Models don’t yet allow researchers to link local wildfire incidence with global climate change patterns: fire expert

Climate change models are still too rudimentary to be able to link global climate change with the wildfire incidence in specific parts of Canada, according to a wildfire expert at the University of Toronto.
Brian Stocks, president of B.J. Stocks Wildfire Investigations Ltd., spoke at an Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction (ICLR) news conference in Toronto on May 26 concerning the fires in Slave Lake, Alberta.
Stocks worked with the Canadian Forest Service for 40 years. He is currently an adjunct professor of fire science at the University of Toronto.
He said reporters often ask him if wildfires in Canada are the result of climate change.
Stocks said the broad nature of current global climate models, called “general circulation models,” makes it difficult to determine the specific impact of climate change at local or regional levels.
“General circulation models…look at global weather, how the climate looks around the world,” said Stocks. “And when you are doing that, they are over large areas. So when they resolve something, we call it a low-resolution alternative, because it applies to all of Northern Canada or all of Eastern Canada, for example.
“But there are regional-scale differences when we use these general circulation models, so what happens then? We’re not any better than the lowest resolution product. Because general circulation models are more global in nature, it’s hard to drill right down and say, ‘Here’s what the problems are in Northern Alberta.'”
Stocks said researchers are able to estimate future fire activity based on future climates that general circulation models can predict. For example, drilling down as far as the general circulation models can go, researchers “see significant increases in fire activity, particularly in West-Central Canada and in British Columbia,” he said.
“We’re able to show some trends in terms of increasing fire severity and fire activity in certain regions of the country, but we can only go so far as the resolution of the general circulation models that are used to project future climates….
“We are unable, at this point in time, to narrow climate change down as a cause for a particular fire or even during a particular fire season, because we don’t have that degree of resolution.”