Lytton and Our Climate Crisis.

B.C.’s Lytton burns because of the climate crisis. What’s next?

Canada has a severe wildfire problem. Climate crisis fires, like the one which destroyed Lytton, B.C. in 2021 – after consecutive days of extraordinary record-breaking heat – are becoming more ferocious and frequent. These fires ravage people’s lives, homes, communities, and histories, to say nothing of already precarious biodiversity. The warnings are all over the charred remains. They should not escape us.

Making sense of our wildfire problem isn’t rocket science. All we need to see are some pretty direct connections. Hotter weather over longer wildfire seasons means more evaporation, which implies fuel is drier and more likely to catch fire.

Raking the forest floor might help. It would remove kindling, consequently reducing the size of fires and the amount of climate-warming CO2 released. And it would likely reduce property losses. However, Canada has an insane amount of forest; over 347 million hectares, or 9% of the world’s total.

And cleaning up the forest floor will do little to stop lightning. Across this vast and densely forested country – and all across North America and the planet – climate change and global warming are making lightning strikes more common. Researchers have known about this relationship for a while. Sadly, in countries most affected by climate change, like India, over the past 50 years, the annual lightning death toll has more than doubled, from 1,000 to 2,500.

Global warming will cause lightning strikes to increase by 12% for every 1C, resulting in about 50% more strikes worldwide by 2100. Historically, in the Arctic, lightning strikes are rare. Yet climate scientists are now estimating far more strikes as Arctic summer weather convection patterns increase and storms intensify, looking like those far to the south. These far north lightning strikes and fires could open up a Pandora’s box of environmental problems. We would see the acceleration of an already rapidly melting permafrost, adding more carbon dioxide and thirty times more potent methane to the warming climate.

Of course, it’s easy to intellectualize these details, keeping omotions in check. But all of this is happening right now all around us. We should, at minimum, raise the level of conviction around these issues to such an extent that we feel very uncomfortable and insecure. And after that?

Societies have three scarce resources:

• Influence
• Decision-making power and authority
• Economic control over the social production of goods and services

Of these three, influence is the most important. The other two are associated with the status quo, which isn’t working out too well for Mother Earth – although, at some point, we may be able to keep them around. But influence is the motor driving successful social movements and gaining irreversible social-cultural tipping points.

We all can influence each other. “Creator Culture” is one of the more dynamic ways we do that these days. It is globalizing influencer content with breathtaking speed across multiple social platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youku, WeChat, Tik Tok, and more. What if social media creators of all ages globalized their efforts to save the world’s forests and combat climate change?