{"id":564614,"date":"2026-07-29T03:27:12","date_gmt":"2026-07-29T03:27:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/564614\/"},"modified":"2026-07-29T03:27:12","modified_gmt":"2026-07-29T03:27:12","slug":"donald-trump-blames-canada-for-wildfire-smoke-but-global-warming-is-loading-the-wildfire-dice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/564614\/","title":{"rendered":"Donald Trump blames Canada for wildfire smoke \u2014 but global warming is loading the wildfire dice"},"content":{"rendered":"

United States President Donald Trump has accused Canada of \u201cwilful negligence<\/a>\u201d over wildfires, blaming its forest management, threatening tariffs and floating demands for compensation. His argument is absurd.<\/p>\n

Smoke does not carry a passport. Wildfires are burning across several countries, causing evacuations and devastating communities. In North America, smoke from fires has spread over many parts of central Canada and the U.S.<\/p>\n

Wildfires are currently scorching vast areas in Oregon and the Pacific Northwest<\/a>. France and Spain have evacuated hundreds of thousands of residents<\/a> as wildfires close in on Bordeaux, France, and grow around Madrid, Spain. Despite Trump\u2019s claims, Canada cannot log, rake<\/a> or prescribe-burn its way out of a planetary problem.<\/p>\n

Wildfires require ignition, combustible fuel and weather that permits rapid spread. Climate change does not usually strike the match \u2014 people and lightning do that, with lightning responsible<\/a> for most of the area burned in Canada. But warming weather increasingly determines whether a spark dies or becomes a catastrophe. Hotter air, earlier snowmelt<\/a> and longer summers mean a drier landscape and more severe fire seasons.<\/p>\n

In 2004, colleagues and I demonstrated<\/a> that human-caused climate change had already left a detectable fingerprint on the area burned by Canadian forest fires. A 2024 study<\/a> found that human influence has made fire seasons like Canada\u2019s record 2023 season more than five times as likely across nearly every Canadian ecozone.<\/p>\n

Of course, forest management practices matter. Fire suppression, accumulated fuels, vulnerable development and inadequate community protection raise risk in some regions. But many of Canada\u2019s largest fires burn in remote boreal landscapes, and much of the boreal forest is not manageable.<\/p>\n

Mitigation, not just adaptation<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s demand that Canada pay for wildfire smoke<\/a> is especially galling. The U.S. has emitted more cumulative fossil carbon dioxide than any other country. Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement while promoting fossil-fuel expansion \u2014 worsening the conditions that drive wildfire risk \u2014 and now blames a neighbour for the smoke. <\/p>\n

His supporters should understand that today\u2019s smoke is a warning of what continued warming will bring. <\/p>\n

Nonetheless, Canada cannot hide behind the absurdity of Trump\u2019s statements. The country remains one of the world\u2019s highest per-capita emitters of greenhouse gases. Better emergency response, FireSmart communities<\/a>, resilient infrastructure, prescribed and cultural burning and science-based forest management can reduce losses. <\/p>\n

Read more:
\n Dealing with wildfires requires a whole-of-society approach<\/a><\/p>\n

However, these measures only buy time; they do not address the root of the problem.<\/p>\n

There is sometimes a tendency \u2014 especially among some non-Indigenous commentators \u2014 to invoke Indigenous cultural burning as a general solution. However, this suggestion does not amount to an effective policy. <\/p>\n

Cultural burning<\/a> is sophisticated, locally valuable and was often suppressed by colonial governments. But no knowledge system \u2014 Indigenous or western \u2014 provides a complete operating manual for the speed and scale of climate warming we are facing.<\/p>\n

Cultural and prescribed burning can reduce fuels and fire severity in appropriate landscapes. They cannot re-freeze permafrost, cool the atmosphere or restore lost snowpack. They are adaptation tools, not substitutes for mitigation.<\/p>\n

El Ni\u00f1o<\/p>\n

\"a<\/a><\/p>\n

A firefighter moves beehives away from flames while battling a wildfire in San Martin de Valdeiglesias, west of Madrid, Spain, July 26, 2026.
\n (AP Photo\/Manu Fernandez)<\/p>\n

The strengthening El Ni\u00f1o adds risk, but it\u2019s not the root cause. El Ni\u00f1o is a natural, temporary rearrangement of heat between the tropical Pacific and the atmosphere, unfolding atop a long-term human-caused warming trend. <\/p>\n

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration gives El Ni\u00f1o an 81 per cent chance<\/a> of becoming very strong from October through December and a 97 per cent chance of persisting into early spring 2027.<\/p>\n

El Ni\u00f1o will tilt the odds toward drought in some regions, heavy rainfall or flooding in others and additional heat and marine heatwaves. In Canada, a mild winter or thinner snowpack could mean earlier spring drying and greater fire risk next year. It also typically raises fire danger in Australia, and I expect extreme wildfire conditions there during the country\u2019s approaching summer.<\/p>\n

Read more:
\n How an El Ni\u00f1o becomes a super El Ni\u00f1o<\/a><\/p>\n

Net-zero solutions<\/p>\n

Stopping the escalation requires geological net zero<\/a>: cutting fossil carbon emissions as far as possible and permanently returning an equivalent amount of any residual fossil carbon to geological storage. There is no technological loophole permitting unlimited continued emissions.<\/p>\n

Hard-to-abate residual emissions will require durable carbon dioxide removal, while reversing any temperature overshoot would require sustained net-negative emissions. We need investment in negative-emissions technologies alongside decarbonization \u2014 never instead of it.<\/p>\n

\"an<\/a><\/p>\n

A flare stack burns at an oil refinery in Burnaby, B.C., as smoke from wildfires burning in Canada and the U.S. settles over the region, on July 21, 2026.
\n THE CANADIAN PRESS\/Darryl Dyck<\/p>\n

One approach my colleagues and I have studied<\/a> pairs direct air carbon capture and storage with ocean thermal energy conversion. This energy conversion uses the temperature difference between warm surface and cold deep-ocean water to generate low-carbon electricity. <\/p>\n

Floating systems could power carbon capture and storage facilities that remove carbon dioxide from the air and store it in geological formations beneath the seabed. The approach is not commercially mature and requires rigorous environmental assessment, but it warrants serious research.<\/p>\n

The atmosphere responds to cumulative carbon, not ideology or borders. Adaptation can lessen damage. But only rapid decarbonization to geological net zero can stop us from continually loading the fire dice. Sustained net-negative emissions would then be required to begin unloading them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"United States President Donald Trump has accused Canada of \u201cwilful negligence\u201d over wildfires, blaming its forest management, threatening…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":564615,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[242,85,46,141],"class_list":["post-564614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=564614"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564614\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/564615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=564614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=564614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=564614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}