Canadian wildfires never caused US skies to turn orange in the past. Here’s what changed
Cities across Canada, the U.S. Midwest and East Coast are currently under thick blankets of wildfire smoke.
In Toronto, skies have been an apocalyptic orange since Wednesday morning and New York City, Detroit and Minneapolis were also facing severe air quality warnings.
The smoke is pouring south from more than 800 wildfires in the Canadian province of Ontario and elsewhere, destroying nearly 5 million acres and forced large-scale evacuations including in neighboring Minnesota.
For millions of North Americans, smoky skies are becoming a familiar sight in warmer months. In 2023, major cities including New York and San Francisco were being compared to the movie Blade Runner after the skies turned a burnt orange, blotting out the sun.
Just a decade ago, these events were fairly rare – so what is causing the onset of such ominous scenes?
A new USA Today analysis of wildfire data over the past three decades revealed that the number acres burned each year is increasing. In short, wildfires are getting worse – but there’s a combination of factors that’s causing them to do so.
At the root is climate change, caused by humans continuing to burn fossil fuels and increasing the global temperature overall.
Climate change is bringing more frequent and severe extreme periods of heat and prolonged regional drought, setting up tinderbox conditions in forests that fuel larger, more erratic and stronger fires.
About half the smoke generated from wildfires between 1997-2020 could be linked to climate change, Loretta Mickley, an atmospheric chemist at Harvard University, told USA Today.
“If we zero in more recently from 2010 to 2020, those numbers increase,” she said.
Smoke from these fires can travel hundreds of thousands of miles and linger over areas for days, threatening human health.
Detroit, a city with 650,000 residents, had the worst air quality in the world Thursday, according to air quality tracking site iQAir, with Toronto coming second, and Minneapolis and Chicago ranking third and fourth.
Smoke in Michigan degraded visibility so much that the 26,372-foot Mackinac bridge was essentially invisible, forcing drivers to slow, according to UpNorthLive.
The air quality in all of these cities is considered to be hazardous to health. Impacts are forecast to last through Friday.
