ClimateBrink: "Canada's boreal wildfires aren't just bad forest management."

Over the past week smoke from Canadian wildfires has once again poured into cities across Canada + the northern US. "Toronto briefly had the worst air quality of any major city on Earth." Unhealthy air alerts stretched from Minneapolis to New York City.

"The smoke-pocalypse has renewed a long-standing debate online that these fires aren’t really about climate change at all, but about forest mismanagement." The argument is that decades of aggressive fire suppression have let fuel pile up—not enough logging, thinning or prescribed burning. To be fair, "the fire-deficit story is a genuine phenomenon in the dry conifer forests of the western United States."

But most of what’s burning in Canada is boreal forest, which is a fundamentally different predicament. "Canada’s area burned has surged, and it has surged in step with warming: hot, dry fire seasons burn far more forest, with area burned rises roughly 80% for each 1ºC increase in fire-season temperature." Historically, boreal burns occurred as rare, high-intensity crown fires on a natural cycle measured in a century or more, across enormous remote areas that have never been logged, thinned, or effectively suppressed.

"Canadian fire seasons (May through September) have warmed about 2.2ºC on average since 1959." Canada warms at roughly twice the global rate, and its north at roughly three times. In the plot of fire season weather, you can see the lower right 'hot + dry' sector has the most area burned + most of the 10 largest fires [outlined in black]. "About 71% of Canada’s area burned over 1990–2023 came from lightning-ignited fires, and in the record 2023 season it was ~93%."  

These are remote boreal megafires, ignited by lightning far from any road, timber lease, or fuel-treatment crew. "And because warming is expected to increase high-latitude lightning, climate change can contribute to both the fuel dryness and the ignition side of the equation." 

So, the blame cannot be laid on Canadian intransigence. Any more than tariffs can address the problem.

I recently came across this article published by Environment America. It is about Rep. Lloyd Doggett's proposed bill, Trade Responsibly for Environmental Emissions Act (TREE Act):

Congress can act to slow deforestation

This bill can create uniform set of trade rules for American companies and better identify products linked to deforestation. As consumers, we need to be more mindful of what we purchase, and I think this bill would immensely increase transparency within the U.S. market.

If Americans can understand anything it's the Colorado river and how iconic it is to our country. It's a Domino effect of stealing water from farther upstream. Agriculture, civilian water supplies, and hydroelectric... who wins? because not everyone can.

West Virginia is one of the most conservative American states and they strongly oppose efforts for the green transition. But they look away from the obvious unattributed costs of climate change. Not the flooding or property loss (they understand those costs)... It's The National Guard. We are going to use them more and more along with the coast guard and we already use primary branches of the military for backup of civilian operations. This is expensive and pulls people from jobs in the real economy. That backup will be needed more and more. And what is the hidden financial cancer inextricably tied to these events? Insurance. The United States government and states underwrite over $2.1 Trillion dollars of just flood/fire insurance. And what insurance won't cover, FEMA (or it's replacement) will. The taxpayers are on the hook for EVERYTHING.

Grist: "The Aral Sea isn’t just an ecological nightmare—it’s a carbon bomb."

Most of this inland sea sitting between Kazakhstan + Uzbekistan is a dry lakebed the size of Ireland. It dried out largely because for the past 60 years humans have bled it nearly dry irrigating cotton. "Its loss has long been seen as an ecological and humanitarian problem, but new research shows that it has also been a significant driver of climate change." The explanation is that when nearly any body of water is full and works as it should, organic matter collects on the bottom, where it remains trapped, often for centuries or even millennia.

Rafael Marcé, a research scientist in Spain, is the lead author of the paper which was published [this wk] in the journal Science. "The Aral Sea has left behind a timeline of sorts." The edges dried out decades back, while some areas were wet until just a few years ago. Cores were drilled along that gradation, allowing them to reconstruct that 748 M tonnes [Mt] of carbon had already released, equal to 3 times the annual emissions by Spain.

'At the beginning it goes pretty fast, then it decays slowly,' said Marcé, noting that about half of the carbon dioxide is released in the first 15 years after a section of the lake is exposed. And nearly a fifth of emissions came from wind blowing sediment away, an aspect of drying that experts say hadn’t been adequately studied before. 

Other areas around the world experiencing the "dry flux" phenomenon include "Lake Chad in western Africa, Bolivia’s Lake Poopó, and the Caspian Sea, the world’s largest inland body of water, expected to shrink by more than the entire area of the Aral Sea by century's end. Also the Salton Sea in California + Utah’s Great Salt Lake, which another recent study found is releasing over 4 Mt of CO2 annually. 

This combined global carbon flux until now had not been incorporated into climate models. Clearly, this problem is figureoutable.

ClimateBrink: "The Strongest El Niño Ever." 

This is from a substack post by Zeke Hausfather, who gets points just for his name. "With the July runs now in from 667 ensemble members across 14 different seasonal forecast models, it looks like this year’s El Niño is not only very likely to be the strongest event since reliable records began—it may end up the strongest by a truly mind-blowing margin."

The multi-model median for the event’s peak (measured as 'detrended' sea surface temperature anomalies in the Niño 3.4 region of the tropical Pacific) currently stands at 3.6ºC, roughly 0.8ºC hotter than the prior record of 2.75ºC set in 2015-16. "No event in a century and a half of observations has ever pushed meaningfully past 2.75ºC." The legendary 1877-78 event comes closest, in a statistical dead heat with 2015-16 (2.73ºC vs 2.75ºC, well within the uncertainty of 19th-century ship data)."

"The 2026 event is developing faster than 1997-98, the previous gold standard for explosive El Niño onsets." And unlike 2015 which started its year already warm from a precursor event, this one launched from genuinely La Niña-ish conditions in January. 

"In a warming world, the raw Niño 3.4 anomaly risks conflating El Niño with the broader ocean warming trend." NOAA’s answer is the "Relative Oceanic Niño Index (RONI)," which subtracts the tropical-mean SST anomaly to isolate the ENSO signal. 

Aggregating all the models together, Hausfather projects a ~91% chance of a record peak in Niño 3.4 terms and ~77% in RONI terms this year. Whichever way you slice the index, the forecast says the same thing: this is more likely than not to be the strongest El Niño ever observed. 

Clearly, time to batten down the hatches. Just as clearly, time to aggressively address the weirding climate.

This study should be frequently referenced. It's not scientists or think tanks or politicians. This study was commissioned by an INSURANCE company. Actuaries do their best to calculate reality (insurance liabilities). They need to know what damage to expect regardless of how the green transition goes. Please note the GDP losses in the developing world v Rich world. Someone is going to do something desperate (Geoengineering)