{"id":848346,"date":"2026-08-06T16:02:11","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T16:02:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/848346\/"},"modified":"2026-08-06T16:02:11","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T16:02:11","slug":"trump-blames-canada-for-fires-but-experts-point-to-climate-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/848346\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump blames Canada for fires but experts point to climate change"},"content":{"rendered":"

Human-caused climate change doubled the likelihood of the tinderbox weather conditions that sparked Canada\u2019s massive summer wildfires<\/a> and in turn angered U.S. President Donald Trump<\/a>, according to a study released Thursday. <\/p>\n

And fire and climate scientists said 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 point to the United States\u2019 huge historical emissions<\/a> of heat-trapping gases from the burning of coal, oil and gas.<\/p>\n

The fire weather conditions in the Northwest Territories and northwestern Ontario, while unusual but not that rare, were still made twice as likely by global warming, said Thursday\u2019s study by World Weather Attribution, a group of international scientists who examine extreme weather conditions to see if there are climate change fingerprints. It\u2019s about the same as the team found for summer fires in France, but not nearly as clear a climate fingerprint as they calculated in Spanish fires,<\/a> which the scientists said were 20 times more likely because of climate change.<\/p>\n

The study, which was done so quickly it has not been peer reviewed yet, looked at the weather conditions that are connected to large wildfires and the Canadian index for those conditions, which are heat, lack of rain, humidity and wind. The researchers found the doubling of frequency when \u2014 using scientifically accepted techniques to search for climate fingerprints \u2014 they compared current conditions to a world without the 2.5 degrees (1.4 degrees Celsius) of warming that\u2019s occurred since the industrial age and burning of fossil fuels started. 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn 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,\u201d said study co-author Jonathan Boucher, a fire scientist at Canada\u2019s Forest Service.<\/p>\n

Hotter, drier conditions connected to burning<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

A woman jumps off a dock into Okanagan Lake, in Lake Country, British Columbia, as the Quilpituk Creek wildfire burns on the mountainside across the lake near Fintry, Aug. 3, 2026. (Darryl Dyck\/The Canadian Press via AP, File)<\/p>\n

A woman jumps off a dock into Okanagan Lake, in Lake Country, British Columbia, as the Quilpituk Creek wildfire burns on the mountainside across the lake near Fintry, Aug. 3, 2026. (Darryl Dyck\/The Canadian Press via AP, File)<\/p>\n

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Outside climate and fire scientists said the flash study made sense and reflects a world where hotter and drier conditions are making fires burn more often and more intensely.<\/p>\n

\u201cMother Nature\u2019s been burning. Now she\u2019s on amphetamines and she burns more and more,\u201d said Thompson Rivers University fire scientist Mike Flannigan, a Canadian expert who wasn\u2019t part of the study.<\/p>\n

Hazardous smoke spread across both the United States and Canada, choking large cities such as New York.<\/p>\n

By burning more and more fossil fuels, \u201cwe\u2019re putting nails in our coffins,\u201d Flannigan said.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Wildfire<\/p>\n

Wildfire damage is visible in the immediate area surrounding Collins First Nation, a small, remote Ojibwa community in northwestern Ontario, July 22, 2026. (Chris Young\/The Canadian Press via AP, File)<\/p>\n

Wildfire damage is visible in the immediate area surrounding Collins First Nation, a small, remote Ojibwa community in northwestern Ontario, July 22, 2026. (Chris Young\/The Canadian Press via AP, File)<\/p>\n

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In the larger and remote Northwest Territories fires, where more than 5,000 square miles (12,950 square kilometers) burned, it\u2019s clear the spark was from lightning but it was the climate conditions that took that initial ignition and made the fire burn intensely and spread too fast to control, said Boucher and report lead author Theodore Keeping, a climate scientist at Imperial College in London. <\/p>\n

While people start about half of Canada\u2019s wildfires \u2014 accidentally or on purpose \u2014 fires sparked by lightning are responsible for more than 90% of the land area burned in Canada, Flannigan said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we\u2019re facing here is more of a climate related problem than a forest management problem,\u201d Boucher said.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not how Trump sees it.<\/p>\n

Trump blames mismanagement, but scientists point to carbon <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

The Statue of Liberty is visible through haze due to Canadian wildfire smoke during sunset Aug. 5, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo\/Yuki Iwamura, File)<\/p>\n

The Statue of Liberty is visible through haze due to Canadian wildfire smoke during sunset Aug. 5, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo\/Yuki Iwamura, File)<\/p>\n

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\u201cA lot of damage has been done. They\u2019re not managing their forests properly,\u201d Trump said July 21<\/a>. \u201cAnd the wind has a tendency to blow right over New York City, right over, you saw Detroit, they had to close the whole place. Michigan was really affected. They had to close businesses for four days. It\u2019s very serious what they\u2019re doing, and they don\u2019t seem to be able to do anything about it. If they managed their forests, they wouldn\u2019t have the fires.\u201d<\/p>\n

When asked Sunday about punishing Canada, Trump on Air Force One told reporters he has decided on a punishment, adding \u201cyou\u2019ll find out about it soon.\u201d<\/p>\n

Canadian climate and fire scientists said Trump doesn\u2019t understand the root causes.<\/p>\n

\u201cSmoke does not carry a passport, but carbon pollution does have a history. That history shows that the United States contributed more than any other country,\u201d said University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver. \u201cPresident Trump is pointing at the smoke while ignoring America\u2019s fingerprints on the climate conditions behind it.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

The sun is obscured by wildfire smoke as people stop to photograph the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, July 17, 2026, on the National Mall in Washington. (AP Photo\/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, File)<\/p>\n

The sun is obscured by wildfire smoke as people stop to photograph the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, July 17, 2026, on the National Mall in Washington. (AP Photo\/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, File)<\/p>\n

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Study co-author Friederike Otto, an Imperial College London climate scientist, said, \u201cif you care about anyone but the super rich, you have to stop burning fossil fuels because the impacts are here and they\u2019re now and have huge consequences.\u201d<\/p>\n

Canada has warmed<\/a> 65% more than the United States in recent decades. In the past 30 years, the amount of land annually burned by Canadian wildfires has gone up by about 50%<\/a> while the amount in the United States has more than doubled<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A big problem that Trump doesn\u2019t appear to understand is that much of Canada\u2019s forests are remote, northerly and full of spruce and pine that burns hard and fast, all making it difficult to get a handle on, Boucher and Flannigan said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Canada, when things are extreme, you have about a 30-minute window to put that fire out,\u201d Flannigan said. \u201cIf you don\u2019t get there in 30 minutes, you\u2019re out of luck. And many of the fires that start in Canada are northern remote areas that are more than 30 minutes away from an airport. So even with perfect detection systems, we would get there too late and these fires are going to burn.\u2019’<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

The Associated Press\u2019 climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP\u2019s standards<\/a> for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Human-caused climate change doubled the likelihood of the tinderbox weather conditions that sparked Canada\u2019s massive summer wildfires and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":848347,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[213992,49,48,2848,2847,6093,13722,1376,9890,6812,11922,6804,2841,295312,44,66,772,8615,1133,6090,883],"class_list":["post-848346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-canada","tag-andrew-weaver","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-climate","tag-climate-and-environment","tag-climate-change","tag-climate-science","tag-donald-trump","tag-energy-industry","tag-environmental-science","tag-fires","tag-forests","tag-general-news","tag-jonathan-boucher","tag-news","tag-science","tag-united-states","tag-washington-news","tag-weather","tag-wildfires","tag-world-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/848346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=848346"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/848346\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/848347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=848346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=848346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=848346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}