I have never placed a bet on Kalshi or any other prediction betting platform. Those platforms seem to be the wild west of gambling where you can bet on anything, including things you yourself think up as a bet. They seemed like a good reference to use for this essay, especially when I saw that there are already a bunch of climate change bets having been made on Kalshi.
Let me tell you about what I would not have bet on when it comes to climate impacts.
Humans have a long relationship with fire. After all, fire is the number one thing that allowed the human race to grow and prosper. It provided warmth, safety, light and many other benefits. There also was and is the mystical bounce and wave of a fire’s flames that has meant something, as anyone who has sat watching a campfire for long periods of time can attest to. After all, a campfire was the original TV, don’t you think?
In my case, there were plenty of campfires as I grew up. But there was also another way to experience a fire. In my small town, there were four “Wards” or sections of the town, which in addition to being useful in both informal and formal sports competitions, were used by the volunteer fire department for assembling firefighters when there was a blaze. A very loud horn would sound off in a manner similar to Morse Code, with the first part having 1-4 blasts, signifying which of the four wards the fire was in, and the second part having a number of blasts that corresponded to the location of the pole-mounted fire boxes within a particular ward.
The blasts were so loud that it wasn’t only the volunteers that heard them. And if they occurred in the middle of the night, they would wake up most of the townspeople. Even given the late hour, many would hop in their cars and go to see the fire. You knew most people in town and hoped it was not at a location of a friend or relative. I still remember lying in bed after being awakened by the blasts and my father coming into my room and saying, “get dressed, let’s go”. And off we went. But I haven’t thought about fires all that much since then.
When I first started to pay attention to climate change, which goes back almost 40 years now (gulp!), I don’t remember fire being the thing that people talked about as one of the bad things that global warming and climate change would cause. I remember it as being all about the two “risings”, i.e. rising temperatures and rising sea levels. It took a while to understand and appreciate what warming-induced climate change would mean in practice in the natural world. And even then, the scientists said they could not predict everything that might happen. There were too many factors in play.
And in that vein, there are two “surprises” so far – both to the general public and to some extent the scientists.
One is the new phenomenon of “Sudden Deluges” that I wrote about several months ago. These surprise downpours of massive amounts of rain in one specific location in a short amount of time are now with us as a baked-in climate impact that scientists didn’t predict.
The other one is Wildfires and what comes with them.
Wildfires have always existed, at least as long as there has been lightning (and perhaps as long as there have been careless campers and arsonists). But there has never been anything like our situation today. They have become an annual, regular part of our weather and climate. Why is that?
One reason is that rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns have led to our forests being much more dried out than before. The drying part is familiar to anyone who has ever tried to burn a log in their fireplace or campfire that is still full of moisture. It doesn’t burn that well when not dried out. In the case of today’s wildfires, the high temperatures today can change the “kindling point” of the trees, where that is defined as the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of the fuels (i.e. wood) to the ignition point based on their initial temperature and that of the surrounding air.
Another reason is the location of many of the fires. Even when a fire is “local” it can be extremely hard to contain, like the ones not that long ago in L.A. and Hawaii. But the new wildfires that concern me are the ones that are, to use a well-worn phrase, “in the middle of nowhere”.
Take the Canadian situation. Some of the wildfires there are in the middle of the northern boreal forest – hundreds of miles from any road or settlement. They cannot be extinguished by humans. They have to burn out.
Also relative to location - and I wouldn’t have put money on this either – half of the wildfires in the U.S. are occurring in the Eastern half of the country.
But having said all of that about the new climate-induced fires, they are not the climate impact that I wanted to highlight in this essay. Because it’s not a case of “where there is smoke there is fire” – it is now “where there is fire, there is smoke”. And as this short animated map from NASA shows, the smoke travels far.
I would not have put my Kalshi money on the smoke as a major climate impact. Yet here we are. And it is making life weird on many days. If many of the fires cannot be contained, then much of the smoke cannot be avoided. And many more people are exposed to the smoke than the actual fires. The effects of wildfire smoke are well-known and well-documented, and they are not good – especially for children whose bodies are still developing.
And speaking of children, it is not a big leap to see how wildfire smoke may be changing the nature of childhood. This very good article about the many ways that may be happening is a real eye-opener. After all, if you take the smoke and combine it with the desire to use air conditioning to escape the high temperatures, one can see a potential future with a lot more days of living (and playing) inside and avoiding the outside.
Climate scientists often talk about how the natural world that we live in is a bit of a fluke when one views the earth’s historical timeline. The world we live in is a rare time span when it comes to climate; there has never been anything quite like it. It is on the whole very stable and temperate. It is perfect for having allowed life to spawn and thrive. But oh my … how fine-tuned the balance is that has created and sustained the climate that humans have lived in for so long. And we are changing it. And wildfires seem to have moved into the lead as Exhibit A.
The loud blasts I grew up with announcing a fire are no longer used in my Town. But there are many, many loud signals telling us of climate change. We should be listening to them and thinking about what we can do to prevent the impacts – and then whatever those things are, we need to do them as soon as we can.
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