[joconne]

Yes agreed. I worked as a Wildfire Fighter for BC gov. for the past 6 years. We had big fire seasons in 2017/2018 which were quite anomalous [0].

For example, the largest fire in 2017 was larger than the total area burned in any previous year. While 2018 surpassed the record breaking total area burned from 2017.

They were accompanied by a weather pattern that we hadn't seen before: We were setting records for the BUI, an index to track moisture content in trees, by mid June. This was accompanied by record flooding. I watched on lookout as 70 km winds pushed a fire 40 km down a valley in one day. So the primary variable in my mind was always the odd weather. I'm sure that fire suppression and invasive species are variables but the weighting was perhaps 10:1 to weather in the anomalous years.

[0] https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/safety/wildfire-status/ab...