Canada’s wildfires continue to burn, and with smoke from those fires darkening the skies in the United States, the mainstream media are covering it extensively. A common underlying theme in almost every report is that climate change is partly to blame for the size of Canada’s wildfires this season and that such fires and the heat contributing to them are a portent of things to come if we don’t stop using fossil fuels.

Image: Creative Commons under Unsplash

“With over 120 million U.S. residents across the Midwest and Northeast under an air quality alert and 60 million residents in the South under heat advisories on Thursday, Americans are contending with two different effects caused by climate change,” Yahoo News reports.

The New York Times assessed the situation thus:

Fires are burning across the breadth of Canada, blanketing parts of the eastern United States with choking, orange-gray smoke. Puerto Rico is under a severe heat alert, as other parts of the world have been recently. Earth’s oceans have heated up at an alarming rate.

Human-caused climate change is a force behind extremes like these.

For this essay, I will limit my comments to the wildfire claims, leaving the heat wave attributions for another day.

The truth is hard data, as opposed to climate model-generated speculation, belies the link between climate change wildfires and the recent heatwave. Either the “news” outlets are ignorant of this fact and believe what they write, or they are so far in the bag on climate alarmism they couldn’t let the facts get in the way of another story hyping the purported climate crisis.

Wildfires happen every year across the United States and Canada—which is why both countries have designated “wildfire seasons”—and across the globe, but they hardly ever get the sustained, nearly apoplectic coverage Canada’s fires are getting. I guess that’s because many major broadcast and print media outlets are on the East Coast, and seeing the smoke firsthand, which others experience every year or two, brought the impact of fires home to the horrified journalists.

But journalists’ sudden awareness of wildfires and that they create smoke doesn’t prove this year’s fires are unusual or caused by climate change. In fact, the evidence shows they aren’t.

Smoke from wildfires in Canada has periodically darkened or yellowed the skies on the U.S. East Coast and the upper Midwest in the past, as they have done in recent weeks. Long before anyone used fossil fuels to generate electricity or for transportation, smoke from Canadian wildfires created “yellow” or “dark” days multiple times in history, such as on May 12, 1706; October 21, 1716; August 9, 1732; May 19, 1780; July 3, 1814; November 6-10, 1819; July 8, 1836; September 2, 1894; and September 24-30, 1950, the New England Historical Society (NEHS) reports. Contrary to media claims, the smoke drifting in from Canada’s wildfires into the United States is far from unprecedented.

Canada’s May 1780 wildfires so darkened eastern U.S. skies that May 19, 1780 became known as “New England’s Dark Day.” Reports from the time state the smoke was so bad that candles had to be lit at midday to see.

As was true in the past when smoke from Canadian wildfires blew into the United States, the cause is temporary weather conditions, not climate change. Gunnar Schade, D.Sc., an associate professor with Texas A&M University’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences, says after hitting the air stream the smoke from Canada’s wildfires was delivered by a “North Central Canadian (Arctic) high-pressure system and a persistent, slow-moving, low-pressure system off the northeast coast [which] combined [to] cause large-scale southerly to southeasterly air movement, which has taken the smoke to the U.S. upper Midwest, southeast and east coast.”

Not only were this year’s fires not unique, they also did not, as the media stories consistently imply, represent a trend in Canadian wildfires that could be attributed to climate change. In fact, the evidence shows wildfires in Canada and globally have been declining during the recent period of modest warming.

Data from Canada’s National Forestry Database for the entire country and for the province of Quebec, where many of the recent wildfires occurred, show declining trends for both the number of fires and area burned over the past 31 years. Interestingly, a study by scientists with the Canadian Forest Service attributes the decline in forest fires in Canada over the past few decades to the combined effect of carbon dioxide fertilization and modestly rising temperatures, which has resulted in improved soil moisture. Plants lose less water through transpiration under conditions of high CO₂ and higher temperatures, so less moisture is drawn from soil.

To translate, the Canadian Forest Service surmises that climate change, rather than causing more and more-severe wildfires, is responsible for a decades-long decline in wildfires.

Globally, NASA satellites have recorded a significant decline in the number of wildfires. In the report “Researchers Detect a Global Drop in Fires,” NASA writes, “Globally, the total acreage burned by fires declined 24 percent between 1998 and 2015, according to a new paper published in Science.”

Nor, in its most recent report, does the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change attribute any shift in “fire weather” to climate change or find any increase in the number or intensity of wildfires regionally or globally.

Following the science, therefore, one must conclude climate change is not to blame for the recent fires in Canada or the smoke they delivered to eastern U.S. streets and newsrooms.

Indeed, even as wildfires ravage Canada, the amount of acres consumed by such fires in the United States this year is only 51 percent of the ten-year average for mid-June, and data show Alaska is experiencing its slowest wildfire season in more than 30 years.

If not climate change, then what factors are responsible the severity of the 2023 wildfire season in Canada? The answer is short-term weather conditions such as a drought in some regions, less winter snowfall and warmer temperatures, and long-term poor forest management—the same factors that have caused a modest uptick in wildfires in the western United States in recent years.

As a peer-reviewed study cited by Canada’s Fraser Institute states,

Canada has failed to fund the proactive management of forest fires sufficiently and is not poised to do better moving forward. “Wildfire management agencies in Canada are at a tipping point. Presuppression [sic] and suppression costs are increasing but program budgets are not.” But clearly, a lack of fire suppression is also a problem: “Wildfire suppression contributes to a wildfire problem but paradoxically it is wildfire use that will help to solve this problem. The wildfire management toolbox must include wildfire use to manage wildfires at the landscape scale because it is not feasible to effectively use prescribed burns and/or fuel management treatments alone to restore expansive wildfire-dependent ecosystems.” That’s a somewhat academic long-winded way of saying you need to fight fire with fire, but the point is valid nonetheless.

As Climate Realism has discussed repeatedly, it takes three things to start a wildfire: fuel, the right weather conditions, and a source of ignition. Shifting forest management policies in the United States since the presidency of Ronald Reagan have resulted in a growing fuel load, with many national forests having more dead timber than growing trees, and other forests packed tightly with small trees and underbrush. High fuel loads combined with drought and high heat create tinderbox conditions. Then all you need is a lighting strike, malicious arson, or simple human carelessness with a match, cigarette, or improperly tended campfire or trash burning, and you have a wildfire.

The fear and actual damage generated by wildfires each year is bad enough without the bought and paid-for mainstream media making it worse by encouraging the misdirection of resources away from actions that address the true causes of wildfires, to the battle against climate change. There is no evidence climate change has or will cause more heat waves, droughts, or wildfires.

This piece originally appeared at heartlanddailynews.com and has been republished here with permission.