Human-Caused Climate Emergency Made Canada's Summer Wildfires Twice as Likely: Study

Committed to climate denial, President Donald Trump has insisted in recent weeks that hundreds of wildfires currently burning across Canada are the result of the country's mismanagement of its vast boreal forests—but scientists confirmed in a study out Thursday that "human-induced climate change" made the fires twice as likely.

The World Weather Attribution (WWA), a consortium of scientists who study how planetary heating and the climate emergency fuel extreme weather, examined the weather conditions connected to fast-spreading fires, including extreme heat, drought conditions, humidity, and wind.

They measured the Canadian index for those conditions and then compared the country's current weather patterns to a world without the 1.4°C of warming that has occurred since humans began burning fossil fuels.

"The weeklong weather conditions that led to the fires in Ontario are now the type that can happen every six years or so," WWA reported.

In the Northwest Territories, where more than 5,000 square miles of forest burned, sending smoke drifting thousands of miles into the continental United States, WWA noted that lightning initially caused the fire, "but it was the climate conditions that took that initial ignition and made the fire burn intensely and spread too fast to control."

Theodore Keeping, a member of WWA and a weather expert at Imperial College London, told The Guardian that "adaptation alone is not enough. We need to rapidly move away from fossil fuels to avoid events like this becoming even more of a reality.”

“Smoke does not carry a passport, but carbon pollution does have a history. President Trump is pointing at the smoke while ignoring America's fingerprints on the climate conditions behind it.”

The weather conditions that dry out vegetation and make them more prone to catching fire are now expected to occur every 2-6 years in the Northwest Territories.

"If humanity hadn’t overheated the planet by burning coal, oil, and gas, the scientists determined, such extreme fire conditions would occur less than once every 40 years," said WWA.

The study was released as a new wildfire in the Vancouver area broke out, prompting air quality warnings and evacuations.

Wildfire smoke contains significant amounts of particulate matter (PM2.5), which can lodge itself in human lung cells and enter the bloodstream.

Trump asserted last month regarding Canada, "If they managed their forests, they wouldn’t have the fires.”

But Mike Flannigan, a fire scientist at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia, who was not part of the WWA study, told ABC News that forest management and prevention efforts can only go so far in a country where much of the boreal forest is remote and hard to access.

“In Canada, when things are extreme, you have about a 30-minute window to put that fire out,” Flannigan said. "If you don't get there in 30 minutes, you're out of luck. And many of the fires that start in Canada are northern remote areas that are more than 30 minutes away from an airport. So even with perfect detection systems, we would get there too late and these fires are going to burn.''

By continuing to burn fossil fuels, Flannigan added, “we're putting nails in our coffins."

The study comes days after Trump's Interior Department moved to further expand offshore drilling by proposing weakened protections for drilling in the Arctic Outer Continental Shelf, and as his push for artificial intelligence data centers has sent the demand for natural gas soaring. He has also accelerated approvals for liquefied natural gas export terminals.

Andrew Weaver, a climate scientist at University of Victoria in British Columbia, noted that in addition to Trump's push for more fossil fuel extraction, the US has caused more carbon pollution than any other country in history.

“Smoke does not carry a passport, but carbon pollution does have a history," Weaver told ABC News. “President Trump is pointing at the smoke while ignoring America's fingerprints on the climate conditions behind it.”

WWA also found recently that wildfires in Spain this summer were made 20 times more likely by the climate emergency.

“What is going to be next?” Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London and a co-author of the study, said to The Guardian. “Time and again we see the same results: Climate change is a key driver behind uncontrollably large and unprecedented fires. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. The science has been clear for decades: Burning fossil fuels is making these wildfires more frequent, more intense, and more difficult to contain.”