According to SOPFEU, lightning is responsible for 99.9% of the forest areas burned this summer in Quebec.
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This forest fire which raged in Chapais on June 1st was caused by Brian Paré.
Nicholas De Rosa (View profile)Nicholas De Rosa
Voice synthesis , based on artificial intelligence, allows you to generate spoken text from written text.
“Climate change apparently has another name, and that name is Brian Paré”: this is how a post shared more than 8,000 times and liked more than 17,000 times since Monday on the social network X begins.
The author of this message was referring to the man who pleaded guilty to 14 counts in connection with numerous forest fires he started last summer near the towns of Chibougamau and Chapais, in Nord-du-Québec.
She is far from being the only Internet user to use this case to deny that the fires that wreaked havoc in Canada last summer were linked to arsonists and not to climate change, a statement that does not stand up to the test of fact.
One of the fires lit by Mr. Paré had devastating consequences: according to information from the Journal de Montreal (New window), a fire he caused on May 31 burned more than 870 hectares of forest, forcing more half of Chapais residents to evacuate their homes.
However, according to the annual report of the Society for the Protection of Forests against Fire (SOPFEU) (New window), 564 fires consumed more than 1 .1 million hectares of forest in intensive protection zone. Taking into account the 3.4 million hectares burned in Nord-du-Québec, it is estimated that more than 4.5 million hectares will have been devastated in 2023 in Quebec, an area higher than the sum of the last 20 years.
SOPFEU notes that lightning – and not arsonists like Brian Paré – is responsible for 99.9% of the damage. 2023 is a year in which we have never seen the ground so receptive to lightning. Lightning still strikes, but usually the humidity is higher. It was very dry, so it was really something exceptional, explains Josée Poitras, prevention and communications officer at SOPFEU.
Before, we were hesitant to say that climate change was the main cause of the fires because there are sometimes droughts, but this year, with the climatic upheavals that we have experienced, we have saw communities battling wildfires that were affected by flooding the previous week, illustrates Ms. Poitras.
Fires of human cause, caused for example by a cigarette or a poorly extinguished campfire, are not those which have burned large areas, according to the SOPFEU spokesperson.
Brian Paré was arrested in September (New window) in connection with the forest fires he caused.
These were considered suspicious since last summer (New window) and already fueled speeches at the time that attempted to minimize the link between climate change and wildfires.
Ironically, the arsonist convicted earlier this week has multiplied on its Facebook page publications accusing the government of lighting forest fires and denying the existence of climate change.
OUR GOVERNMENT AND ELITE WANT ITS BURN NOT TO BE COMPLICATED SINCE 2020 WE ARE IN A PLOT OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER OF 2030 LIGHT ON BECAUSE THE TIME HAS BECOME SERIOUS (sic), he wrote on June 25.
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Teilor Stone has been a reporter on the news desk since 2013. Before that she wrote about young adolescence and family dynamics for Styles and was the legal affairs correspondent for the Metro desk. Before joining Thesaxon , Teilor Stone worked as a staff writer at the Village Voice and a freelancer for Newsday, The Wall Street Journal, GQ and Mirabella. To get in touch, contact me through my teilor@nizhtimes.com 1-800-268-7116
