BTW, the researcher you quoted, Justin Waito, explicitly warns against reading his historical data to mean modern fires are normal. He concluded that modern temperature increases are driving fire frequency to levels higher than anything seen in the last two millennia. Here is one of his papers on that:
You can believe the consensus of the vast majority of scientists (99%) who have collectively spent 10's of millions of hours researching this space, or you can pretend you know better.
Its definitely not part of forest fires that have raged for centuries.
In the past thousand years, we have never seen a single season where 4% of Canada's entire forest area burned down. The 2023 season torched over 15 million hectares, completely shattering the natural baseline. It's entirely unprecedented.
The line about this being normal sounds like the talking points climate skeptic grifters like Bjorn Lomborg use to breed doubt. Claiming global fires of this scale are normal is a totally dishonest stat. He even claims they are decreasing, but that decline is just because African grasslands are disappearing due to agriculture and urbanization.
When you normalize the data and isolate forests, fire-related tree cover loss in boreal forests has been accelerating by an average of 160,100 hectares per year over the last two decades. Globally, forest fires burn twice as much tree cover today as they did 20 years ago.
I'm just mentioning this in case you are only hearing the louder, skeptic side on social media.
I'm no tree hugger. I've started data centers in the telco and crypto space and have provided seed financing for natural resource mining projects, and I will continue to do so knowing that it's a positive for society. But I don't believe in being dishonest about where the data says the planet is headed.
Anyone who grew up in Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, or New York in the 70s, 80s, and 90s knows smelling smoke and seeing red skies in the summer was not common, unless you were out at camp deep in the woods. It just didn't happen. For kids growing up in the 2020s, it's just a normal part of summer in the city.
Here are some papers that might help you understand it better:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1305069110 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38934256/
BTW, the researcher you quoted, Justin Waito, explicitly warns against reading his historical data to mean modern fires are normal. He concluded that modern temperature increases are driving fire frequency to levels higher than anything seen in the last two millennia. Here is one of his papers on that:
https://winnspace.uwinnipeg.ca/handle/10680/1749
You can believe the consensus of the vast majority of scientists (99%) who have collectively spent 10's of millions of hours researching this space, or you can pretend you know better.