Record high pollution, heat herald a season of extremes
It’s not officially summer yet in the Northern Hemisphere. But the extremes are already here.
Fires are burning across Canada, blanketing parts of the eastern United States with choking, orange- gray smoke. Puerto Rico is under a severe heat alert, as are other parts of the world. Earth’s oceans have heated up at an alarming rate.
Human- caused cl imate change is a force behind extremes such as these. Although there is no specific research attributing this week’s events to global warming, the science is unequivocal that global warming significantly increases the chances of severe wildfires and heat waves like the ones affecting major parts of North America .
Now comes a global weather pattern known as El Niño, which can drive up temperatures and set heat records. Thursday morning, scientists announced its arrival.
Taken together, the week’s extremes offer one clear takeaway: The world’s richest continent remains unprepared for the hazards of the not-too- distant future.
A sign of that came Wednesday when Canadian Primeminister Justin Trudeau said his government may soon create a disaster response agency to “make sure we’re doing everything we can to predict, protect and act ahead of more of these events coming.”
The recent fires also have punctured the notion that some places are relatively safe from the worst hazards of climate change because they’re not near the equator or they’re far from the sea. Almost without warning, smoke from faraway fires upended daily life.
So much wildfire smoke pushed through the border that schools in Buffalo, N.Y., canceled outdoor activities. Detroit was suffocated by a toxic haze. Flights were grounded at airports in the Northeast.
“Wildfires are no longer a problem just for people who live in fire-prone, forested areas,” said Alexandra Paige Fischer, a professor who studies fire adaptation strategies at the University of Michigan.
In the United States, more people are living with wildfire smoke. A 2022 study by Stanford researchers found that the number of people exposed to toxic pollution from wildfires at least one day a year increased 27-fold from 2006 to 2020.
The two countries experiencing these extremes, the United States and Canada, are major producers of oil and gas, which, when burned, produce the greenhouse gases that have significantly warmed the Earth’s atmosphere. The average global temperatures today are more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit higher than in the preindustrial era.
Park Williams, a geologist at the University of California-los Angeles, pointed out that eastern Canada and northern Alberta are actually projected to get wetter in the coming years, according to climate models. But that wasn’t the case this year. It was an unusually dry year across much of Canada. Then came the heat.
The boreal forests of western Canada offered ready fuel. The trees and grasses of eastern Canada turned to tinder. “Under warmer temperatures, those dry years will cause things to dry out and become flammable more quickly than they would have otherwise,” Williams said.
By wednesday, more than 400 fires were burning from west to east in Canada, more than half of them out of control.
Other parts of the world have felt the scorch this year. Vietnam broke a heat record inmay, with temperatures soaring past 111 Fahrenheit. China broke heat records in more than 100 weather stations in April. The boreal forests of Siberia also are burning.
As in the North American boreal forests, climate change is making the Siberian fire season longer and more severe. It also has increased lightning ignitions, said Brendan Rogers, a boreal forest fire expert at the Woodwell Climate Research Center.
There are different conditions in different years, to be sure, he said in an email, but “the common denominator is warm/ hot and dry conditions that prime the ecosystems for burning.”