We’ve been saving an item from the Canadian political insider Hill Times that starts “As wildfires rage” and got to wondering whether we’d actually already addressed it. So we searched our own site and found that “As wildfires rage” is by no means a unique item in a story claiming climate change has charred the Earth. We found one from this year, one from 2023 and one from 2020. Because wildfires aren’t actually news. However this one we hadn’t done and it actually goes “As wildfires rage, online conspiracies are adding fuel to the flames”. Boo online conspiracies. Yay censorship. As in “Governments can no longer treat disinformation as an unavoidable feature of the internet, and must do more to address it through safer design of online platforms.” Safer, you see. A favourite word of benign rulers from Beijing to North Korea. And while one shudders to imagine an online platform designed by government, which in the spirit of the usurper Miraz in C.S. Lewis’s Prince Caspian would be at once wildly inaccurate and mind-bogglingly dull, one also shudders to contemplate a state-subsidized media that insists that wildfires are blazing in unprecedented out-of-control ways when they’re um not. All part of our sinister denier habit of checking what they said against the facts.
As, for instance, when Heatmap went:
“Brace Yourselves for Snaptember/ The Pacific Northwest fire season is about to get even worse.”
And well what with the Pyrocene and all why not?
Well, as Heatmap’s Jeva Lange wrote on Sept. 2:
“I turned on the heat this week for the first time since spring. Tuesday started out mild, damp, and overcast here in Seattle — the kind of weather the city still conjures in the popular imagination, even if about 50 days a year now are warmer than they used to be because of climate change. Summers here may be getting longer, but this morning felt truly like fall, and in the uninsulated shed where I do most of my writing, I briefly turned on the space heater to stave off the nip.”
So not exactly blazing away, literally or figuratively, right? Not to mention, OK to mention, that climate change doesn’t make things warmer it is a description of things being warmer.
Now apparently the problem is that emergency responders may “snap” because they’ve faced a long hard fire season. As usual. It’s why “Snaptember” apparently exists as a cliché. Though she does say 2026 has been “the worst fire season in the Pacific Northwest in 30 years” meaning not, as such people suppose, that it proves things are now unprecedentedly unprecedented but that there was a worse one more than 30 years ago (say, would that be the year of the devastating Tyee Fire of 1994?) so wildfires are usual and common as are fluctuations in the severity of fire seasons.
Moreover, her setup is that the fall is being wet and cold and thus suppressing fires, hardly cause for panic. Or at least not among most of us. For her, instead:
“What follows could be truly nasty. ‘Outlooks favor above-normal temperatures with no indication of a sustained wet pattern, meaning drying may quickly resume once the early September systems depart,’ Tuesday’s report [an “update to the National Wildland Significant Fire Potential Outlook”] reads. Making matters worse, ‘Historical analogs and past transitions into El Niño,’ such as the one we’re in now, ‘suggest an elevated likelihood of at least one moderately strong east‑wind day in September, further reinforcing opportunity for new significant fires to arise when lightning or human ignitions occur.’”
Whereas what really happened is that, in the words of one Oregon newspaper, “Soggy September makes for quick shift from fighting fires to lighting them”.
Now there are those who might think that writing inaccurate predictions and misleading descriptions of wildfires was bad. But apparently only if you do it one way. As that odd Hill Times piece rantsplained:
“No, the wildfires across the country were not started by the government to clear the way for lithium mines, or to frighten people in Canada into accepting climate policies. But this is what the social media rumour mill might lead you to believe.”
And yes, of course there are self-assured lunatics online, as there always used to be in diners and bars. They’re just more accessible these days if you like that kind of thing. But we’re reasonably attuned to the good, bad and ugly in online discussion and the lithium mine is new on us. However let us delve deeper, or let them dig deeper, and see what they awaken best left asleep:
“It would be easy to dismiss such claims as foolish distractions. But wildfire disinformation is not innocuous. It can obstruct emergency response, undermine confidence in public health warnings, and weaken support for the measures needed to prevent even greater suffering in the future. Disinformation is not just exacerbating the wildfire emergency; it has become an emergency in itself.”
What? There’s a wildfire disinformation emergency? That sets the bar pretty low for emergencies as, earlier, the piece set the bar pretty low for ubiquitous online. Especially given the strange stuff it contains. Here we don’t mean primarily:
“During wildfire season, accurate information is a public health intervention. Residents need to know whether to evacuate, where to find shelter, and how conditions are changing. They also need reliable warnings about wildfire smoke, which is linked to premature mortality, respiratory illness, and cardiovascular harm far beyond fire zones. On smoky days, this includes clear health guidance about how to stay safe, including staying indoors, running HEPA air purifiers, and wearing well-fitted N95 respirator masks when outside.”
If there were memes about how smoke is healthy, or never mind the flames rushing toward your house, we missed those too. And they were just warming up. It seems their real hate is directed at people who question the orthodox narrative:
“The risks extend far beyond the immediate emergency. Online disinformation sows doubt about the causes of wildfires, threatens society’s ability to respond effectively to climate change, and breeds distrust in democratic institutions. While individual fires may be ignited by lightning, accidents, or deliberate acts, focusing on ignition misses the bigger picture. As the climate warms – driven by the combustion of coal, oil, and gas – Canada faces hotter, drier, and more combustible conditions, more than doubling the likelihood of extreme fire weather. The last three wildfire seasons rank among the 10 most destructive in Canadian history, with this year shaping up to be the fourth worst on record. Disinformation obscures these connections. Arson and forest mismanagement are invoked to erase the role of climate change and reduce complex realities to politically useful stories. The pattern is documented: sow distrust about the fires’ causes, politicize the response, and move the discussion toward conspiracy theories and climate denial. This is the result of the interaction between the fossil fuel economy and the rage economy.”
Not at all paranoid, are we? Canada’s Wildfire Information Service currently assesses 6% of fires as human-caused and 94% as natural. When people point to arson and forest mismanagement it’s because they contribute to the problem, not as part of some secret conspiracy to stop alarmists from making everything about greenhouse gases. Though if “disinformation” is a concern, given the Canadian establishment’s enthusiasm for online censorship of unapproved views, the claim that “The last three wildfire seasons rank among the 10 most destructive in Canadian history, with this year shaping up to be the fourth worst on record” might attract negative attention as the number of fires has been declining in Canada since the late 1980s, a couple of outliers with regard to area speaks as much to bad forest management as to underlying crackly combustibility, and the author neither knows nor cares what kind of fires were burning in the late 19th century. Consider for instance that an item on Preventionweb, itself an initiative of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, did express concern about “climate change” while writing in 2023:
“We gathered 16 studies that had independently applied the same method to different areas across North American boreal forests, from Alaska to Québec. After reanalysis of all this data in what scientists call a ‘meta-analysis,’ the results are striking: North American boreal forests burned much more 150 years ago than they do today. In the earliest period covered by our data, between 1700 and 1850, the annual area burned was between two and more than 10 times greater than what has been observed over the past 40 years. What explains this long-term downward trend? It is difficult to say based on the current state of research. Obviously, climate change is one of the suspects. The period from 1700 to 1850 was the end of what is known as the Little Ice Age, a period known for being colder, but probably also drier and, therefore, more conducive to fires.”
And while 1850 is pre-confederation it’s post-Durham Report so presumably part of Canadian history. So it’s just not true that we’re seeing records. Instead we’re seeing misinformation. Coming from the people who want to censor anyone else’s efforts to correct it.
Terms such as misinformation, disinformation and malinformation (and for all I know, fluffypiginformation) are usually just a shorthand way of saying 'I don't like what you've just written but I'm too lazy/clueless to argue against it so I'll just name-call it'.