John Vanillant's excellent new book, Fire Weather: The Making Of A Beast, looks at the Fort McMurray wildfire that destroyed much of the city in the context of the history of climate science. He reviews the long history of warnings about the risk of using fossil fuels that date all the way back to the 19th century, including warnings from Canadian scientists dating back 90 years, to show that we have been well aware of the problem for well over a century.
And the climate change deniers are still out there in full force, as Vailliant notes in an op-ed recently, even after we have had this record setting wildfire month in May that burned 2.7 million hecatares in May in Canada, 18 times the national average of 150,000 hectares burned during the month of May.
The article also notes that "We’re little better here in B.C. (than Alberta or Saskatchewan or the rest of the country in my opinion), exporting liquid natural gas and Fort Mac dilbit while building Roberts Bank 2 to move goods from fuel-burning ships to fuel-burning trucks and trains." Vaillant also descirbes how the expansion of fossil fuel use has been historically tied to the growth of unfettered capitalism. A book well worth reading in my opinion.
For me one of his most interesting sections is on why people ignore the glaring warning signs of impending disaster, which is called the Lucretius Problem. It's named after a Roman poet who noted that people have difficulty "imagining and assimilating things outside their own personal experience.”" Many people seem unable to imagine, or don't want to admit, there could be a climate change disaster bigger than the ones we have already seen. He illustrates this with an example from someone's personal experience during the Fort McMurray fire.
A resident drops off some items for Sam the dry cleaner:
… and while I’m standing there, a guy comes in from the golf course in full golf apparel, and he’s like “Holy shit! We just got evacuated from the golf course!”… And he says, “Well, I’m here to pick up my dry cleaning.” I said, “What golf course are you on?” — because we only have two in town. He says “Thickwood,” meaning the fire has just jumped the river.
… Sam the dry cleaner, who’s our buddy, is like “Whoah!” And he’s on the phone to his wife: “Honey, it just jumped the river — get out, get out, get out!” … In all this craziness, Sam takes my stuff, logs it, and he’s like, “Tuesday good?” I’m like, “Yeah, Tuesday’s great.”
Even with the evidence before us, we lie to ourselves that it won’t be as bad as the evidence predicts. Vaillant interweaves the Fort Mac fire with a concise history of climate science that was on the right track from the start but was repeatedly ignored or forgotten.
Scientists in the late 19th century calculated that coal-burning industries were already pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere than natural processes could remove. In 1901, one of them became the first to use the metaphor of a greenhouse. In the 1930s, a Canadian-born engineer named Guy Callendar argued that CO2 had warmed the atmosphere by 0.5 C between 1890 and 1935. Later studies showed he was right.
Another Canadian, Gilbert Plass, proved in 1953 that water vapour and CO2 trap solar heat in the atmosphere. A prominent oceanographer, Roger Revelle, testified before a U.S. congressional committee that burning coal, oil and natural gas was warming the planet. He got a respectful hearing from conservative congressmen.
In 1959 Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb, got an equally respectful hearing from oil and gas executives at a symposium on the campus of Columbia University. Teller was there to blue-sky about the future of energy and speculated about using nuclear bombs to gain access to resources like the tarsands of northern Alberta.
But the petroleum industry would need to find other energy sources, Teller warned the executives, because putting more CO2 in the atmosphere would result in melted icecaps and the flooding of coastal cities like New York.
Nuke the tarsands!
The stunned executives didn’t know what to make of this prophecy; Vaillant says they took only what they wanted to hear from Teller’s ideas, and one oil company went into discussions with Alberta’s Petroleum and Natural Gas Conservation Board to detonate a nine-kiloton atomic bomb in the tarsands around Fort McMurray. Alberta premier Ernest Manning loved the idea, but it was eventually dropped out of fears of Soviet espionage.
Climate change itself was dropped again and again: after a few media reports, it would fade out of public memory. Even the oil companies did serious research that confirmed earlier climate science and explored alternative energy sources....
But they too seemed to forget about it — and then funded massive disinformation campaigns to throw doubt on the whole idea. Vaillant cites an expert who describes the petroleum industry’s strategy as “predatory delay:” “the deliberate slowing of change to prolong a profitable but unsustainable status quo whose costs will be paid by others.”
This long and complicated history helps to make sense of the Fort McMurray fire. Even as the science (and insurance companies) confirmed global warming caused by fossil fuels, we consumed ever more of them. Vaillant notes that modern homes (including those in Fort Mac) are essentially various forms of oil. Firefighters call vinyl siding “solid gasoline;” carpeting and furniture are made of synthetic fabrics. When such a house begins to burn, many of its contents give off inflammable gases that explode in a “flashover.”
“The houses stop being houses,” Vaillant writes. “They become, instead, petroleum vapour chambers.” ...
Vaillant is wryly aware of the overuse of the word “unprecedented” during the Fort Mac fire and since then. The precedents for Fort Mac were the Chisholm Fire in 2001 and Slave Lake in 2011. Fort Mac itself was the precedent for other fires Vaillant describes from Australia to California. These events are unprecedented only to those who couldn’t imagine them until they themselves were personally affected. It’s as if we all have to solve the Lucretius Problem the hard way. ...
Recently Vaillant published an op-ed in the Globe and Mail about the current wildfires in Alberta. Some of the article’s commenters would make Lucretius himself shake his head. Seventy years after Gilbert Plass, many of us remain defiantly denialist — so many that in the imminent Alberta election, climate change has scarcely been mentioned.
We’re little better here in B.C., exporting liquid natural gas and Fort Mac dilbit while building Roberts Bank 2 to move goods from fuel-burning ships to fuel-burning trucks and trains.
John Vaillant describes wildfire’s ability to expand and consume as very much like unregulated free-market capitalism. He draws parallels with the Hudson’s Bay Co., which co-opted Indigenous peoples into supplying beaver pelts that would pay for muskets and other trade goods, while damaging the ecosystem in the process. And while Fort McMurray has rebuilt, many have not returned, and bitumen is not selling as well as it once did. It’s harder for oil projects to get insurance — and investors.
Vaillant ends his book with the discovery of “revirescence,” the return of life to fire-blasted land. The forests are reviving around Fort McMurray, and in the ashes of its Abasand neighbourhood Vaillant saw tulips blooming.
“Human beings planted those flowers,” he writes, “with no idea what was to come. This — devoting our energy and creativity to regeneration and renewal rather than combustion and consumption — is what Nature is modelling for us and inviting us to do.”
https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2023/05/25/John-Vaillant-Fire-Weather-Fort-Mc...