This editorial was written and published by the Toronto Star on June 14, 2023.

Canada is on fire.

The wildfires ravaging Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes, which recently transformed central and eastern Canada and the U.S. into hazy hellscapes, offered many of us, for the first time, an emotional appreciation of climate change. We could finally see it, feel it, even taste it.

That’s a marked departure from our previous understanding of climate change. Until now, global warming was, for us, an intellectual exercise — it was about science, about charts and graphs, about the voluminous evidence collected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Or it was about stories of waterlogged or water-deprived, farflung places. About Tuvalu, the tiny South Pacific Island nation trying to cope with rising sea waters. Or about desiccated, drought-stricken areas of Africa.

But the wildfires brought climate change home. Suddenly, it was our house that was on fire.

Of course we can’t attribute a single event, or even a single fire season, to climate change. Yet experts agree that climate change plays a role in increasing both the intensity of fires and the total area burned.

Wildfires, as University of Alberta wildland fire scientist Mike Flannigan explains, are influenced by three factors — weather/ climate, fuel, and ignition sources — and climate change affects all three.

As for climate, the federal government reports that Canada is warming at more than twice the rate of the rest of the world, while the North is heating up at three times the rate. Among other things, this results in longer fire seasons, allowing more time for wildfires.

Indeed, according to the June 7 National Wildland Fire Situation Report, a total of 3.7 million hectares of land had burned, compared to a ten-year average of just 273,000 this early in the season. Factors other than climate change play a role, of course, but those stark statistics ought to give us pause.

Furthermore, Flannigan notes that climate change is creating slow, wavy jet stream patterns, which can create persistent warm and dry conditions. And those conditions are ideal for starting and spreading wildfires as they drain forests of moisture, thereby providing fuels for the fires.

Ignition sources are typically divided into two broad categories: lightning and human activity, and each is responsible for starting about half of fires. Yet this is something of a false distinction, since human activity can actually increase the risk of lightning-caused wildfires, with human-caused warmer weather incubating lightning-generating storms.

In fact, the frequency of lightning is predicted to increase and with it risk those strikes will spark forest fires.

And when it comes to lightning and wildfires, causation works both ways: Intense wildfires can produce their own weather systems, including the development of “pyrocumulonimbus” clouds, which further spread fires through lightning strikes.

A wildfire therefore has a strange way of taking on a life of its own, of keeping itself going — and growing — once someone provides the initial spark. Hence the best way to prevent fires from spiralling out if control is to avoid offering them a light in the first place.

If the science doesn’t convince us of that, then perhaps recent events will. Because an emotional appreciation of climate change could motivate us to act in a way that an intellectual understanding doesn’t.

After all, the South Pacific and Africa are no longer the only areas feeling the heat. We might not be drowned or desiccated like those far-flung places, but Canada is burning. And we’ll continue to suffer the deleterious effects of climate change until we feel strongly enough to stop it.