Global Cooling

The myth of climate change and wildfires

Peter Shinn October 17, 2013

I’m going to post a really great article about this from Electroverse. His site is behind a paywall, so I encourage you to sign up to get his weekday weather updates. It’s only $5 a month.

Canada Burns In A Cool Year

Canadian wildfire smoke turned skies over Massachusetts orange this week. Senator Ed Markey looked outside, declared that “the climate crisis is here,” and announced “we need a Green New Deal.”

However, heat isn’t causing the wildfires.

Over the 120 days (ending July 16), the majority of Canada—including Ontario (plus Alaska and Greenland)— ran below the multidecadal average. The countrywide temperature anomaly was negative.

Wildfires can occur during a cool year because fire depends on ignition, dry fuel, wind and forest conditions—not merely the temperature anomaly on a map.

Moreover, the long-term record offers no support for the claim of relentlessly worsening heat

A reconstruction of Canadian hot days using NOAA’s GHCN-Daily station archive (below) shows no sustained rise from 1910 to 2025. The 1920s, 1930s and 1940s repeatedly produced totals comparable to or above recent decades.

The obvious modern exception is 2021, dominated by the extraordinary June–July Pacific Northwest heatwave that set numerous records across British Columbia. Outside that anomaly, the claimed explosion in extreme Canadian heat is nowhere to be found.

The smoke drifting south over the U.S. is not evidence that Canada has become hotter, as media outlets claims.

Another plume of wildfire smoke will rotate south through the Great Lakes this weekend.

Canada’s own guidance lists fuel, landscape, wind, soil moisture, weather and winter snowpack among the major factors behind fires. Lightning starts roughly 45% of Canadian forest fires but accounts for 81% of the area burned, largely because strikes occur in remote places where fires are detected late and suppression is difficult. Human activity causes most of the remaining ignitions.

Then there is management.

Canada is the only G7 country without a dedicated national wildfire-response agency. Responsibility remains divided among provinces and territories, with the federal government assisting and coordinating when requested.

The Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre coordinates the sharing of personnel, aircraft, equipment and expertise. It is a not-for-profit resource-sharing body—not a centralized federal firefighting command.

The dangers of allowing combustible material to accumulate are hardly a new discovery.

A 1992 review in The Forestry Chronicle described prescribed burning as cost-effective and compatible with forest, wildlife and park-management objectives. But the practice is far older. Indigenous peoples across North America routinely used low-intensity cultural burns to clear undergrowth, renew habitat and create patchwork landscapes that limited fuel buildup and reduced the spread and severity of larger wildfires.

Parks Canada itself acknowledges that decades of fire suppression have created dense forests packed with coarse woody debris.

Fire is also a natural and necessary part of many ecosystems. It clears accumulated material, returns nutrients to the soil, opens forest canopies and supports biodiversity. Attempting to suppress every fire indefinitely can simply store up fuel for a larger one later.

Today, every smoke plume is immediately blamed on “climate change.” But environmentalists should not be shaking their fists at the sky. They should be calling out Canada for repeatedly failing to manage its forests.

The bigger picture is even more damning for the Climatariat.

Through July 1, official GWIS satellite data put global burned area in 2026 at record-low levels: