I am a retired Fire Chief, and former educator. For the last 30 years of my 43 year career in the fire service, I attempted to make people aware as to how climate change was affecting our lives. It started with discussions in relation to my roles at the time, as a college instructor, and professionally as a fire service instructor. That was 32 years ago.
It became more and more obvious, that in relation to global warming, the burning of fossil fuels was the cause, not simply implicated, but directly causative. And throughout all of this time, the fossil fuel industry, its spokesmen, CEO’s, CAO’s, CFO’s, their Chief Information Officers, their boards and their employees, all knew the facts. All ignored the facts, and all lied about the facts.
For me, my experience first began in earnest in 1989, when fires ravaged northern Manitoba, my province. I was contracted to the Provincial Government, teaching firefighting and wild land firefighting to native firefighters in the north. In my time off from being a full-time firefighter, I trained as a SARTEC, dive rescue instructor and mountain rescue instructor, which I acquired privately by training outside the country. I also travelled throughout the North under contract. That year, fires forced the evacuation of 25,000 people across 25 communities.
However in 2003, I resigned from my fire department in order to take a Fire Chief’s position in another Province. I had gone through all the interviews, been selected for the position, but hiring was stalled due to fires surrounding the city in British Columbia where I had been, technically hired. That year, the provinces budget for fighting forest and wild land fire was 54 million dollars. By the end of the summer, the Province of British Columbia had spent 554 million dollars fighting those fires.
In the interim, unable to wait for the city to hire as I had already resigned my position, I took a position as the Fire Chief for a newly amalgamated fire service in Ontario, Canada in the Region of Niagara. After eight years, I found myself successfully hired as the Fire Chief for a jurisdiction in Alberta, Canada, that surrounded Calgary, Alberta.
Within this jurisdiction was a scenic town, adjacent to the Rocky Mountains and Kananaskis Provincial Park. The fire risk, within what is known as the wild land interface fire zone, was, and remains, extreme. My attempts to convince the administration, the council, and the citizens of the jurisdiction that they faced enormous risk, where fire on the landscape between the mountains and the town had not seen fire for 150 years, and where the forest and its deadfall had never been reduced or culled during that period, fell on deaf ears.
It is also notable that this jurisdiction is an oil production area that saw over 9,000 wells drilled in 2010. I often wondered how much pressure behind the scenes the fossil fuels industry exerted or had influence over that administration in relation to the decisions that those councillors reached? I will never know, but based on what is occurring in Canada today it is obvious that all the other jurisdictions that produce or are dependent on the fossil fuels industry fully intend to ignore climate change and the impact that the extraction of oil and gas has on it. They divorce themselves from the reality that extraction is exactly the same as burning the product, which it ultimately accomplishes.
As my contract ended, and I began a job consulting, in May 2011, a forest fire surrounding Slave Lake, Alberta, home to 7000 people, saw one-third of the town destroyed by a wild land interface fire. The loss amounted to 700 million dollars.
Five years later, in May 2016, Fort McMurray experienced the same result, resulting in the loss of 2,400 structures. The loss amounted to 3.7 billion dollars, just in insured losses. A 2017 study from MacEwan University estimated total losses were in the range of $9 billion dollars.
In 2023, Canada’s most destructive year to date, there were more than 6,000 fires, and 29 mega fires, that burned 41 million acres, ten times what was previously considered a bad year in Canada.
Experts in the climate sciences have proven unequivocally that the cause of these fires is due to global warming, insect infestations cause by global warming and the burning of fossil fuels. And then this year, Jasper, Alberta, one of the jewels of Canada’s National Parks saw a fire burn 1,113 structures.
None of these occurrences is normal. None of this massive change in wild land and forestry fires is due to any natural processes. They are all attributable to anthropogenic climate change and the burning of fossil fuels.
In 2023, in Lytton, BC, another Canadian town was destroyed by a fast moving wildfire. The temperatures for the last three years having exceeded 41 C. At some point, reached a temperature hitherto unknown in Canada in 2021 of 49.2 C or 121 F. This is a mountainous area surrounded by forested areas that are considered boreal rainforest.
What Does All This Have To Do With Los Angeles?
This week Audie Cornish of CNN did a podcast. Her guest was Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist for NASA. His former home, which was destroyed in the Los Angeles community of Altadena, was one of the more than 12,000 homes destroyed in the recent, and as yet, still burning fires.
Peter, now self-described as a climate activist, grieves over the loss of his former community and recently wrote, “As a Climate Scientist, I knew it was time to leave Los Angeles,” on January 10th, in the New York Times. His personal risk analysis had been ongoing for the entire 14 years he had lived in Altadena, and two years ago he moved his family to Durham, North Carolina. He did so, because he was convinced that the ever increasing temperatures in Southern California and Nevada would make the risk of living there, irrational.
And this last week, he was proved right. What is happening is not simply anomalous, it is directly caused by global warming due to the burning of fossil fuels. Yet, Americans, unwilling to change, do not listen to climate scientists, they listen to shills for the fossil fuels industry on Fox and to the incoming President of the United States, a man who hasn’t told the truth about virtually anything for his entire time in office.
The problem according to Kalmus, is that while the facts illustrate that things will only get worse, and quickly, the fossil fuels industry and those becoming rich from its extraction are doing everything possible to ensure that misinformation, disinformation and outright lies remain the mainstream news. Less than half of America elected the current President of the United States (49.9%), yet this ‘mandate’ enables a man without any scientific understanding, a man who denigrates and lies about the impacts of climate change, to influence a public whose own ignorance is so profound that they have swallowed and internalized all the lies.
They are immune to intelligent discourse, of scientific facts and of the profound risks that the continued burning of fossil fuels poses for life on this little blue orb.
So, Where is Safe?
One of Kalmus’ beliefs is that like lightning strikes, the impacts of drought, wild fires, massive rain events, hurricanes and their attendant tornadoes and storm surge are not easily predicted. Not only is the complexity of the problem itself astronomical, but the solutions, without acceptance of the fact that we not only need to stop in the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, but needed to, 50 years ago, is daunting.
Much of what is to come, is baked into our future. Of that, there is certainty. And whether or not the earth has reached a tipping point will without question be known within the next twenty-five years.
Meanwhile, the question remains. Where is safe?
Kalmus states that in reality, nowhere is safe. Climate change is global. Obviously, those places that are within the wild land interface are less safe, as are the coasts of the United States and Canada that will face the brunt of hurricanes and ocean storm surge. But Ashland, North Carolina was considered extremely safe just a few years ago. So was Lytton, British Columbia.
We are on a bobsled run into climate change that will be profound. It will reshape our lives and our relative safety and health.
And because of our ignorance, because of our willingness to listen to liars and those invested in and profiting from the fossil fuel industry, we are facing what are planetary existential risks.
And none of us, will escape its effects.
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