It's insane to me that we had all that thick smoke and there were still 3 countries that each polluted more than the sun of that.

I know smoke was much more than just carbon,but the scale was massive and really puts into perspective how much carbon we're extracting and burning.

It's not even close to howuch the US and China emitted.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07878-z/figures/1

Clearly we need to burn down all the forests once so we don't ever have this problem again.

More seriously, as a Vancouverite wildfire season makes it incredibly miserable to be outside.

No shit. It hurt like hell to even breathe with all the haze last summer.

Quantitative information that's up to date about how much area has burned this year compared to a normal fire season was not easy to find, but this time my web search was fruitful: https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/report/graphs

As the NYT reports, along with the many other sources that tend to drown out better results when you're trying to find the actual numbers, it's well above average although nothing like the disaster of last year.

It's ridiculous that only a few hundred people protest and work to protect old growth forest with information like this at hand. If you've ever been in an old growth stand you're almost guaranteed to see whole sections of thousand year old trees with burn scars on their trunks from several hundred years ago, several dozen years ago, etc. They were so stout they didn't burn when the understory did.

You can't replace that as a "carbon storage" strategy or for any other reason unless everyone agrees to leave a given piece of land be for a thousand years or more. Given the way things are right now it seems like that'll never fuckin happen again. Ever.

What's it going to take?