Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Or, in the case of last Saturday, there’s fire hundreds, even thousands, of miles away.

Much of Minnesota, including Mankato and the Twin Cities metro area, spent last Saturday under an air quality alert, with the odor of smoke from wildfires in northern Minnesota and Canada everywhere. The smoky haze dissipated that night, but that the symptoms have abated hardly means the problem has.

It’s May, and the boreal forests of the northland should still be moist and fire-resistant from the winter snows. That we’re already experiencing such fires bodes ill for the “real” fire season ahead.

The trauma of the Canadian city of Fort McMurray, the center of Alberta’s oil sands production, has captured headlines for the past week. A city of 88,000 surrounded by wilderness, Fort McMurray was evacuated late last week as an out-of-control fire threatened to ravage it.

It now appears that most of the city has been saved from the flames, but a great deal of damage has been done, both to the city and to the Canadian economy, which has seen the oil sands region essentially shut down during the crisis.

Oil sands production has been particularly criticized for its contribution to global warming, and as reported by the Canadian Press, the Fort McMurray fire is seen in some quarters as karmic retribution. Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, has climate change prominent on his agenda, but he — no doubt mindful of the politics of the situation — is trying to downplay the connection between climate and this particular disaster.

Connecting any one event to the overall increase in global temperatures is a dicey undertaking. As Trudeau said Thursday, there have always been fires. But it is also true that the ill effects forecast by the climate models — from wildfires to megastorms, droughts to spreading tropical diseases — are on the rise.

Canada in the early 1970s averaged about one million hectares of forest burn annually over a 10-year period. Now the 10-year rolling average is more than twice that, and rising. And it builds on itself: the carbon dioxide emitted globally by wildfires is more than half the CO2 emitted by carbon fuel use. More carbon, more warming; more warming, more fires; more fires, more carbon.

“This is a foretaste of things to come,” warns Mike Flannigan, professor of wildland fire at the University of Alberta. Mankatoans who ventured out on Saturday know that however distant the fire, it’s our problem too.

 

—Mankato Free Press, May 12