As it drives tens of thousands from their homes and turns whole neighborhoods to ash, the wildfire raging through Canada’s oil-rich Alberta province is feeding on conditions that got their start thousands of miles away in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. An El Nino in the Pacific disrupted weather patterns to bring northern Alberta a dry fall and very little snow throughout the winter, said Daniel Thompson, a fire research scientist with Natural Resources Canada in Edmonton. Then, in the last week, record temperatures along with dry air and winds added to the tinderbox environment. That’s what you get with El Nino, and not just in Canada: the phenomenon’s been blamed for blazes in Indonesia and high-risk conditions across the western U.S. “In 1997-98, we saw a similar sort of setup,” Thompson said. “It’s safe to say that weather played a major role in the fire here.” El Nino happens […]