The devastating wildfire in Fort McMurray, Canada appears to be losing its intensity, as weather conditions improve for firefighters and initial assessments of staggering damage trickle in.

Meanwhile, awareness of the massive fire’s significance in the context of climate change continues to spread.

Alberta’s unusually early and large fire is just the latest of many gargantuan fires on an Earth that’s grown hotter with more extreme weather,” the Associated Press wrote on Wednesday.

Indeed, the New York Times reported last month:

The Times reported further on Wednesday, citing boreal forest fires “throughout the hemisphere”:

“Based on what we know and in which direction the climate is going, yes, we can expect more frequent super fires,” Marko Princevac, a fire expert at the University of California at Riverside, told CNBC this week. “There is scientific consensus that climate change will lead to much more intense fires, more dry areas.”

And it’s a double-whammy, the Times noted, as “scientists say a large-scale loss of the forest could have profound consequences for efforts to limit the damage from climate change.”

However, making connections between the tragic inferno and human-caused climate change is dicey business.

“Understandably, the last thing the victims of the Fort McMurray fire wanted to hear as they arrived at their temporary lodgings in Edmonton (many unsure if their homes had been destroyed or not) were climate activist critiques of the fossil fuel industry’s role in global warming and the disaster,” John Collins wrote at In These Times, pointing to the mammoth tar sands industry that provided many of Fort McMurray’s jobs.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tread lightly, for example, when asked by journalists last week about the link between climate change and the forest fire. 

“It’s well known that one of the consequences of climate change will be a greater prevalence of extreme weather events around the planet,” he said, before cautioning against trying “to make a political argument out of one particular disaster.”

But “[s]tating that climate change is political, instead [of] science, is exactly the problem,” author and professor G. Elijah Dann wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. “It indicates our society’s grim lack of awareness over the most pressing issue now facing humanity.”

Dann labeled such avoidance the “not now” meme, and explored a different manifestation of it taking place in the U.S.:

Not all elected officials have been so reticent to tackle the issue, however.

“I think there are a lot of factors in this situation and we are very, very sad and we think of the people of Alberta,” Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne said over the weekend during a French-language interview with Radio-Canada’s political show, Les Coulisses du Pouvoir. “But we must talk about the causes and for me, climate change—extreme weather events—is the face of this problem and for me, it’s not about the economy, it’s not about industry, it’s an issue about the environment.”

With abundant evidence available of the devastation wrought by such blazes, the U.S. Forest Service “should be doing all it can to reduce its own contribution to climate change,” Earthjustice staff attorney Ted Zukoski wrote in a piece published Wednesday at Politico. 

In addition to drying out the environment, he added:

“But instead,” Zukoski continued, “as soon as this month, the agency intends to rubber-stamp a plan to open 20,000 acres of roadless Colorado forest to road-building, a move designed to pave the way for mining 170 million tons of coal there.”

As the carbon-spewing tar sands did in Alberta, such a move “will light the fuse to a huge carbon bomb; when burned, this coal will cause 130 million additional tons of CO2 emissions—as much as running a large coal-fired power plant nonstop for over a decade,” Zukoski said.

Thus, “a dangerous feedback loop” is created, the New York Times explained Wednesday:

As Canadian climate scientist Andrew Weaver, a Green party legislator in the British Columbia parliament, told the AP of the Fort McMurray fire: “This is absolutely a harbinger of things to come.”