Canada’s been on fire for two months now. Lahaina in Maui just burned flat. And now we have a hurricane causing flooding in Las Vegas, Death Valley, and Los Angeles.

Climate change? Or weather?

Let’s take a look:

Canadian wildfires: Fires in some of these places don’t happen — ever. Sure, northern Canada has no real forest fire resistance; it’s sparsely populated, and every few years during the dry season vast tracts burn. But usually the far north is rather soggier thanks to snow and ice cover, which remains well into June in most years and keeps the soil wet even when there’s no rain. (There’s often a lack of rain.)

Having said that, northern Canada does burn pretty regularly. There’s a ton of uninterrupted forest with wild undergrowth, and lightning strikes cause fires. There aren’t enough people living nearby to fight them, or even notice most of them. So it would be happening anyway, though on a smaller scale. This season is unusual, but on the whole not a lot worse than the average bad fire season. We’re mainly aware of it in the US because the jet stream is dipping low this year, bringing the smoke with it.

The Maui fires: Poor land use regulation — which is the very definition of manmade climate change on a local level — is responsible. They drained the Lahaina swamps and lakes and developed on top of where they used to be. Behind that, the massive abandoned fields (on reclaimed land!) were left unirrigated, and the invasive “California” grass grew thick and then died, piling dry tinder several feet high. To exacerbate the issue, the local power company failed to trim around power lines or perform other essential maintenance, and the government failed to compel them.

This much damage was catastrophic, but it’s even worse to know that it was 100% predictable and thus 100% preventable… if only people who had the power to change it were thinking about potential for disaster. Unfortunately, development codes and building officials in the islands tend to be corrupt, focusing more on private profit than the public good.

The sea temperature rise, which is measurable in the area but slight, had little to nothing to do with this event. The area is always dry, and the conditions were created by venal and short-sighted human beings.

California flooding: Again, it’s about land use. California probably shouldn’t have turned the Lake Tulare water system into farmland, or else there’d be a natural system in place to absorb most of this water and channels for the excess to run off. It’s also really foolish to build a large city in the middle of a desert.

Again, what we’re talking about is manmade climate change on a local level, what Republicans might label “irresponsible land use and short-sighted zoning choices”. It’s still changes to the local ecosystem and ground conditions, which are factors that help to make up the local climate.

As for it being an unseasonable storm, though, it wasn’t. This is the height of the Pacific hurricane season. Hurricanes follow this path every decade or so, and twice back in ’76, so it’s not at all unheard of. Kathleen was arguably a bigger storm.

One of these three events has been mildly unusual, and the difference likely results from a more global climate phenomenon. That’s the Canadian wildfires. The rest were definitely the consequences of manmade climate change — not from the temperature, but instead criminally irresponsible land development.

Each event was undeniably terrible.

All of the causes are easily understood.

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