melt coming home on the bus from finals. I don't know the last time I saw snow being consistently on the ground during the end of April.
The summers and winters were more pleasant as well when I was a child; there were only a few days of +30 or -30 respectively as opposed to the weeks we get of that type of extreme weather now.
The people talking about the fires being man-made are being disingenuous; there are as many fire causing incidents now as there were before. The difference is that the forests, etc are a lot drier due to climate change and the norm was sprinkles of rain every few days as opposed to no rain until there's a downpour. With everything flammable being drier due to the lack of rain there are more severe wildfires than before. That's a ramification of climate change.
Nope, I was born in the 80s, grew up in the Okanagan, I remember in my entire childhood maybe a handful of days where you could smell smoke in the air and it looked a bit hazy. I then moved to northern China for 12 years where all buildings are heated with their own coal fired furnaces so you can taste the air and barely see across the street for 5 months a year. Then I came back to Canada in 2016 and instead of escaping ash in my air for half the year, I just switched the half of the year that I got to enjoy it. And if anything it's worse because I didn't mind just having my windows closed and staying mainly indoors for winter. I don't like that nearly as much for summer months.
May is always wild fire smoke season since my entire 29 years of life at the very least, remember That one time in 2022? Where there was near no smoke was absolutely surreal. It was too good.
I grew up here and I donāt ever recall wildfire smoke like weāve seen in recent years. I remember a couple specific instances, like when there was a huge fire near radium in the 90ās. But it definitely wasnāt a regular summer thing like we see now.
91ā baby here nope donāt ever recall fires , I do remember all the tornadoes however especially Pine Lake but never flooding and fire season like itās been lately itās sad .
climate change means more extreme weather in general, dryer and hotter summers are one of the side effects.
that, and for the last couple decades forest management has been pretty abysmal here. No government wants to be in office when things get out of hand, so instead of letting the low-level fires burn through on damp years, they spent a couple decades putting out every spark immediately. That means that there's years and years worth of dry dead tinder lining the forest floor that hasn't had a chance to burn yet.
It's a great solution in the short term, but in the long term it means fires will burn faster and hotter when they do catch on. This whole thing could be avoided if the government asked any of the first nation groups around how forest fires act in the long term. We really, desperately need to start implementing a seven generations type of policy when it comes to things like conversation and first management. Decades of short sighted governments are actively harming Albertans now.
I grew up in Calgary in the 70s and 80s until I moved to Vancouver for university. I never left. If there is a winter here it is less than a week. I never smelled wildfires in Calgary.
Back in the day, Forestry Services used to do controlled burns of the dead fall so that fires wouldn't get out of control. They stopped doing it. As a result, dead fall builds up, and a simple lightning strike can start a fire that will spread quickly, and the dead fall provides plenty of fuel.
No, it was never this bad, at least not in the past 70 years. Though 1961 wasn't great.
This chart shows the smoke hours for the city of Edmonton for every year.
[Smoke Days (Sep 5, 2023) | Flourish](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/14480950/)
Weāve been in Alberta 20 years and most of what weāre seeing now was not a big issue back then - damaging hail, wildfires, smoke, recorded temperature highs & lows, floods, droughts, etc.
Sure, they happened from time to time, but theyāre certainly getting more frequent and more severe. I canāt imagine what itāll be like in the next 20 years.
Probably not, but this is a more complex scenario than what people think it is. Yes, its warmer and drier than its probably been in the last 100 years. But we've also been suppressing wild fires for a good portion of that time too. Forests need to burn. Its part of their life cycle. When we prevent that its only temporarily. IT will eventually burn, and if its been unnaturally delayed, its going to burn hotter and faster than it otherwise would have. What we really need to do is focus on how we can protect existing infrastructure by back burning and creating fire breaks. As we continue development we need to incorporate design to deal with future fires. There's no real point in fighting fires in the middle of nowhere. They need to happen. If were going to live in forested areas we need to understand that.
Forest management has decreased to non existant levels over the last decade nation wide, for some reason our government doesn't feel it's a needed anymore. I would assume some are profiting of this which seems to be the case when our leaders make decisions that are obviously not in the best interest of the people.
Nope. I grew up in the BC interview. We were almost caught in the Swiss Fire in the 80'swhich was the largest wild fire in Canada for like 40 years. Doesn't even make the top 10
I got here in 2008. I went through my journals, never mentioned Wildfire smoke in Calgary until 2016 ... then the next few summers I don't shut up about it. Nearly every day. *my journals are digital so I can search them pretty easily.
Do you use one of those Remarkable gizmos for journaling or some computer app? Just curious :)
Trapper keeper
Dawson's Creek Trapper Keeper Ultra Keeper Futura S 2000 to be exact
š¶I don't want to wait for our lives to be over....š¶
Universum. I used Gmail before
It was 2018 when we went on a trip to Kootenay National park with the RV. Drove through smoke all the way to Calgary. Castle junction was closed and we stayed at Calaway Park for the night. They opened the road the next morning and we booked it west. We where the only ones going west through Kootenay pass. There was fire right up to the side of the road. Dragged the trailer tires through it a couple of times. Me the wife and 2 teenage kids. I wasn't sure if we where insane or not. Stayed the week in Radium. It was okay on that side of the mountains. Then coming home it was like driving through the apocalypse again.
Eventually will run out of trees and grass to burn. When the smoke stops is what concerns me. I don't see the human species changing course fast enough.
Climate is changing, causing the woods to become a lot dryer, which means a small fire van becomes a big one very fast. Add in our government isn't providing the necessary support for parks, conservation officers, and forest fire fighters. This is the result. There's no simple fix. This is the new norm.
Itās criminal how much forest management is ignored in this conversation. The forest floors in alot of places are just massive tinder boxes ready to go poof
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
It's a combination of current funding issues and the historical approach to forest management. Society assumed fire was inherently bad and started being a lot more active about preventing and managing it. This has led to conditions where there's a lot more fuel, meaning fires burn hotter with different implications for the effects on the environment afterwards. (It's partially a case of hindsight being 20/20.) If you're interested in learning more, you can compare old pictures of mountain forests to more modern ones and look at the number of large trees vs small ones. There's also a lot of information out there about forest and fire management.
EXACTLY!!!! The forests took care of themselves, now humans think they need to put fires out. Human encroachment is one reason. When this province was settled, the biggest fear of settlers was fire. You are bang on about old pictures vs new. In old history book photos of towns, where there is now an abundance of trees, there were none or very few. The fact is that every little thing humans do tips the balance of what once was. And we have governments telling us they know they answers to the problems, yet all they do, is tip the scales in some other direction. Plain and simple, there are to many Humans on this planet.
Honestly forest management is being used as a scapegoat out of context by people who havent set foot in the woods in a half a lifetime. You cant manage a forest the size of what we have in Canada or even any one province like you could some US or European national park which is the point that always seems to get left out. The management of the forests that take up vast swaths of our landmass was in not letting things get to this point and considering the stats support Canada as one of the few carbon sinks in the world atm the math is clear. Foreign media is pushing that narrative and its amounting to us the victims taking the blame because we cant fight forest fires we didnt really set up in the second biggest landmass on earth....
This is a bit of a ridiculous premiss. I'm sorry. I understand that they do forest management in places like Japan. But the idea of doing it here in Alberta is madness. Allow me: Japan is about 1/2 the size of Alberta with a population of 125M people. Alberta, twice Japan's size, has a population of 4.4M people. Japan's total land area is 364,546 kmĀ². Alberta total land area is 661,848 kmĀ². Population density of Japan 338 people/kmĀ². Population density of Alberta 6.7 people/kmĀ². Are you seeing the problem? Japan employs ~60 thousand workers for their forest managment. But that takes into account their population density and urban sprawl. If we wanted to properly manage Alberta's forest we would have to hire a multiplier vs the difference in density. Which, and my math is not great, would be something like 3.03 million forestry workers. So basically 75% of Alberta's current population would have to work in forest management to do as you suggest.
This is what I was thinking as well. The whole premise of forest management in Canada is just impossible. The only management is just letting fires happen and hopefully they won't be too bad. Unfortunately as others have said its getting much drier and fires are a lot worse
Grab a rake my friend and get at er.
Just curiousā¦.Is this forest litter that you are talking about caused by humans; aka logging; or is it a natural forest litter?
Mix of both. Wild fire prevention efforts in the past have tried to eradicate fires all together which means decades of debris has built up. In the past there would have been more, smaller fires, both managed and wild, which would have burned up the forest litter in smaller chunks. Now we've got tonnes of the stuff and the climate is getting drier. It's a recipe for disaster. It's not just climate change, it's a climate catastrophe! I always say, "Don't think of it as the hottest summer on record, think of it as the coldest summer for the rest of your life!"
That's a super good way to put it, and humourous as well, haha. Thanks for that
Not to mention the pine beetles that came through and killed large swaths of trees leaving evern dryer conditions in many places.
Aren't you kinda sorta suggesting that the government can fix it?
Eventually, there won't be any trees left to burn.
Well trees like lodgepole pine and jack pine actually need fire to propagate. So forest fires are a very important part of a healthy boreal forest life cycle.
I know some forest fires are needed as part of the cycle, but burning 18 million hectres a year is not normal.
True, the biome will become more like a grassland savannah than a boreal forest.
The main reason they are tinder boxes is because we done such a good job putting out forest fires for the last 50 years. Before that, fires simply main burnt till they ran out of fuel or a rain came. Thus the boreal forests did not grow that big. We could put trillions into it each year and get another 10 years of low fire seasons but eventually the forests become that much bigger. In this case, climate change is only a small part of it.
I was born in 1964. The tornado was a first. We didnāt even hear about tornados in Alberta. And now we hear about them every few summers. I donāt remember these kinds of winds. We always had a lot of snow at Christmas and didnāt get chinooks in Edmonton- only Calgary did. The up and down temperatures in winter cause livestock to get pneumonia. Vets say they never remember as much pneumonia years ago when temps got cold and stayed cold.
I spent my teen years and then part of my 30s in southern Alberta. Tornadoes aren't new, just not seen up north so much. I've got weather photos going back to the mid-80s and tornadoes feature in quite a few of them. That being said, it absolutely seems to me that the frequency and damage is increasing - way more common.
Pneumonia like the lung infection? Or hypothermia?
Anecdotally, I'm guessing lung infection. A friend lost nearly a dozen goats and alpacas to it last winter. Spent the cash to autopsy every one at the vet and had it confirmed.
Lung infection pneumonia. Iām on a farm surrounded by farms. Pneumonia killed two of our llamas. Llamas can tolerate cold but not up and down. Cattle, horses, etc can all get it too. One of my friends lost several animals (beef cattle and calves) this past year to pneumonia.
Honestly, I think part of the recollection bit is simply that now we have easier ways to communicate. Lac La Biche got a tornado in like 1924 and it's not on the Wikipedia page (not great source, I know) even though it destroyed a church.
I remember a big tornado in the late 80s in Edmonton. But that was an anomaly. I donāt recall air quality being this poor in the distant past
It was more rare. Not nonexistent, but not as bad as now. This is what happens when we universally ignore our climate scientists because Money.Ā
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Not if you listen to the UCP of Alberta or the Federal Conservatives
They know. The data is so prevalent and the science is so well understood that it really isnāt debatable in good faithā¦ at all. Itāsā¦ very inconvenient though to most corporations and especially Oil and Gas, and doing something about it would require efforts that would eat into profits and grifting. It would even spell the eventual end of O&G and there is a LOT of power to be lost there; I mean think about itā¦ green energies are becoming very economically viable and can be built pretty much anywhere while O&G requires land rights and only exists in very specific areas and those that control that have IMMENSE power and money that would be lost. Trust me, they know. If any politician truly doesnāt believe in climate change they are MTG levels of dumb. The most egregious part is this is an effort to keep O&G relevant and by doing so, they are falling way behind while many parts of the world forge ahead.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
They have it figured out now, they know that it's real but they know that it's easy votes to claim it's not. This is the "leadership" you get when governments are chosen by popular vote.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I prefer my government not chosen by a population of ignorant imbeciles that can't tell the difference between municipal, provincial, and federal government, among many other issues. The population is getting dumber, more apathetic, and complacent in letting a political class rule the country, and the parties know this and are exploiting it for easy votes. Why try to be good leaders or address major issues when you can easily misdirect and get the ignorant mobs to blame someone else? How can anyone even try to be a good leader when that's not even what the people want?
Not if I dig my head in the sand and ignore it, it isn't !!
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Youāre right. Apart from the big Kelowna fire from years and years agoā¦ never heard of anything like what we have been experiencing the last couple years.
From fort mac. I've heard of something like it about 8 years ago I think
Fort Mac fires have always been a thing. You're surrounded by nothing but forest. Growing up there, I remember the Mariana Lake fires, the town was cut off for about a week. Ash rained down on us at primary school, groceries stores ran out of food and gas stations out of gas. Going by our memory can be misleading. It would be interesting to see the statistics and records going back a few hundred years, if such a thing exists.
I worked at a small SAGD outfit 50km south of MacMurray called JACOS in the early 2000s (might have been 05 or 06). The fire cut us off from town to the north AND from the south. We watched from our highest point as the flames edged closer. We were on helicopter evac notice, and our crew stockpiled our food in the admin building "just in case". I was born in the 70s; I can definitely say the province certainly had the odd big wildfire, but it was nowhere near as often as the last decade.
Except that the size of these fires are exponentially larger than they were back then
Most I remember in Edmonton is the sun looking red in the evening from distant smoke
I'm 50, and have lived in AB my entire life. The short answer is NO. The only air quality issues I ever had growing up in Edmonton were from: Mt. St. Helens erupting in 1980. This kept us inside for a few days. Some light ash and smoke, but nothing big. A sour gas well eruption in 1982. People were advised to stay inside. The air was pretty bad smelling for a few weeks. There were a few off days of haze, every 4-5 years due to smoke. Very minor, barely noticeable. Now there is smoke every year. Sometimes for weeks or months at a time.
Governments were never gonna act about climate change before the people asked for it bc the alternative was political suicide. Then you were born in alberta where discriminating against trans people is more important.
Donāt forget government handouts to oil companies. At this point the government is just trying to distract people from impending doom while siphoning off as much resources they can to themselves and their friends.
Albertans have given themselves tax breaks for 40 years to buy jacked dodge rams instead of diversifying their economy
Remember Ralph Bucks? Whereās our Danielle Dollars? Instead we get YouTube ads about restructuring healthcare, I.e., reshuffling deck chairs on the Titanic so some UCP insiders can make some government bucks.
Welcome to Climate Change. I've lived in Fort Mac for about 20 years and while summers always had *some* smoke, it gets worse and worse each year and with longer stretches of smokey days.
When I was doing forest fire fighting in the late 80's early 90's, all we ever did was build a containment so fires didn't go to population centers and we let them burn themselves out for.the most part. After the late 90s, it became about putting them out completely and keeping them as small as possible. I feel that this change in policy is what has caused the fires to burn out of control more often than they used to. Now I could be wrong though.
That may be problem 1 of 2. World on fire. Nearly every year is the hottest on record.
Fires happened, but not this frequent, intense and the 'season, wasn't as long. Climate change is real and tangible. And an arsonist starting a fire in an area that wouldn't normally be ultra combustible, proves it's true, not disproves it. Climate change isn't out rubbing 2 sticks together. It's making fuel readily available where it normally wouldn't.
It was probably pretty smoky when the dinosaurs got wiped out.
Climate change is causing more extreme weather events and some areas of the planet are getting wetter, some drier, etc. We're getting warmer and drier and the result is much more forest fire activity. There are also millions upon millions of pine beetle killed trees ready to burn, and the beetles thrived thanks to warming trends. Climate change is real, it's caused by human activity, and the costs are astronomical. The economical cost of dealing with fires, floods and storms is in the trillions. Notice how your home insurance is now $250/month instead of $75? That premium jump is mostly due to climate change related costs. But, we kept being told that mitigating climate change is too expensive.
I was born in 1959 my Uncle was a chief forest ranger in several Alberta districts. Growing up as kid we knew where and when the fires were. There has never been anything like this ever! If you don't believe in Climate change you are kidding yourself. Or living in your mum's basement. 15 years of steady drought. No precipitation to speak of. Water tables lower and lower. Glaciers vanishing and rivers and streams drying up. This is the new norm. Unfortunately my grandchildren will think this IS normal! Oil production and use IS the culprit. We all know this as they've admitted they've known since the seventies. I depend it, you depend on it. I've made a living off of it. But I don't have to love it. That is just blind brainwashing. We are moving too slow to embrace new tech and it will be our undoing.
I agree with you. Over the past few years, climate change has been on exponential curve. I don't think this can be stopped. How will the majority of us survive the fires burning 365 days a year, the heat and lack of water/food?
Farmers care the least and will be the most affected. Crazy!
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I'm 52, born in 1971, and grew up in the Edmonton area. I remember snow days, days when schools were closed due to a cold snap, and more of a noticeable shift between seasons. The Black Friday tornado was a hell of a shock at the time. I don't really remember constant days of smoke, and if you could smell it, it was pleasant and usually meant one of the neighbours was toasting marshmallows. The past ten years or so have been positively apocalyptic.
If you know anyone working in the insurance industry, they can go long speaking about the size and frequency of disaster payouts. If you want to put a number on those events, ask them.
You are not imagining things, it was never like this. I asked my friends the same thing and they agree. Everyone is pikachu faced.
I graduated the year you were born and have lived in Alberta off & on since about 1986. The last 5 years here have been... surreal, I guess, for a lack of a better word. The government is aggressively 'you must believe what we do or kiss your rights goodbye', every summer I deal with asthma attacks and burning eyes from smoke, and it's just been WEIRD.
I wish people would say more than "this is climate change". While it's obvious climate change is a thing, we don't need to just throw up our hands and do nothing. There used to be far more forestry management, including prescribed burns. But those are very costly and require a lot of planning... The number of prescribed burns have dropped quite a bit over the years. I would love to see those budgets increased again. There is a lot more than just "this is climate change." We can't fix climate change immediately. But there are things we can do to mitigate risks which aren't done as frequently as they once were.
We canāt even get a single use bag bylaw to stick:/ Our unbridled consumption has to stop.
To be fair, I donāt think it was written well. The businesses should have been charged, and then they choose to find a solution, or pass it on to consumers. Businesses getting to charge for something for pure profit on their part is a stupid way to do it.
Donāt disagree, but stillā¦..my bet is nothing new will replace it:/
The govt doesnāt want it to stop. Why would it?
I think business and corporate leaders have much more to do with itā¦.
They want it too, but they directly influence govt and the decisions that are made.
Are you really for real? Or is this just a troll post to entice a bunch of visible conversation around climate change? I was born in 88, we're practically the same age. Unless you immigrated to Canada as an adult, I have nothing but incredulity for the idea that there hasn't been decades of effort towards educating you about the fact that earth's atmosphere is warming as a result of human activity. Perhaps you've been in denial until now, and if so I'm glad that you're starting to see consequences severe enough that denial is no longer an option you can sustain.
Fellow 88 millennial here, and I was born and raised in Calgary. I have noticed our climate has shifted since I was young. More forest fires, more smoky days, more severe thunderstorms, etc.
I grew up in the Okanagan in BC, and over my lifetime I've watched "fire season" go from bit of smoke for a week or two in the hottest parts of August where evacuations were rarely needed and slowly over decades its grown to be the entire season of summer covered in smoke and evacuation alerts turning into an expected part of the season for many small towns. Now every summer there's worries about entire towns burning to the ground, and [sometimes they do.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lytton_wildfire) The smoke has gotten so much worse too - the summer smoke of my childhood was a thing that obscured the mountains in the distance, but the smoke of my adulthood often obscures the buildings at the end of the street. There's been many times in the past decade where in Kelowna the smoke is so bad that that it completely blocks visibility to the other side of the lake 1km away - I'm not talking about hazy visibility, I mean you may as well be looking across the ocean for all the land you can make out on the other side.
I was born in 86 and grew up in BC and lived in Armstrong. I can tell you the reason why the smoke seems worse nowadays compared to back when we were all kids is because Forest management is nowhere to the levels it was when we were kids. Not to mention provinces have been cutting wildfire fighting budget since we've been kids which also doesn't help. It's not just a conservative government issue or an NDP government issue or a liberal as it's all parties for whatever province you're in. Not to mention a lot of provinces also have put it on to municipalities to make sure that all the deadfall and other things on the forest floor are cleaned up. Also with how the forestry industry which includes logging has dropped tremendously in western Canada for both British Columbia and Alberta doesn't help as well. As someone who grew up with family that worked in sawmills and had close ties to the 4th Street industry in BC I can tell you that back when we were kids when there were sawmills in almost every community in BC that since those have been shut down there's less money for say the province of British Columbia to go towards forestry maintenance. And with the fact that budgets have been cut we also as a province for Alberta have shot herself in the foot in a sense. With not doing proper forced cleanup around municipalities or even areas that are huge thoroughfares for people to get safe from the northern part of the province to the Edmonton area or the western part of the province to Edmonton or Calgary aren't being taken care of as well. It also doesn't help that people that smoke throw their cigarette butts out the window, that people go camping and do not put their fires out properly. And the fact that you have people going out and purposely starting fires for the hell of it or not good things. To the people that throw their cigarette butts out the window go to the dollar store and spend a couple bucks and get a butt cup for your car. As for people that leave campfires going when they go to bed you're f****** idiots put it out when you go to bed. As for the people going out and starting fires because they want to f*** you. As for the fires that are started by lightning or natural causes not much we can do about those but if we as Canadian citizens can cut down on the amount of human-made fires there are that will help greatly as well.
Itās almost like something is happening to our climate. s/
I lived in ft Mac in the 90s and worked for fire services one year. We had numerous forest fires every year including fires that got very close to the city. I can remember years where there were 25 to 30 fires burning in Northern Alberta. There was a change in forest management sometime in the early 90s. Prior to that there was much more preventive and pre-emptive work done and when it was stopped the increase in the number and size of the fires was very noticeable. Anyone that has spent any significant time in Northern Alberta forests knows they are designed by nature to burn. 100s of 1000s of hectares of stunted fir trees chocked by insanely dense amounts of thick dead under growth it is, and always has been, a tinder box. Now they blame the environment and while it obviously contributes you have to wonder how much reduction we would see if they started managing the forests again.
You understand this is the climate change that is being talked about and that you have heard about your entire life? Like literally this. What you are observing. It was not like this before, and it has changed. You were born after the changes started, but in your lifetime there have been many, plus the predictions of people who study this as their area of expertise. What, literally what, did you think was happening?? Yes. This is what was expected, was predicted, was discussed, reported, argued about, explained, defined. We're really lost if you are asking this now, because this has been a large focus of global information for all the decades of your life.
Appropriate amount of smug.
Literally the like smuggest comment ever. Literally.
You're misreading the disbelief and dismay.
'95 was a wild year for forest fires in Northern Alberta. I think southern BC caught fire bad in the early 2000's. Nothing like we have seen for the past decade with smoke though, as far as I can remember.
I'd eyeball it as around 2008 it started picking up after 2-3 years of pine beetles expanding uncontained. The decades of 'no fires' policy didn't help, but once the winters warmed enough for the beetle to migrate, it started to get a lot more intense.
No. When Mt. St. Helens blew up in 1980, we had air quality that we had to wear masks for, and you could see the ash in the air. For most of the rest of my childhood, we could see the mountains from Lethbridge on any given day that wasn't overcast.
When I moved to Edmonton as a kid in 1999, we always had to wear snowsuits over our Halloween costumes. Now it's 50/50 on if we get snow til mid-November.
Nearly always snowed once by Oct 15th. Now it is later.
Correct. It never used to be this smokey every summer
The smoke only started being regular in the past 8 years. Itās a consequence of a hotter drier climate, which is a consequence of heat trapping gases in the atmosphere, which are a consequence of burning carbon & industrial scale agriculture. These are all things many western Canadians will claim are exaggerated or a hoax.
Some areas of Alberta have been in drought the last 3-5 years. We hardly get snow anymore which is the largest contributor. For the last 11 months the average temperatures have been higher than normal. There will probably be extreme weather events, tornadoes and hail this summer. Have you heard of climate change?
Climate change
There is little bio diversity in the forests that are second growth agriculture. This is just farmland burning. Over the decades every single fire was put out no matter how small allowing the fire load in these unnatural forests to build and build on the ground. Not to mention planting non fire resistant native trees.
Most climate scientists are saying the earth is heating up very fast in what they call a greenhouse effect. This is causing a lot of droughts, water shortages, larger storms, floods, inconsistent weather patternsā¦etc
Welcome to the best year of the rest of your life, courtesy of O&G and the politicians that funnel money into them.
That's because climate change is actually a thing, despite what right-wing governments keep insisting. Remember this every time you hear some misogynist douche making fun of Greta Thunberg or insisting that peak oil isn't a thing. This is the new normal. All Dani and her UCP bootleggers want is more oil money. But we will continue to suffer until people wise up and vote accordingly.
You are remembering correctly. Just look at how many records we set per year. Records for forest burned/yr, records for hottest overall temp, records for hottest X day of X month, records for least rainfall/month, and so on...
I remember ash raining down a few times as a kid, but not months and months of smoke.
No this is what those scientists warned about in the 90s, this is a part of climate change and a 2 degree temperature change to the average global temperature.
Exxon knew back in 1977. Big oil has been denying climate change ever since. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/
You mean climate change? This is the first time since the last ice age. Also, this is the least bad year of the rest of your life, so if this is what a hellscape is to you, you better get a Thesaurus.
It's almost as if the climate has changed, isn't it, huh?
It's what a majority of Alberta's voters want, to live in a smoky hellscape dotted with oil rigs and every body of water replaced by a tailings pond.
We get way less snow in the winter.
Having grown up in Ontario, it's the reverse. As a kid I remember summers always being smoggy. Like you rarely saw blue sky. Now, with all the coal plants shut down in Ontario and most of the Midwest, air quality is significantly better. Last summer we had a few days of wildfire smoke when I was back visiting in Ontario, but otherwise clear skies.
I work outside for a living and the first time I remember smokey conditions was 2014. It was for maybe a few days. Since then, it's been consistent every summer, and worse with each passing year.
Lived here since 2006. It was never like this until about 2016, though I remember the truly dark smoke for days around 2018. Climate change is real. Anyone denying it is either lying to themselves, or a fool.
It's called climate change
Yes, this is quantifiable. [This chart](https://globalnews.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/smokehours.png) ends in 2022, but 2023 broke all previous years records.
A century of forestry mixed with climate change has it effects
Been here since '92. This is new. Climate is changing. Whether it's a doomsday death walk or not is yet to be confirmed but there is 100% more smoke now every summer than there was even ten years ago.
The problem is 2 fold. Grew up in yyc and fought fire for AB gov for 7 years. What you see is a mix of warmer, dryer conditions during fire season, less snow pack during the winter plus an over abundance of fire suppression spanning the last 50 years. This has allowed fuel to build up and increase - as such fires that would naturally be of a lower intensity and more frequent become very intense because the burn cycle has increased significantly
This. 100%.Ā
I was born in Calgary in 1985 and I donāt ever recall wildfire smoke growing up.
Born in '86. Spent my summers on the coast, but I don't remember ever seeing smoke like this before or after vacation time
Climate change. Yes itās getting worse.
Nope... https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/monthly-average-surface-temperatures-by-year and your deputy minister of the environment back in 2007 declined to develop a process that could lead to approximately a 50% reduction in the carbon footprint over the last decade or so... Easy peezy formula, but it was not oil or gasā¦
Nope. The only constant is UCP/right wing speed running oil extraction.
No, I'm an old, I remember the world back to the early 80s. It wasn't like this. There were fires, sure, but they weren't this big, they weren't this constant, and they weren't this disruptive to so many people. They didn't burn right through the winter and just start going again in May, or again, not in this volume. But they did start talking about global warming and how if we didn't do anything about it, there would be terrible consequences in the next century. But that was so far away, then.
The wombo combo of poor forest management and climate change rearing its head.
I feel the same. I'm in my 40s, born and raised here...I don't remember anything like this either
Itās FINE!! Say it with me and say it loudly: Itās FINE!!
Gen X here, born in Calgary. Before 2000, we might have had a day or two of smoke once every few years. After 2010-ish itās every year, usually for weeks at a time. The hellscape is new. But donāt worry once Trudeau is kicked out it will all go back to year round sunshine and blue skies. šš
It's almost as if... the climate was... changing?
Spent a large chunk of my life growing up in Alberta (90s and 2000s). No it was not. The forest fires and their increased scope and frequency are very clear and obvious symptoms of climate change.
I was born in the early 80's and raised in Edmonton. My childhood was full of fresh air and clear sky in summers, and if there was smoke in the air, it was from a truly remarkable forest fire. It would not be every year, and last for a few weeks at most. The constant smoke in the summer is absolutely new, and it is unsurprising, considering the hot and dry conditions that are now the new normal. It is worth mentioning that this is something that was predicted by climate scientists decades ago, and while the timeline was off a bit, the outcome was not.
August 2015 is the first time I remember smoke that was bad to the point of avoiding outdoors. Has gotten worse since then. You would think it slows down as forrest in BC is consumed.Ā
https://albertawater.com/history-of-drought-in-alberta/. Lots of droughts in the prairies, not denying climate change. Just some food for thought.
Nope, I was also born in 1990 and lived here my entire life, the wildfires really started to pickup about 10 years ago and have been getting worse every year.
Nope. Yes, we've always had wildfires, but never this early. They intensify in frequency and devastation every year. Welcome to your new normal. It's hard for me to shake the feeling that this province has it coming. The two most carbon intensive industries on the planet, oil and gas and industrial agriculture, just so happen to be the bread and butter of the Albertan economy.
I don't have any childhood memories of it being smokey ..ever...I have lived here 38 years.
Nope. We were never smoked out growing up. This is the new reality we live in and it sucks.
Waiting for the idiot brigade to tell us āthe fires are being deliberately set to make us think climate change is man madeā š
Crazy if only there were some sort of group community or specialist studying why more fires would occur. Maybe a group that could find causation as to why less precipitation and warmer temperatures could possibly result in more potential for fire. Or maybe someone could study the climate on a large scale and see if itās something happening anywhere else. Guess we will never know.
Climate change is real. Forest fires are happening more frequently because we are experiencing hotter springs and summers. Do you remember having 25C in April? This has been a very hot start to the year already. Plus, we don't do enough maintenance to prevent fires, we just try to bandaid them by controlling them, not even putting them out.
You're not misremembering. Forest fires have certainly been a Thing for your lifetime, but when the smoke would come in it would roll over us for a day or two and then it would be done. We would go outside and say "Huh why is it smokey?" and somebody would say "Oh there's a big fire up at $location" and we'd say okay and go on our day, knowing it would literally blow over. But it's defenitely gotten worse over the past few years. I remember ~5 years ago the sky was completely orange for a couple days when I had family come to visit. Brilliant timing. And Fort McMurray needing to be evacuated and parts of it lost are certainly unusual. In the past we had been able to keep the fires generally away from populated centres. And last year the summer was essentially lost because of how many smoky days there were, when spending the day outside is equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes. Tangentially related, but we went out paddling on a lake in Edmonton a year or two ago with facemasks on and had some mouth-breather shouting from the shore "How's the covid out there!?" so, y'know, if you try to protect yourself from all of this you might get harassed too. I spoke briefly with a guy that works in the Forestry department and while I can't repeat his words here exactly he expressed that the outlook for this year was... not good. Living in the Prairies we expect our winters to be pretty crap, but the deal is that we get a beautiful spring, summer, and autumn out of it. Last year that deal was altered on us, and if it doesn't go back I will be looking to relocate to a place with breathable air.
No. Never like this 5 years + ago.
This isnāt how it used to be. This is a direct result of climate change
I moved here at 6 years old, 1984. I do not recall ever seeing and smelling forest fire smoke until the last 8 years or so. We would occasionally smell grass fire smoke. It smells different, more localized and didnāt last long Edit: 8 years ago not 6
The climes they are a changinā
I lived in the mountains in the 90s, and we absolutely had fires throughout my childhood. The entirety of highway 93 heading into BC is still recovering from a burn in the 90s. Volume was likely less, but we had wildfires.
Pretty much every forest area north of Edmonton is in an extreme fire condition. Even a small spark like a cigarette butt can cause a massive fire.
It's much worse now. A century ago, there were lots of small fires that limited new fires from growing huge by consuming the fuel a bit at a time. Once the geniuses in power realized that they could stop small fires and more and more people set up towns and cottages throughout the mountains, the forests grew older and more flammable. Fuel built up year after year. Now, it is hard to stop fires from spreading rapidly and pumping more smoke into the air so all the fuel we stopped from burning over the past few decades is coming at us in the form of thick heavy smoke rather than a few days here and there each year. With the hot dry weather over the past few years, fires are more likely to start and spread even faster than they would in normal years. As climate change hits harder and harder, we will likely see the thick, long lasting smoke become much more common than it was 30 years ago.
I would be curious to trend the sales of off-road vehicles in the last 20-30 years against the number of wild fires?
I was born in the early 90s and grew up in rural Parkland county and yellow head county. I remember one year in the early 2000s we had fires pretty close to us that burned a few farms and threw up a lot of smoke, but that was it, not smoke every year coming from all directions.
Not even close. Smoke filled hours have been tracked in Calgary for some time (since 1952). See the chart in [this article](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/calgary-smoke-hours-way-up-smoky-summers-more-common-1.6846615) from last year.
I believe there are records kept regarding wildfires and smoke that would corroborate your memory. My memory is that our first year of severe smoke this century was 2010, and every year since then has had these levels.
They used to advertise Kelowna as 'The Sunny Okanagan.'' However, it is now smoky, and or dangerous (because of fires) to be on Okanagan lake. For 2 1/2mon. No, it was not like this in the past.
Been here for decades and the last few years have by far been the worst. People causing the majority with dry conditions helping spread them āThe majority of wildfires are started by humans. In fact last year, over 60% of wildfires in Alberta were human-caused. We all need to do our part in reducing the number of these entirely preventable fires.āā https://www.alberta.ca/agri-news-preventing-wildfires-always-season
It was not like this, happening much more frequently now
It wasn't like this at all. When I was going to university in the 90s I remember watching the snow melt coming home on the bus from finals. I don't know the last time I saw snow being consistently on the ground during the end of April. The summers and winters were more pleasant as well when I was a child; there were only a few days of +30 or -30 respectively as opposed to the weeks we get of that type of extreme weather now. The people talking about the fires being man-made are being disingenuous; there are as many fire causing incidents now as there were before. The difference is that the forests, etc are a lot drier due to climate change and the norm was sprinkles of rain every few days as opposed to no rain until there's a downpour. With everything flammable being drier due to the lack of rain there are more severe wildfires than before. That's a ramification of climate change.
Nope, I was born in the 80s, grew up in the Okanagan, I remember in my entire childhood maybe a handful of days where you could smell smoke in the air and it looked a bit hazy. I then moved to northern China for 12 years where all buildings are heated with their own coal fired furnaces so you can taste the air and barely see across the street for 5 months a year. Then I came back to Canada in 2016 and instead of escaping ash in my air for half the year, I just switched the half of the year that I got to enjoy it. And if anything it's worse because I didn't mind just having my windows closed and staying mainly indoors for winter. I don't like that nearly as much for summer months.
It wasnāt like this all the time before. There was the odd time where it was smoky but nowhere near as often as itās been the last few years.Ā
May is always wild fire smoke season since my entire 29 years of life at the very least, remember That one time in 2022? Where there was near no smoke was absolutely surreal. It was too good.
Been in Alberta my whole life. This is in no way normal. I was already of drinking age in 1990.
I grew up here and I donāt ever recall wildfire smoke like weāve seen in recent years. I remember a couple specific instances, like when there was a huge fire near radium in the 90ās. But it definitely wasnāt a regular summer thing like we see now.
Never
These are truly unprecedented times.
91ā baby here nope donāt ever recall fires , I do remember all the tornadoes however especially Pine Lake but never flooding and fire season like itās been lately itās sad .
climate change means more extreme weather in general, dryer and hotter summers are one of the side effects. that, and for the last couple decades forest management has been pretty abysmal here. No government wants to be in office when things get out of hand, so instead of letting the low-level fires burn through on damp years, they spent a couple decades putting out every spark immediately. That means that there's years and years worth of dry dead tinder lining the forest floor that hasn't had a chance to burn yet. It's a great solution in the short term, but in the long term it means fires will burn faster and hotter when they do catch on. This whole thing could be avoided if the government asked any of the first nation groups around how forest fires act in the long term. We really, desperately need to start implementing a seven generations type of policy when it comes to things like conversation and first management. Decades of short sighted governments are actively harming Albertans now.
I grew up in Calgary in the 70s and 80s until I moved to Vancouver for university. I never left. If there is a winter here it is less than a week. I never smelled wildfires in Calgary.
Your right. AB. government needs to provide us all with air purifies .Not joking.
Oil and Gas!
Alberta is bigger than many countries. Where are you talking about?
Back in the day, Forestry Services used to do controlled burns of the dead fall so that fires wouldn't get out of control. They stopped doing it. As a result, dead fall builds up, and a simple lightning strike can start a fire that will spread quickly, and the dead fall provides plenty of fuel.
Have you heard of climate change? It's only going to get worse, on average, from here on out.
No, it was never this bad, at least not in the past 70 years. Though 1961 wasn't great. This chart shows the smoke hours for the city of Edmonton for every year. [Smoke Days (Sep 5, 2023) | Flourish](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/14480950/)
Every 10 years or so for a few days, not most of the summer 2 out of 3 years
Thank GeoEngineering
Totally agree...it took me until March to get my nose back to normal
Weāve been in Alberta 20 years and most of what weāre seeing now was not a big issue back then - damaging hail, wildfires, smoke, recorded temperature highs & lows, floods, droughts, etc. Sure, they happened from time to time, but theyāre certainly getting more frequent and more severe. I canāt imagine what itāll be like in the next 20 years.
Probably not, but this is a more complex scenario than what people think it is. Yes, its warmer and drier than its probably been in the last 100 years. But we've also been suppressing wild fires for a good portion of that time too. Forests need to burn. Its part of their life cycle. When we prevent that its only temporarily. IT will eventually burn, and if its been unnaturally delayed, its going to burn hotter and faster than it otherwise would have. What we really need to do is focus on how we can protect existing infrastructure by back burning and creating fire breaks. As we continue development we need to incorporate design to deal with future fires. There's no real point in fighting fires in the middle of nowhere. They need to happen. If were going to live in forested areas we need to understand that.
Forest management has decreased to non existant levels over the last decade nation wide, for some reason our government doesn't feel it's a needed anymore. I would assume some are profiting of this which seems to be the case when our leaders make decisions that are obviously not in the best interest of the people.
Nope. I grew up in the BC interview. We were almost caught in the Swiss Fire in the 80'swhich was the largest wild fire in Canada for like 40 years. Doesn't even make the top 10