Smoky skies the latest sign of climate change

“How’s the smoke in Ottawa?” I texted my friend early Wednesday morning. Toronto smelled like yesterday’s campfire and the sky had a golden glow to it, but the haze had thinned. “It’s so bad,” came the response. “Climate anxiety is at an alltime high. It feels apocalyptic.”

Ottawa’s Air Quality Health Index, a measure of the health risk floating by on the breeze at a given hour, was off the charts at 6 a.m., measuring 28 out of 10. Local hospitals were already seeing a surge in patients.

It’s hard to ignore climate change when it’s scratching the back of your throat and making it hard to breathe.

In Toronto, the arrival of summer isn’t usually marked by hazy mornings, air quality warnings and cancelled outdoor children’s programs. The AQHI has been around for nearly a decade, but many of us have hardly used it. In the years to come, smoky days may become normal as human-caused climate change worsens wildfires across the country and makes them harder to control.

Quebec wildfires

The smoke spreading through eastern Ontario was coming from Quebec, where 149 active fires were burning as of Wednesday afternoon, mostly out of control. Federal officials counted 414 blazes across the country, with 239 raging uncontrollably.

In Canada, the wildfire season typically spans April to October and peaks in July. On average, more than 8,000 fires occur annually, burning about 2.1 million hectares across the country. This year, more than 3.8 million hectares of forest have already been torched.

In interviews and news briefings, fire experts and officials are using the word “unprecedented” more often, saying the country is on track for its worstever wildfire season. At the current pace of burning, the alltime record could be beaten by next week.

Wildfires aren’t unusual in Canada. They’re key to clearing dead leaf litter from the forest floor to allow new growth and to return nutrients to the soil. Some pine trees can’t reproduce unless fire melts the resin in their cones and releases the seeds.

Climate change

But climate change has exaggerated the wildfire season. Severe drought, hot weather and low humidity are drying out vegetation and leaving landscapes more vulnerable to ignition. Dry, windy weather allows fires to burn longer and hotter and to spread. And lightning strikes, which ignite half of all wildfires in Canada, are increasingly frequent. A few years ago, researchers found the wildfire season had already lengthened by two weeks since 1959, beginning a week earlier and lasting a week longer.

Extreme heat over Eastern Canada and Quebec in late May helped sparked the fires we’re smelling today. Climate change made those high temperatures three to five times more likely, according to the U.S.-based non-profit Climate Central.

When I messaged Mike Flannigan, a fire researcher at Thompson Rivers University, to ask if the peak had also shifted, he wrote: “I think the new reality is that we can see highintensity wildfires at any time during the fire season, (even) outside the core or peak period.” He pointed to the fires and evacuation of thousands of people in the Northwest Territories in May when there aren’t typically any wildfires at all.

Less predictable fires

Fires are also becoming less predictable. They’re burning through the night, upsetting their long-established “active day, quiet night” pattern as drought conditions persist. By mid-century, Canada could see twice as much wildland area consumed by fire due to human-caused climate change.

By dinnertime Wednesday, Toronto’s AQHI had climbed to 7 — high risk. Those with the resources can take steps to improve their air quality by staying indoors and running air filtration units on high, or wearing N95 or KN95 masks if they have to go outdoors. Still, each notch up the 10-point AQHI scale can increase hospital admissions by as much as five per cent, especially among those with chronic heart or lung conditions, such as asthma or COPD.

I stayed inside with my windows shut, studying the National Wildfire Smoke Model’s projections. Its map showed oxblood pixels, evidence of extremely high levels of fine particulates, staggering counterclockwise from the fires in Quebec, over Lake Ontario and into the United States. As the animation ticked through to the end on Saturday morning, the air over Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal began to clear up. Then black pixels erupted again in northern Quebec and the animation reached its end.

Tools like this can warn us of the health risks that come with climate change, but they can only do so much. It would be far better if wildfires weren’t raging out of control in the first place. Decades from now, after focused efforts to eliminate carbon emissions, the wildfire season might return to something resembling the past. But for many of us, the smoke will seep into spring and fall, for the rest of our lives.