With each day the bad news spreads. A gigantic wildfire now covering some 4,000 km² is spreading through northeastern Alberta and into Saskatchewan — devastating much of Fort McMurray, the city in the heartland of the tar sands. Some 90,000 residents have been displaced and thousands of homes, many local industries and businesses, destroyed.

What's turning northern forests into tinder? Biggest reason is climate change, but that’s not all

A sudden shift in the wind at a critical time of day was all it took to send a wildfire out of control through Fort McMurray, forcing more than 80,000 people out of their homes in what has become the biggest natural disaster in Canadian history.

Earlier this week, Darby Allen, the regional fire chief for the area, minced no words when he was asked what might happen now that more than 1,600 homes have been destroyed.

Human activity has transformed the Earth, accelerating climate change in just a few decades. Author Ian Angus talks to Socialist Review about facing up to the new reality.

British Columbia is facing droughts more severe than any in the past 350 years, according to new research that used tree ring data to reconstruct the coast climate back to the 17th century.

Unseasonably dry and hot weather in Fort McMurray, northern Alberta has inflicted disaster on the city.

Canadian scientists have collected stories from more than 90,000 people whose traditional ways of life rely on nature, in an effort to capture signs of climate change where weather stations are absent.

Their findings, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, fill a knowledge gap in climate change science, which is dominated by data and computer models, said the six researchers from Simon Fraser University.

Last December members of the International Trade Union Confederation joined other civil society activists in a mass sit-in at the COP21 talks in Paris. Unionists and their allies, some 400 strong, filled the social space adjacent to the negotiating rooms for several hours, in defiance of a French ban on protests that remained in effect in the wake of the November 13 terrorist attacks.