{"id":11999,"date":"2024-07-25T17:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-07-25T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cleanenergycanada.org\/?p=11999"},"modified":"2024-07-26T15:06:29","modified_gmt":"2024-07-26T19:06:29","slug":"the-link-between-extreme-weather-and-climate-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cleanenergycanada.org\/the-link-between-extreme-weather-and-climate-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Media brief: The link between wildfires and other extreme weather and climate change"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Clean Energy Canada is a clean energy think tank at the <\/em>Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue<\/em><\/a> at <\/em>Simon Fraser University<\/em><\/a>. Through media briefs, we aim to provide useful factual and contextual information related to Canada\u2019s clean energy transition. Please use this as a resource, and let us know if there are any topics that you would like to see for future media briefs.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The 2023 wildfire season was like no other. By May, the area burned in Alberta exceeded a million hectares<\/a>, putting the province on track to blow past the previous record set in 1981. And less than a week into June, wildfires in Eastern Canada have put tens of millions of North Americans<\/a> under air quality alerts. And at its conclusion, it was comfortably Canada’s worst wildfire season ever\u2014burning more than double<\/a> the area of the previous record and nearly seven times more than the historical average.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The season comes only a few years after B.C.\u2019s 2017 and 2018 wildfire seasons, which were the worst two on record<\/a> at the time. According to the Canadian Climate Institute<\/a>, since 2010, the costs of weather-related disasters and catastrophic events have amounted to about 5 to 6% of Canada\u2019s annual GDP growth, up from an average of 1% in previous decades. In the insurance industry, nine out of the most costly 10 years<\/a> in Canada ever have occurred since 2011.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Given the regularity of record-breaking events, the link to climate change is increasingly hard to ignore. But while the scientific link is clear, the connection is not always made explicit in media coverage of the weather events themselves. Extreme weather attribution<\/a> is a growing field of science, dedicated to establishing the role that climate change plays in our changing weather patterns. It is now possible to attribute certain weather events to climate change with some confidence, with one analysis suggesting 71% of all studied extreme weather events<\/a> were made more likely by climate change. And more recently, some analyses are even able to link damage from extreme weather to specific emitters<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The following brief summarizes some of the latest studies around the implications of extreme weather in Canada and the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wildfires<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n