I almost choked on my morning coffee scanning the headlines a few days ago. In among the torrent of harrowing news about wildfires around the world, one item jumped out: “'Just stop burning fossil fuels.' Scientists stress that our smoky skies have only one true fix.”

It is remarkably rare that a news story about climate impacts actually mentions climate change. Rarer still are the stories that pinpoint fossil fuels as its primary cause. To do so in a headline is virtually unheard of. So, it was both coffee-splurting and strangely invigorating to run across a news story from a legacy news outlet that identifies the why behind the wildfires. 

Kudos to the CBC’s Inayat Singh for naming the perps, and to his editors for running with the headline. But the rarity of such clarity must surely drive a lot of the public’s confusion around wildfires and other climate impacts.

Here’s a sobering statistic: barely half of Canadians understand that wildfires will intensify over the coming decades, according to new polling by the Angus Reid Institute. The institute found that just 56 per cent of the public thinks the wildfires are “something that will get worse,” a percentage that’s barely budged since 2023.

A similarly slim majority (55 per cent) understand that climate change is “a major factor” in making the fires worse. There are some striking results beneath those topline findings — notably the chasm between Conservative voters (less than a third of whom think they’ll get worse) and everyone else.

Meanwhile, the fires themselves do keep getting worse, just like the scientists have been saying they would. And our tortured information environment keeps the obvious question from rising to the foreground:........

© National Observer