Alberta Wild Fires, Global Warming, and Gas Prices--Ironic

It's Ironic! Global warming caused by tar sand oil extraction, generates freak weather in Alberta, which results in forest fires that shut down tar sand oil extraction in region--a major source of global warming.

Not everyone appreciates the irony regarding the devastating Alberta forest fires which have shut down the Athabaskan oil companies which extract synthetic petroleum from the gooey black tar sands of the region. But it is worth understanding the situation, since it affects us all so intimately.

Forest fires in northern Alberta have been raging for days now through a region of taiga spruce and hemlock forests normally not affected by the scourge of wildfires, more common in more southern and broadleaf forests. But the massive amounts of carbon dioxide modern man has dumped into the atmosphere, as a result of burning fossil fuels, (like tar sand oil) have changed all that.

Winters have been unusually warm and dry in Alberta recently. And for weeks now a deep and uncharacteristic low pressure center in the northern territories of western Canada, most probably a meteorological result of global warming, has been drawing warm, dry air to the north. The source of air for this low Pressure center, comes in over the northern Rockies and then descends down into central and northern Alberta. This is a region where the main industry is extracting oil from tar sands. As these moountain winds sink over the Northen Rockies the air heats and dries up (a result of orographic pressure changes). These dry winds flow north through central Alberta as a strong and hot southerly breeze. Somewhere along the course of its flow, a smoldering campfire, a tossed cigarette butt, or lightning strike must have ignited dry brush which the steady winds fanned into a great conflagration. The outbreak of wild fire may be one of the most expensive "natural" disaster in Canadian history. The flames have consumed over 600 square miles of forest, thousands of homes, in and around the regional city of Fort McMurry. Nearly 100,000 resident of this region have fled the area. Many of them are workers at the several tar-sand extraction open-pit mines in the region. Most of these industries were closed or operations curtailed due the evacuation of personnel or the threat of being overrun by fire.

The wildfires are claimed to have cut back Canadian daily oil production by about 20%, or roughly about 800,000 barrels of oil a day. That amount, nearly a million barrels of oil, has had a significant affect on oil and gas prices at the local pumps here in the USA. The world consumes about 95 million bbl of oil a day. But up to just recently, just before the Alberta wild fire disaster, global producers have been generating about 96 million bbl per day. That slight glut of oil ( a million bbl per day) as kept the prices of oil and gasoline too down in this region at about two dollars a gallon. But the Canadian wild fires have put a dent in the supply. With consumption and production now about nearly equal, the sale of oil futures have spiked up from under $40 dollars a barrel to more than $44 dollars per barrel. In turn the price of gasoline at the American pumps has climbed too, reaching close to $2.50 in some localities.

So human induced climate change, or what I call "climatic intensification", is having its UNHAPPY effects in northern Canada, and on our pocketbooks too.