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full screen The August 2023 McDougall Creek wildfire raged above homes in West Kelowna, British Columbia. Photo: AP
Wildfires caused by climate change continue to fuel wildfires around the world – and increase carbon dioxide emissions – which in turn fuels global warming.
Last year’s large wildfires in Canada covered an area the size of half of Japan.
Warmest in “100,000 years”
The giant fires also caused the release of 1.7 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide last year – three times more emissions than normal for the country, according to data from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service.
– The temperatures in 2023 probably exceeded those in any other time period in the last 100,000 years, says Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, to the Japanese newspaper Nikkei.
She warns of the increasing risk of the greenhouse effect.
“Breaking out where they don’t usually”
The number of forest fires has increased as a result of warmer and drier environments. Canada was particularly hard hit.
– Year after year, with climate change, we experience more and more intense forest fires. And they have started to break out in places where they normally don’t, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wrote on X last June.
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full screenNew York June 9, 2023, the smoke from the great forest fires in Canada has embedded the big city in orange fog. The harmful pollution caused many to pick out face masks from the pandemic era. Photo: AP
Harmful smoke enters the United States
More than 180,000 square kilometers of forest burned in the fires, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center.
The smoke from the wildfires spread across the US border and caused severe air pollution in New York, Chicago and Detroit.
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