🇨🇦The Climate Change Boogeyman🇨🇦 People in BC’s Interior have always lived with dry summers, and lightning has always been there along with human carelessness. But climate has never been static. Solar cycles, volcanic eruptions, El Nino and La Nina patterns, ocean currents, seafloor emissions, Milankovitch cycles, which include changes in Earth's orbit and axial tilt, and the 18 year lunar nodal cycle all influence temperatures and weather over time. Historical events prove this clearly: The Little Ice Age was driven by low solar activity and major volcanic eruptions, while the Dust Bowl of the 1930s resulted from ocean temperature shifts combined with poor farming practices. While the world's population has doubled since the mid-1970s and we've clearly added more CO₂, it still seems ridiculous to blame nearly everything on trace amounts of gas and man made climate change. The planet has also been greening in response, and our forests continue to act as carbon sinks. So why have recent fire seasons felt so much worse? The forests themselves have changed dramatically. Decades of aggressive fire suppression allowed fuel to build up on the landscape. In the 1970s, one local warned the BC government that consolidating small mills into massive mega mills, and trucking beetle infested logs across the province instead of processing them locally would spread pine beetle larvae far and wide. He was ignored. The beetle outbreak exploded in the late 1990s and 2000s, killing vast stretches of forest. Those dead standing trees remain a massive tinderbox today. Compounding the problem, inept city councils and regional districts approved housing developments pushed right up against the dry hillsides and forest edges. Communities now sit directly in the path of fast moving fires with almost no defensible space. Layer on top of this the sharp rise in social breakdown since around 2015...widespread drug addiction, homelessness, and encampments of unstable people living in or near the bush. Official stats claim arson makes up only a tiny percentage of fires, but those numbers only reflect what investigators can prove. Many fires remain "undetermined," and the chaos in encampments and on the fringes rarely gets properly classified. The fire near Summerland remains under active RCMP criminal investigation. It’s also hard not to notice that the sharp rise in destructive fires since 2015 has closely tracked with the increase in political polarization around climate change. How many of these fires are being deliberately set by extremists trying to prove the climate crisis is impossible to know... but to merely call it suspicious is an understatement in my opinion. This isn’t about denying that the climate has shifted or that summers are drier. It’s about recognising that "climate change" has become an all purpose explanation that lets governments dodge accountability for decades of bad forest management, reckless development decisions, and failed policies on drugs, crime, mental health, and enforcement. The stats give a blurry, sanitized picture. They don’t reflect the reality on the ground or in the backcountry. We’ve always had dry summers and lightning in BC. What’s changed is how poorly we’ve managed both the forests and the growing disorder in our society, and that combination has made every spark far more dangerous.