Canadian wildfire crosses border into Saskatchewan

[Baobab]

Source: BBC News

The massive Canadian wildfire that displaced thousands of people in Alberta has officially spread to neighbouring Saskatchewan.

The fire is now 4,830 sq km (1865 sq miles) and has expanded east.

It has burned about 7.8 sq km (3 sq miles) in the province so far, the CBC reports.

The nearest village is more than 30 km from the border, but smoke and ash could be a concern for the town of La Loche, Saskatchewan.

There are currently nine fires in Saskatchewan

Read more: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-36335717

[Monk06]

2. The good news, by August there will be nothing left to catch fire Also the boreal forest has

entered old age Too many dead trees and under brush from Pine Beetle infestation and drought

The future is young green growth and better habitat for bear, dear, rabbits, fox, owls; the works.

These fires are natural. This one was long overdue . The Athabaska Basin will be better for it

[Ichingcarpenter]

3. Can the oil sands and tar pits catch fire?

I've seen pictures of the oil, tar and environmental degradation of that area showing huge pools or even small lakes of that shit covering large areas.

Is that being discussed in Canada as a concern?
Thanks

[Monk06]

8. Not the raw sand but the processed oil sitting in tanks ready to shipped out The fire is forty mile

from SynCrude's storage facility as of yesterday

I covered the reclamation claims being made by the mayor of Wood Buffalo just before the Tar Sands began production in 2003 at 200 to 500 K barrels per day

Their environmental claims were pure bullshit The settling ponds are within sight of the North Athabaska River which empties into the Arctic Ocean

If there is a major spill it will be very hard to contain it

[Botany]

4. The Athabaska Basin will be better for it

maybe not because this time of year the ground level in a boreal forest should
be very damp .... moss, rotten timber, ferns, lichens, and peat all of which should
be wet from last winter's snow pack ... now if you had lots of dead standing trees
they should be able to "carry a fire" but a fire this time of year that is in part due to drought
and higher then normal temps* because of global climate change is not a good thing.


85 F in late april in northern alberta should not be the norm.

[Monk06]

9. No the temperature is not normal but we are just going into an El Nino cycle and the boreal

forests do dry out because of El Nino drought conditions Add the Pine Beetle infestation which began in the early 1990s and you have a lot of dead wood and underbrush that is just now burning off

Whether this is part of an historic cycle or related to climate change may be decernable by how much this area comes back

[hatrack]

11. Actually, El Nino is winding down fairly rapidly per NOAA

NOAA scientists are now saying there is a 75% chance that there will be a transition into La Niña this fall.

Currently, we are still under an El Niño phase but we are expected to quickly transition into a neutral phase and then into La Niña. This means that sea surface temperatures (SST) in the central Pacific will be at least 0.5 degrees below average.

The latest numbers show that in April, SST were 1.2ºC above average, which is a big drop from the peak of El Niño in November of 2.4 degrees above average. Recently, cooling has accelerated and models are trending towards El Niño ending at the beginning of the summer.

What does this mean? As previously mentioned, during a La Niña, the Atlantic has the possibility of seeing more hurricanes due to weaker vertical wind shear. As for impacts such as cooler, warmer, drier, or wetter conditions as we hear with El Niño will not come into play throughout the summer in United States.

EDIT

http://www.wmdt.com/weather/75-chance-of-transitioning-to-la-nia/39561378

Oh, and that pine beetle infestation? Directly climate related:

http://www.fs.fed.us/wwetac/projects/PDFs/BioScience_CC_and_Bark_Beetles.pdf

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/22/science/southern-pine-beetles-new-england-forests.html

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/03/climate-change-sends-beetles-overdrive

http://bioscience.oxfordjournals.org/content/60/8/602.full

Do try and keep up.

[Monk06]

12. Why keep up when you're doing all the work Mr Smarty Mouth

[hatrack]

13. Ooh! Stinging!

You don't even know whether El Nino is coming or going, and it's all natural, according to you.

Yeah, good luck with that.

[Monk06]

14. I responded in humor but I guess your sense of ha ha is a bit impaired

Last edited Sun May 22, 2016, 12:26 AM - Edit history (2)

I am not convinced the the El Nino cycle is contributing much if any to the wild fires

Northern BC and Alberta The infected regions historically susceptible to wild fires because they are historically susceptible to Spruce Bud worm infestations Worms and the dead fauna they leave behind are part of the ecology of these forests. Don't take may word for it

http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/forests/fire-insects-disturbances/top-insects/13383

Also if you look at a map of the bud worm epidemic which began in earnest in the 1990s you will see Fort Mac is only 100 km away from the leading edge of the worm's march eastward see map below

http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/sites/www.nrcan.gc.ca/files/cfs/assets/file/1550

I am not a climate change denier but I also don't attribute every short or mid term weather pattern to climate change Nor do I think all climate change is the direct and determinate result of industrialization

The indicator of whether climate change is the result of a rapid increase of industrialization would be China
China and the rest of South Asia may be the canary in the coal mine when it comes to de terming the extent that rapid uncontrolled industrialization changes climate world wide

Mind you by the time the canary dies it will be too late But that's the conundrum, science can't predict the future based on the past because historical data is scarce and rather recent So we depend on statistical models which, while always improving but never definitive

My mild skepticism is based on the empirical contingency of scientific theories and the evidence which supports them I professor said to me once that scientific predictions are under determine by the evidence.

On the other hand, he said, historical retrodictions are radically under determined by the evidence

Which means future phenomena are predicted by physical forces that can be examined in the present and extrapolated forward

In the case of past phenomena, historical data must first be mediated and interpreted by a theoretical model and then extrapolated to the present or future Much of historical data is lost forever due to geological forces that int erupt continuities in fossil and geological records So in many ways the past is veiled to us forever

In other words the past is not prologue

So again while mildly skeptical regarding the statements of climate change enthusiast I am not a disbeliever eat her

[NickB79]

6. These fires are far from natural. They are megafires created by human stupidity

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/08/150809-wildfires-forest-fires-climate-change-science/

Woodpeckers are among the winners, along with small hawks and other birds that like to call bug-filled, hollowed out dead trees home. Deer and elk prefer open spaces created when forests burn down, but denuded terrain also attracts invasive plants, which crowd out native species. One of the most notorious of these is cheat grass.

Southern Idaho, where much of the forest has burned in the last quarter-century, has seen a dramatic transformation from forest to open range.

“We’re seeing the migration of the Great Plains ecosystems northward into Idaho now,” says Dick Bahr, deputy director of the Interior Department’s wildlands fire office. “People are going, ‘whoa, what happened?”

The fires burn hotter than any natural fire because we've prevented small fires for decades, dried the forests through climate change, and allowed bark beetle populations to explode through climate change. As such, they don't create new habitat like natural fires do. They STERILIZE the land, leaving precious little seedstock left to reforest the land compared to fires of millennia past.

And if the current projections for future climate change are accurate, large portions of Canada may warm so much in the next decade that all the new growth spruce, birch and pine may die off before they reach maturity.

My advice? Start spreading prairie grasses, prairie flowers, maple, oak, walnut and hickory seed from the air; these species are already taking over northern Minnesota as climate change kills our boreal forests off.

[Baobab]

10. Mississippi >> Amazon?

maybe eventually the whole middle of the US will look like South America did in the past lush jungle and rain forest.. with tropical animals, piranha, disease carrying insects, poison frogs, jaguar, etc.

[niyad]

5. absolutely heartbreaking.

[Judi Lynn]

7. It's a horror show. What a shame. n/t