Scientists point to U.S. emissions in wildfire blame dispute
Fire and climate scientists said President Donald Trump, who has talked about punishing Canada for poor fire management and sending days of choking smoke across the border, should look more in the mirror than up north when it comes to blame. They pointed to the United States’ huge historical emissions of heat-trapping gases from the burning of coal, oil and gas.
The study, released Thursday, found that human-caused climate change doubled the likelihood of the tinderbox weather conditions that sparked Canada’s massive summer wildfires, which in turn angered Trump. World Weather Attribution, a group of international scientists who examine extreme weather conditions to see if there are climate change fingerprints, concluded that the fire weather conditions in the Northwest Territories and northwestern Ontario, while unusual but not that rare, were made twice as likely by global warming.
The estimate for Canada is about the same as the team found for summer fires in France, but not nearly as clear a climate fingerprint as the scientists calculated in Spanish fires, which they said were 20 times more likely because of climate change.
The study, which was done so quickly it has not been peer reviewed yet, examined the weather conditions connected to large wildfires and the Canadian index for those conditions — heat, lack of rain, humidity and wind. Using scientifically accepted techniques to search for climate fingerprints, the researchers compared current conditions with a world without the 2.5 degrees (1.4 degrees Celsius) of warming that has occurred since the industrial age and the burning of fossil fuels started. They found the frequency of such conditions has doubled.
The weeklong weather conditions that led to the fires in Ontario are now the type that can happen every six years or so, the report said.
“In a pre-industrial climate this would have been much less likely to occur, maybe once in a lifespan. So climate change has made those events more likely,” said study co-author Jonathan Boucher, a fire scientist at Canada’s Forest Service.
As MSI previously reported, Trump blamed Canada for the wildfire smoke and suggested the country “should pay some damages” or face tariffs, while Prime Minister Mark Carney responded by pointing to the climate crisis (read the July 22 report). The attribution study released Thursday adds a scientific measure to that dispute, finding that climate change doubled the likelihood of the fire weather behind the blazes.