"It's Only Going To Get Worse" - From Australia To Canada To France, Nations Face An Emerging New World Of Wildfires

[hatrack]

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Deadly wildfires have engulfed western Europe this month – the grim consequence of a trio of heatwaves that have turned lush vegetation into dry tinder – while separate blazes suffocate North America with cloying smoke. France, Portugal and Spain have each been torched by a record-breaking number of wildfires for this time of year, leaving an unprecedented area of France in flames and 13 people dead in Spain. The UK began the week with 19 separate wildfires that led experts to warn of a “firewave” more widespread than ever before.

Across the Atlantic, smoke from 100 fires burning northern Ontario made Toronto the most polluted city in the world on Wednesday before it crossed the US border to choke New York. Far-reaching fumes from Canadian wildfires are so strong they caused 82,000 early deaths in 2023, a study found last year, including 33,000 in the US and 22,000 in Europe. On Friday, the EU’s Copernicus agency said summer smoke was causing “extremely poor” air quality warnings in areas such as New Jersey, which hosts the World Cup final on Sunday.

The problem is not just the hectarage. Perhaps surprisingly, the global trend in wildfire size has been toward fewer hectares of burnt land, largely because huge tracts of African savannah that were susceptible to fires are now fragmented by farmland. But where fires burn, they are often hotter, less predictable, and greater in number. Carbon pollution has raised global temperatures, and with more heat to dry out plants, small fires can more easily escalate into hellish infernos. This allows wildfires to spread into areas – in forests and moorlands, but also in cities, parks and gardens – that were not as vulnerable before, increasing the danger at what researchers call the wildland-urban interface.

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“One of the alarming things I was seeing over the weekend was large parts of the country where the probability of sustained ignition was 100%,” said Dr Thomas Smith, a wildfire scientist at the London School of Economics. “Especially for grass fuels, which dry out very quickly, it only requires 2-3 weeks of dry weather to reach those thresholds.” “The climate of the 20th century is now gone,” UK scientists said on Wednesday in a report that found last year was the country’s hottest on record. Average temperatures virtually unknown in the 1980s now cover almost a fifth of the land, the scientists said, as fire services fought to put out blazes from Durham in the north to Devon in the south-west. The next day, a wildfire burned 300 hectares (740 acres) in Scotland’s Cairngorms national park.

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https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2026/jul/18/the-impossible-choices-of-a-deadly-wildfire-season

[CrispyQ]

1. Maybe the book of Revelations was aliens from the future warning us. -nt

[Fiendish Thingy]

2. Trump is on it!

He’s going to Jack up tariffs that Americans pay for Canadian goods and materials to punish the Canadians for not raking their forests, as the Very Stable Genius has recommended repeatedly.