GORDON BAY, Ontario — Two weeks ago, one of America’s best-known climate scientists set off onto Ontario’s Lake Joseph for an evening of stargazing, as she had almost every summer of her life.
From her boat, the night sky, which should have been brilliant, was obscured by smoke.
“It was a clear night, but you couldn’t see the stars,” said Katharine Hayhoe, the Canadian-born chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy. “The sky was bronze. The lake was bronze. You could smell smoke. We’re not used to that here.”
In Canada, as in the United States, this has been a summer of catastrophic wildfires, from British Columbia and the Yukon east to Manitoba and Ontario.
More than 13,000 square miles of Canadian wildlands have burned this year, more than twice the 20-year average for this point in the calendar — and more than twice the area that has burned in the United States, according to government statistics.
The smoke has drifted as far east as New York, where the brown haze helped give Manhattan its worst air quality in 15 years.
Environmentalists have long warned that Canada’s vast boreal forest was becoming drier and more flammable, but few had expected a fire season as explosive as this or focused on the degree to which climate change would bring California-scale fire dangers to Canada’s north.
It was a clear night, but you couldn’t see the stars. The sky was bronze. The lake was bronze. You could smell smoke. We’re not used to that here.Katharine Hahoe, Ontario, Canada
“We’ve paid attention to other signs of warming,” said Hayhoe, who was born in Toronto but now lives in Texas. “The seasons have been shifting, invasive species are coming in, we’ve seen flooding in Toronto and Ottawa. But nobody’s talked about wildfires before.”
For Canada, the implications are dire: ravaged towns, lost timberlands, unhealthy air and lost habitat in North America’s most important breeding ground for migratory birds.
BUT THE IMPACT on the rest of the globe could be greater.
By most estimates, the boreal forests that stretch from Alaska to eastern Canada and across Siberia absorb more carbon dioxide — the main cause of global warming — than the Amazon and other tropical forests.
Fires occur naturally in the north; they’re part of the forest lifecycle. But scientists say this year’s blazes, made more intense by hot weather and drought, are abnormal and more dangerous.
“When fires get intense or burn hot due to drought, combustion often removes most or all organic matter in the ecosystem,” said Merritt Turetsky, director of the University of Colorado’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research.
After high-intensity fires, “vegetation is slower to recover,” she said. “We are starting to see happen more, as a result of climate change, the creation of what look like moonscapes.”
