inflammatory innuendo

A new book, Fire Weather, documents the Fort McMurray wildfire that razed sections of that Alberta town in 2016. The Vancouver-based best-selling author John Vaillant is currently making the rounds of interviews and signings.

He did a question & answer piece for the Vancouver Sun and said: The Fort McMurray fire was not a freak event; it was a bellwether, and the past seven years have borne this out.

Vaillant also suggests that oil use is creating a more flammable world: We need to acknowledge that our fire-powered civilization is changing the climate in ways that make familiar things more combustible. Using this premise, isn’t it ironic that the town at the very heart of dirty oil extraction was the target of … the shocking, atomic bomb-level damage a fire tornado can do … ?

​Granted, the author is trying to sell his book, so hyperbole works well and if the story was fiction let it fly! But Fire Weather is promoted as a reality documentary, so climate-causation assertions must be held to a higher standard, given that the average reader isn’t going to spend any time fact-checking.
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If the Fort Mac fire was a bellwether, is this supported by subsequent years’ wildfire data as the author claims? No, the number and impact of Canadian wildfires are trending down over the current 30-year climate period.
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The graph shows the number of fires (thousands) and hectares burned (millions), 1993-2022:

Despite Vaillant’s position that society is now more combustible, wherever people live has always and will always succumb to the overwhelming power of an oncoming firestorm. The Wikipedia list of major Canadian fires includes the 1825 Mirimichi fire in New Brunswick that caused 160 to 300 deaths, and the 1916 Matheson fire in Ontario that destroyed 49 townships.

It is likely that Fire Weather will sell many copies given the high percentage of those who want to believe that we are on the edge of climate inferno (and secretly love the fact that a town full of oilsand accomplices got clobbered). However, Fort McMurray burned because it happened to be located in the path of a very aggressive fire and not because it is guilty of setting the petrochemical table for such disaster to be served.
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