More than 140 wildfires continue to burn in the province’s Interior. Dozens of homes have burned. More than 45,000 people have had their lives turned upside down. Another 255 military personnel have joined B.C. fire crews and those from other provinces.
Images from NASA show plumes of smoke reaching as far west as Hope and east into Saskatchewan. Photographs and video taken from the ground show flames crawling across mountainsides, beside roads, across lakes and down the valleys, with black clouds twisting into the hazy sky.
Yet, as late as June, we had been grumping about cloud, drizzle and the late spring. By early July, grass and undergrowth that had been green and thriving a month before had already dried out and died after just a few weeks of hot, dry weather.
On July 7, lightning storms flickered over the region, sparking more than 100 fires in the dry vegetation.
The change in conditions was sudden. It was also long-evolving and generally predicted.
A decade ago, climate scientists warned us that our world was changing. Summers along the Pacific’s northeastern coast, they said, would get hotter and drier, and winters stormier with more torrential downpours, heavier snowfall, higher winds and bigger waves. In short, we were in for an increasingly extreme weather ride, with Vancouver eventually coming to resemble droughty, hot, fire-plagued southern California.
Others plugged those data into other models, and the results indicated that the consistently more extreme weather predicted would lead, in turn, to more extreme local and regional effects. They predicted we would see more local and regional flooding as sudden downpours overwhelmed storm sewers, creeks and river banks in populated areas and destabilized hillsides and banks. Wet, heavy snowfalls would cause more power outages.
More frequent drought would lower river levels earlier in the summer, warm river waters and stress fish, contributing to poor salmon reproduction.
Drought would also stress forests, while shorter winters that — despite the increased frequency and intensity of storms — would be, overall, milder, would lead to more insect outbreaks that wouldn’t be contained by the usual full stop of early, freezing temperatures.
And extensive swaths of dead timber, they said, would lead to more severe wildland fires.
Fast forward 10 years. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, reported this past week that, so far, 2017 is the second-warmest year Earth has seen since record-keeping began about 150 years ago. The year-to-date average temperature was 0.9 C above the 20th-century average of 13.5 C. This was the second-warmest for this period, behind the record set last year.
Last month, the worldwide average temperature was 0.8 C above the 20th-century average of 15.5 C, according to scientists from NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. This average temperature was the third highest for June since 1880, behind only June 2015 and a record-breaking June 2016. June 2017 marks the 41st consecutive June and the 390th consecutive month with temperatures at least nominally above the 20th-century average.
June did not feel that way here on B.C.’s south coast. Clouds moderated temperatures on the Island for about half of the month and, on the Lower Mainland, days of cloud and — sometimes — bucketing rain interrupted the first hot sunny periods of the year. June’s on-again-off-again weather in this part of B.C. came on the footsteps of a drawn-out, wet winter, with days of heavy rain and high winds — and snowstorms in the Lower Mainland.
But after a short, damp spring in the Interior that had nurtured forest undergrowth, a stretch of abnormally hot, dry weather sucked the moisture out of the soil and dried out the new growth. What had been forests of maturing lodgepole pine two decades ago, before the mountain pine beetle infestation killed them, provided fuel.
The computer models from a decade and more ago had predicted this.
