Climate Change's canary in the coal mine–Fort McMurray Fire

I was looking at the pictures coming out of wild fire ravaged Fort McMurray on CNN. The overshadowing pain of the destruction was clear despite the eerie beauty of some of the photos. Burnt out cars and trucks means people had little time to escape and the loss for the people whose homes were burnt to the foundation must be difficult to bear. When I was in Hawaii I lived through hurricane Iniki, at first I was glad that I and my colleagues were all safe. There was even a celebratory feeling after the hurricane passed through and it wasn't until the next day that we started to feel the emotional pain of the loss from the destruction of property and disruption of life.

Huge smoke plume rises from the Fort McMurray wild fire. The carbon dioxide from the burning is not going to help. Photo courtesy NASA.

I feel for the people at Fort McMurray however wild fires are just part and parcel of living in the northern latitudes as floods and mudslides are to equatorial Malaysia until I realised isn't it still spring? Fort McMurray is not very far away from the Arctic circle, how hot can it be in the middle of spring and shouldn't the land be damp from the thawing snow? The time is just wrong, if it was summer, understandable but we just crossed into spring on the 21st of March. I wondered if this strange time for this wild fire had any connection with this years El Nino so I googled it and sure enough the connection has been made but its not just El Nino.

The northern latitude burning during the spring thaw? Changing times. Picture courtesy NASA

Read this article on BBC about the fire, if you are thinking Climate Change is a century away take heed, spring is already turning to summer in Fort McMurray. El Nino simply made Fort McMurray's 'pre-summer' worse to the point of the devastating wild fires. The main culprit is climate change.

Here is some shocking information I got from the article. Keep in mind that Fort McMurray is at 56.7 ºN and the Arctic Circle is at 66 ºN.

Fort McMurray normal high temperature for the beginning of May: 14 ºC.
The high temperature recorded beginning of May 2016: 32.6 ºC

Pre-Climate Change (or most of human history) Fort McMurray fire season start: 1st week of May.

2015 fire season start: 15th March. Thats six days before the start of spring–fire season now starts in winter!

2016 fire season start: 1st March, mainly attributed to 2016 El Nino.

The global climate temperature average has so far risen 0.89 ºC.

Canary in the coal mine: A metaphor about early warning signs drawn from the practice of taking a caged canary into coal mines. The bird would die if there was carbon monoxide or methane in the mine indicating an evacuation for the miners before the gas leak got lethal to the miners.