Trump told Mark Carney \u2018you got to stop these fires from coming in\u2019 as experts say wildfires symptom of climate crisis<\/p>\n
Scientists have reacted with incredulity after Donald Trump<\/a> accused Canada of \u201cpoisoning\u201d the US\u2019s air with smoke billowing from a slew of forest fires and threatened sanctions upon the country\u2019s northern neighbor.
The US president has said that he raised the issue of smoke wafting into the US from nearly 1,000 Canadian wildfires with Mark Carney, the country\u2019s prime minister, at the weekend\u2019s World Cup final.
\u201cI told him, you got to stop these fires from coming in and poisoning our air,\u201d Trump said. \u201cIf we can help them, we\u2019ll help them. But maybe they should pay us some damages or something, or we should do some tariffs.\u201d
Trump, who has previously advocated the \u201craking\u201d and \u201ccleaning\u201d of forests to prevent major conflagrations, this week announced<\/a> 50% tariffs upon Canada, a long-term US ally that he has previously threatened with annexation. The US is being \u201cunnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted and unhealthy air\u201d, Trump claimed<\/a> last week.
With palls of wildfire smoke causing unhealthy, hazy skies in cities including New York, Washington DC, Detroit and Toronto in recent weeks, some Republicans in Congress have issued further threats against Canada. Bernie Moreno, a Republican senator from Ohio, said<\/a> he will introduce legislation to sanction Canada for the \u201catrocity\u201d of not managing its forests properly.
Such threats have been met with shock<\/a> in Canada, where thousands of people have been evacuated<\/a> from fires that have badly burned remote towns. More than 8.1m acres (3.3m hectares) have been consumed by fires across Canada\u2019s vast, mostly unpopulated boreal forests, a steep increase on the long-term average<\/a>.
Such fierce wildfires are a symptom<\/a> of the climate crisis rather than a lack of management, experts warn, with the current blazes worsened by the recent severe heat dome that expanded from the US into Canada. The world is rapidly heating up due to the burning of fossil fuels, a process that Trump has actively<\/a> sought to<\/a> accelerate<\/a>.
\u201cThis is like crashing into the car in front of you because you were speeding and tailgating, and then demanding they pay for the damage to your headlights,\u201d said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, of Trump\u2019s comments. \u201cIt\u2019s victim-blaming by the assailant.
\u201cThe policies of Trump and the GOP are worsening the problem by doubling down in fossil fuel production and doing their best to obstruct the clean energy transition while the rest of the world moves on,\u201d Mann added.
While Trump has falsely dismissed established climate science as \u201ccrap\u201d, there is robust<\/a> evidence<\/a> linking<\/a> prolonged hot, dry weather with fire-prone conditions. Elevated temperatures caused by the climate crisis more than doubled the likelihood of severe fire conditions when Canada was last engulfed by major wildfires in 2023<\/a>, a previous analysis found<\/a>.
\u201cThe main cause of worsening fires in Canada<\/a> is not mismanagement \u2013 most Canadian forests are remote and haven\u2019t been managed at all, unlike the US \u2013 but instead a warming climate that has made large and extreme wildfires more common,\u201d said Marshall Burke, an environmental policy expert at Stanford University.
\u201cThese fires are not the result of Canadian action nor inaction, but instead largely the result of forces outside their control. So, punishment here would do nothing.\u201d
Attacking Canada over the fires is \u201cunfounded, uninformed and even insensitive to people losing homes and firefighters putting their lives on the line\u201d, said Lori Daniels, an ecologist and wildfire expert at the University of British Columbia.
\u201cIt\u2019s weak leadership to blame someone else when disasters are happening. It\u2019s not helpful, [Trump] is not contributing to real solutions by playing the blame game.\u201d
Daniels said that while some densely thicketed woodland in North America could benefit from \u201cthinning\u201d to reduce the amount of potential fire fuel in them, thereby restoring the small, targeted fires used by Indigenous people before European settlement, such an approach would be futile in Canada\u2019s boreal forests.
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These forests are dominated by spruce and fir trees that sit within soils topped by spongy mosses that are usually sodden with water. In hot, dry conditions like now, however, the forest floor itself becomes highly flammable, sometimes nourishing fires non-stop for extended periods.
Clearing \u2013 or \u201craking\u201d as Trump puts it<\/a> \u2013 this organic material would only hasten fires, Daniels said. Such an endeavor would be logistically difficult regardless, with many of the current fires located in highly remote areas lacking roads and nearby firefighting resources. Canada has more than a quarter of the world\u2019s boreal forests, spanning about 1.2bn acres of the country.
\u201cIt would be physically impossible to do what Donald Trump has suggested, even with all the money and firefighters in the world,\u201d said Daniels.
\u201cSome of the rhetoric from political leaders in the US is almost laughable, they don\u2019t understand the ecosystem or the scope of the problem. This is a climate change-driven disaster and of course the Trump administration are climate deniers so they won\u2019t take responsibility for US contributions to greenhouse gases. This is about deflecting attention from the cause of this.\u201d
Smoke from wildfires can trigger severe respiratory and heart problems for people living many miles away, with plumes of smoke eroding<\/a> long-term improvements in air quality for Americans in recent years.
But climate change-fueled wildfires is a global problem, including in the US, where smoke from fires in the west of the country has routinely spread into Canada. Huge blazes in Colorado and Utah have recently scorched<\/a> 235,000 acres, sparking evacuations and causing the death of Nicholas Dale, a Canadian pilot who was helping fight the fires.
\u201cWe crossed a tipping point in the last decade, just think of the shocking fires we\u2019ve seen in the Amazon, Australia, Europe, the US and Canada,\u201d said Daniels. \u201cThe smoke goes both ways across borders. Unless we address climate change we will continue to see this around the world, so that has to be our priority.
\u201cWe can\u2019t manage all these fires in Canada but we can triage and manage for safety and shift forest management,\u201d Daniels said, adding that a range of methods, such as planting different tree species and fuel reduction could be suitable. For those in the path of wildfire smoke, air conditioning and filtration when indoors will be important.
\u201cWe will have to try to adapt because we are in a new climate now,\u201d she said. \u201cCanada is warming twice as fast as the global average so this is the canary in the coalmine for the rest of the world. This is what happens when we heat the planet \u2013 we change the ecosystems and we get catastrophic disasters.\u201d<\/p>\n