United States MAGA Meltdown Over Canadian Wildfire Smoke Is A National Embarrassment

Thick smoke in Chicago last week.
MAGA has been embarrassingly 
whining about the smoke without
offering any real help or 
solutions to the problem. 

Just stop already. 

MAGA is going nuts over the wildfire smoke billowing into theUnited States from Canada, and it has long since become embarrassing. 

Somehow, MAGA thinks Canada can wave a magic wand to stop the fires, or, they're sending the smoke over the border as some sort of deliberate provocation. 

Sigh.

MAGA has spent the past week falling over each attacking Canada for the fires, as if they aren't battling the blazes with everything they have and praying for soaking, widespread rains. 

We have so many, sad disgusting examples. Let's go through a bunch of them, just to wallow in the stupidity. : 

Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio said he is introducing legislation that would require an investigation as to whether the Canadian smoke had harmed U.S. air quality and to sanctions those responsible. Moreno ought to be careful, given the harm the United States has caused Canada.

Moreno's legislation gets worse.

As Daily Beast reports, "The bill reportedly goes so far as to threaten to revoke the visas of those deemed responsible for the 'atrocity.' The legislation also 'expresses a sense' that the Canadian ambassador should be declared persona non grata until the smoke no longer affects the U.S." 

Moreno's legislation would ban U.S. government contracts with Canada and Export-Import Bank assistance and authorize the president to most import restrictions.  

Katie Miller, the wife of the odious White House aide Stephen Miller, posted the wild idea that annexing Canada would have spared the U.S. of the wildfire smoke. "This is why Canada should be the 51st state," she wrote. 

Rep. Lisa McClain, Michigan, had this temper tantrum on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter: "Michiganders shouldn't have to breathe negligence....."YEAR AFTER YEAR the smoke crossed the border while Canada does nothing. Stop exporting your smoke into our skies. Enough is enough!"

Does she expect Canada to erect a wall to block the smoke?

Also on X, Rep. Nick Langworthy, R-NY, whined, "This is no longer a one-time emergency - it's becoming an annual public health crisis. This is unacceptable."

It's not just MAGA Republicans. I found a Democrat who entered the fray. Michigan State Rep. Alabas Farhat  posted on Threads:

"For four straight years, Canada has failed to get these fires under control, and Michigan continues to pay the price." 

He referred the fires as "Canada forest management failures." He also said if Canada "refuses" to stop the fires (as if!) he said "There should be consequences."

This motive for all this whining? Almost all of it is in service to the Orange Lump of a president. We remember all the anti-Canada blather Trump has belched, the demands to make Canada the 51st state. And, after a couple days of all this, on Friday, all this stupidly and predictable whining culminated with Donald Trump saying he would add to the tariffs he's already imposed on Canada.

The Orange Lump said Canada "has refused to engage in basic Forest Management and Debris Removal."  I guess Canada was supposed to rake its forests, just as he insisted California should have done. 

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney had a devastatingly low key reaction to the MAGA tantrums: "Climate change is everyone's responsibility, truly everyone's including the United States."

ABOUT THAT CLIMATE CHANGE

There have always been occasional years with Canadian or western United States fires that belch smoke into the United States. It used to be infrequent. 

On May 19, 1790 - way back when - was labeled the "Famous Dark Day" in New England, according to the Vermont Weather Book.  Candles were needed to read, and the air had an eerie, brassy hue. That was probably smoke from the western United States or maybe the northern Great Lakes region.

On September 6, 1881, it was the legendary, "Yellow Day,"  Everything took on a yellow hue, and artificial light was needed to read documents and books during the day. Basically the same thing happened in September, 1908, and September 1950.

So we used to have smoky days, but since those days were a rarity, they became legend. 

Now however, smoke attacks are no longer a rarity, but a regular occurrence. So what changed?

Canada has roughly 1.4 million square miles of forest. Most of it is boreal forest, a broad area representing 30 percent of the global forest area in northern areas of Canada, Russia and Alaska. 

Most of the forests are remote, and impossible to manage like forests in more populated areas in the continental United States.

Fires have gotten worse and widespread in recent years for reasons that mostly have to do with climate change. The snow in the spring melts sooner than it once did, leaving more time for the landscape two dry out than it once did Parts of Canada are warming at twice the rate of the global average, creating heat waves that further dry things out. 

The summer heat also destabilizes the air, creating thunderstorms with relatively little rain but plenty of lightning strikes that set off fires.  Invasive bark beetles kills swaths of foresters, leaving behind tinder dry dead trees. 

So, contrary to MAGA, Canada isn't trying to torture Americans by sending choking wildfire smoke into the United States. They are in large part a victim of climate change. And historically, the United States has always been the #1 or #2 greenhouse gas emitters in the world. 

In the end, climate change has us breathing smoke that makes us sick, and will end up killing some of us. 

MAGA has been yelling outrageous things about the wildfire smoke. But just hint to them climate change might have had something to do with it, the screaming just becomes that much louder. 

THE FIRES

On Saturday, 949 fires were burning across Canada, according to the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System.  The intense fires in Ontario were quieter, thanks to some rain.

But those weren't the only fires burning in North America.  As of Saturday, there were 73 large fires burning across the United States, including 17 new large incidents, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Most of these were in the West and in northern Minnesota. There were also a multitude of smaller fires burning around the nation. 

Fires are also burning in the boreal forests of Siberia. In recent days, a fire in Norway spread from a townhouse and into a forest, where it continued on to destroy about 100 homes. It was the largest such fire in Norway's history. 

TRAGEDY, HELP AND HONOR

It's not as if Canada is just gleefully sending smoke to the U.S.  Smoke has choked much of southern Canada, including large cities like Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. 

The Canadian fires have especially hit the First Nations communities in Ontario. Thousands were evacuated. An unknown number of houses have burned, but the number of destroyed buildings is easily in the hundreds. 

Normally, and in the past, the United States and Canada would help each other with emergencies. Canada is still doing that. 

Sometimes, firefighters give their lives to the effort. About a week ago, Nicholas Dale, 56 of Sooke, British Columbia died in a helicopter crash while responding to a wildfire in not too far north of Telluride. 

Dale's death make the vitriol aimed at Canada over the smoky atmosphere especially galling. 

In a demonstration of how much more decent most Americans are, compared to the noxious MAGA crowd, Wyoming Public Radio described this scene as the sad process of returning Dale's body to Canada began. :

"On Monday morning, a line of firetrucks, ambulances and other emergency response vehicles flashing their lights stretched for nearly a mile as the convoy passed through the little towns and small cities between Gunnison and Grand Junction. 

In Montrose, hundreds somberly lined U.S. Highway 509 holding American flags to honor Dale."

STUPIDITY WORSENS

Meanwhile, he whining from MAGA kept getting louder and even more bizarre gets even worse in some circles  

Right Wing Watch posted on X (formerly Twitter) posted this gem of a clip from MAGA activist Eric Metaxas: 

"Who's telling me how to live my life?  I'm an adult man in a free country, and you're telling me, 'limit your outdoor activity.'' he said, "How dare they say that. Who has the right to tell me or you or anyone anything? It's a free country. I can do whatever I want."

Never mind this was just an advisory, kind of like telling people to drive carefully in a winter storm. But the guy isn't very bright. The comments section was glorious

"He should definitely go outside ad jog for HOURS!

"Fine, Eric. Please go outside and put your mouth over a diesel bus exhaust. It will benefit all of us."

"Eric doesn't understand the difference between a suggestion and an order Poor guy."

"Oh the humanity! This dude is the victim of receiving information! Will the abusive alerts never stop enslaving him?"

"Getting asthma to own the libs."

"Dear Eric - I forbid you from running out in front of traffic on the expressway."

Metaxas is a great example of the low, ignorant, tragicomic  MAGA mentality. They can do anything! They are all powerful!  While the rest of us roll our eyes and laugh at them. 

MAGA seems to think the abuse they've hurled at Canada is a flex, showing how powerful they are. Trump and his minions are actually demonstrating exactly how weak they are. Their pathetic insults and whining is a precise demonstration of how impotent MAGA really is. 

We should all remember that despite their bluster, the rest of us hold most of the power. We ought to use it. 

  

Coral And Antarctic Sea Ice Climate Change Tipping Points Underway?

Coral bleached out from exposure to too-hot water
If this goes on for too long, the coral dies. 
Coral reefs worldwide are now suffering
from big bleaching events. 

Scientist are eyeing coral reefs and Antarctic ice more than ever lately as the two wildly different parts of nature seem to be headed toward what is known as climate tipping points. 

Climate tipping points are defined as critical thresholds that, when exceeded, can create huge, irreversible changes in ecosystems. 

Recent studies have found that we are at, or about to reach two big climate tipping points. One in the tropics, one in the icy environment around Antarctica. 

All this is part of the second Global Tipping Points report from the University of Exeter's Global Systems Institute in England. The report examines some of the fundamental processes that support life on the planet and how close they are to suffering permanent damage. 

CORAL REEFS

In recent years, we've heard about coral bleaching, in which these organisms lose their colorful appearance and turn ghostly white and die, due to the water temperatures being too hot to support them. 

As climate change warms the oceans, these bleaching or diebacks are becoming more common. 

Now, according to CBS News:

"Scientists have determined that the 'tipping point' for coral reefs begins the global warming reaches 1.2 degrees Celsius, with somewhere between 70 and 90 percent of coral dying when that number climbs to 1.5 degrees. 

About 84 percent of the world's coral reefs had bleaching this year in the most intense event of its kind in history, according to the International Coral Reef Initiative."

Sure, coral reefs are pretty, but most of us won't get to see them. So if they die back, is it really a big deal? 

The answer is a loud yes. Coral reefs provide habitat for about 25 percent of all  underwater species. They also support the livelihoods of about a billion people. 

The past two years have been the warmest recorded on Earth. Though 2025 will be a tiny bit cooler than the previous two years, it won't be by much. With such intense warmth, coral reefs have reached their breaking point. 

ANTARCTIC ICE 

This chart shows pretty stable levels of ice
around Antarctica until around 2000. Then
it began to increase. But starting a
decade ago, the amount of ice began to
drop sharply. 

A paper in the journal Nature describes previously unnoted details of interrelated effects of abruptly melting ice. 

The study in the journal Nature stated: 

"A regime shift has reduced Antarctic sea ice extent far below its natural variability of past centuries, and in some respects its more abrupt, non-linear and potentially irreversable than Arctic sea ice loss." It also said.

 Evidence is emerging for rapid, interacting and sometimes self-perpetuating changes in the Antarctic environment. "

According to Reuters, the study gathered data from observations, ice cores, and ship logbooks to charge long-term changes in the area of sea ice, putting into context a rapid decline in recent years. 

That decline means a smaller ice sheet at the bottom of the world. Ice reflects the sun's heat back, to space, So less ice in and around Antarctica means more warmth is sucked in by the planet, making climate change that much worse. 

Reduced Antarctic ice  can shift ocean currents, which changes the distribution of krill, phytoplankton and other sources of nutrition for larger animals in the region, like emperor penguins. 

The amount of Antarctic ice remained pretty stable for at least the century ending around 2000, making life relatively predictable for the region's ecosystem.

Then. as the new century began,  the level of Antarctic ice began to increase, contrary to what you'd expect from climate change. Scientists suspect increased snowfall due to a warming world's ability to produce excess precipitation, in this case, snow, was partly responsible.

After that, suddenly, around a decade ago, the amount of Antarctic ice began to plummet rapidly. The amount of ice is now well below where it was during most of the 20th century. The decline so far shows no real sign of stopping or slowing down. 

The loss of coral reefs and the Antarctic ice situation are two examples of how one effect of climate change can have a snowball effect, making other aspects of a warming world worse, and also accelerate the rate of warming. 

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Hurricane Helene Decimated North Carolina Forests, Too

The forest basically collapsed around this house
in mountainous western North Carolina during
the winds of Hurricane Helene in September.

As we well know, the extreme flooding from Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina is one of the worst and deadliest disasters the United States has seen in years. 

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper has recently said the total damage estimate in the state is so far up to $53 billion, very likely the most expensive disaster in the state's history. 

Almost all the damage was obviously due to floods and landslides. 

But I've been struck by the images I've seen of the destruction to forests in western North Carolina.  Heavy rain often extends far inland after a hurricane comes ashore, though this is an extreme example.  But wins from a hurricane usually diminish pretty quickly after a hurricane makes landfall.

The area of western North Carolina is very roughly 400 miles from where Helene made landfall near Perry, Florida.  Still, the wind damage up in the mountains near Asheville was incredible. 

As Fox Weather Reports: 

"The North Carolina Forest Service has completed an aerial damage assessment of forest lands across western North Carolina and the losses are staggering. 

The surveyors estimate 822,000 acres of timberland were damaged or destroyed across more than a dozen counties during Helene, with McDowell County hit particularly hard. All told, the NC Forest Service estimates damage to the state's timber at $214 million."

With all those trees down, there's new hazards that can afflict the mountains of western North Carolina. 

As television station WYFF in Greenville, South Carolina reports: 

"With the loss of such a large portion of the ecosystem in the area, officials said this can cause several negative effects including: The threat of wildfire due to increased fuel levels, loss of vital wildlife habitat, impacts on watershed health and the higher potential for invasive species to thrive."

Plus, you can't just play pick up sticks and remove all the fallen trees. There's too many. It's hard enough just clearing the mess from mountain back roads and remote driveways and hiking trails. 

WHY THE INLAND WIND

 The rapid forward movement of Helene probably helped preserve the storm's strong winds well inland. And the high elevations likely captured the strong winds better than valleys, as a dying hurricane often maintains its high winds aloft better than near the surface. 

The mountains were high enough to be exposed to those upper level winds. While valleys were comparatively calm, the mountains were being blasted by 80 to 100 mph winds. 

Former hurricanes can hang on to their wind energy well inland, especially as these interact with other weather systems. 

And yes, the chances are low, but here in Vermont we can lose much of our forests if the wrong hurricane takes the wrong path. 

It's happened before, in the Great New England hurricane of 1938. The Category 3 hurricane came ashore on Long Island and near New Haven, Connecticut and moved rapidly northwestward from about Brattleboro to Burlington. 

Its fast forward speed, and the fact that its winds were most intense over and east of the center decimated Vermont sugar bushes. Some estimates say half of Vermont's' maple trees blew over or were uprooted.

We even had a mini-instance this past summer of a former hurricane trekking inland and raising havoc with Vermont's trees.  

Hurricane Debby made landfall near Steinhatchee, Florida before dawn on August 5. Its remnants moved northeastward through central New York and clipped the northwest corner of Vermont on August 9. We were just in the correct spot for the Debby remains to transfer its remaining strong winds aloft down to the surface, especially in the  Champlain Valley.

Winds gusted past 60 mph, causing quite a lot of tree, power line and even structural damage. 

NORTH CAROLINA'S SETUP

The North Carolina Forest Service said most of the damage appears to be from what looked like downbursts or microbursts. That might be a symptom of intense upper level winds being "grabbed" by either topography or thunderstorms embedded in the overall wind field.

The topography of mountainous western North Carolina helped contribute to the areas of worst damage. 

Per the Washington Post:

"The same rugged topography that sent floodwaters racing through valleys compounded the wind's destructive power. Ridges acted like walls to a funnel, allowing winds to concentrate and strengthen. As they hit east-facing slopes, they were then pushed uphill, accelerating as they converged at the top of each peak."

Intense hurricane winds are almost unheard of as far inland as the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. So trees there evolved in such a way that they don't tolerate such intense winds. They're not like pine forests near the hurricane-prone coasts, which are rooted in ways to brace their roots so they don't pull up. The pine branches and trunks are flexible so they often bend but not break in hurricane winds. 

The broad deciduous tree leaves in the mountains each act like little sails, pulling the tree in the winds until it topples. Those coastal pine trees have needles that don't catch the wind so much. 

The blasted forests of North Carolina might well be the longest lasting legacy of Helene.  It'll probably take a few years to patch up all the roads, rebuild homes and businesses that can be rebuilt, and for life to return to some semblance of normal.

But it will take decades to regrow the hardest hit forests. Many people living there will never again fully see the forests that had been part of their lives for decades.

 Videos:

First video is an interview of a woman whose family huddled in their high elevation house above Asheville, North Carolina as almost the entire forest around them blew down within an hour and a half. In the video, it's interesting to see that depending on which way the hillsides face, the forest destruction was either  complete or minor.

 In this video, it looks like wind got momentum going downhill,  kind of like the damaging downslope winds we sometimes see in Vermont on the western slopes of the Green Mountains. 

Very luckily, the trees fell in such a way that the house miraculously suffered only minor damage. Click on this link to watch and hear the wild story, or if you see the image below, click on that. 

Drone footage by Aaron Rigsby via AccuWeather shows areas of terrible forest destruction in North Carolina next to areas of beautiful autumn foliage. The video taken on October 22 shows the capriciousness of the timber damage in the western Carolina mountains. Again, click on this link to view, or if you see the image below, click on that. 

More excellent aerial shots by Aaron Rigsby. Click on this link or if you see the image below, click on that. 

 

Hot Times In The Arctic: Annual Report Card Shows Big Changes Affecting Entire World

The Arctic got at best a D- in NOAA's annual Arctic report
card that takes a look at how climate change is affecting
the top of the world. Remember, what goes on in the
Arctic does not stay in the Arctic .

 Most of the world has had a really hot year in this age of climate change. 

Relatively speaking, the Arctic was arguably the most out of whack, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's annual Arctic Report Card, which was released Tuesday. 

The main takeaway from this year's edition: The Arctic is warming almost four times faster than the world as a whole, and had their hottest summer since at least 1900,

According to NPR:

"'The Arctic is now more relevant to us that it has ever been before,' said NOAA administrator Rick Spinrad. 'In many cases, what we're seeing is - by a few years - the kinds of impacts that we're going to see elsewhere in the country.'

Climate change in the Arctic doesn't just offer a view of the future. It also directly influences worldwide changes across ecosystems, from sea-level rise, to new weather patterns to altered wildlife migrations. 

As Spinrad put it,' what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic."

The report has plenty of examples of how warming in the Arctic is screwing with people who live near the upper reaches of the Earth, and everybody elsewhere. 

The Arctic had its hottest summer on record and its sixth warmest year on record. Despite the summer heat, the Arctic "only" had its sixth lowest sea ice extent on record.  That was because some pockets of the Arctic were relatively cool, like the East Siberian Sea and areas of ice near Alaska. That slowed the ice melt in the summer a little. 

Greenland lost 150 billion tons of ice. That's bad because Greenland is the second biggest source of global sea level rise. One mitigating factor became apparent this year. A warmer Arctic means a wetter Arctic. At least most of the time. That means it snowed more than usual in Greenland this year. The extra snow ensured that the loss of Greenland ice was less than the recent average. 

It's worth noting that the peak high point of Greenland's ice sheet, 10,000 feet above sea level, got above freezing this summer for only the fifth time on record. 

Worldwide commerce is being affected by a warming Arctic, or better or worse. As the Washington Post tells us:

"The Northwest Passage, which allows ships to pass between the Atlantic and Pacific archipelago, was relatively ice free by late August....The Northwest Passage has long been an object of fascination as a means to dramatically reduce shipping distances and costs, and especially since 2007, when dramatic melting first opened it up."

Shipping companies are really taking notice of this. Early in my lifetime, it was quite a laughable idea that the Northwest Passage would be a viable shipping route. How times change with climate change. 

Wildfires, of all things, are becoming increasingly common in the Arctic.  As I've already reported, most of Canada was seemingly on fire during 2023. That includes the far north of that nation.

Sure, as noted, the Arctic is by and large getting wetter, but the droughts in between the rains are also getting worse. 

Per the Washington Post: 

"More than 90 percent of the 11 million acres that burned across Canada through the end of October was in the Northwest Territories, according to the report. Data from the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service released Tuesday showed that Canada accounted for 23 percent of global wildfire carbon emissions this year."

Climate change is making Arctic salmon populations weird. That's important because that's the livelihood of many people in the Arctic. 

Says NPR: 

It'll be interesting, and probably alarming to see what happens in the next 12 months up in the Arctic. El Nino is helping to supercharge climate change, at least temporarily. 

Though I'm sure there will be record warmth up there this winter, it won't matter too much quite yet because it will still be too cold for appreciable warming.

But a warm winter would make less ice for than normal, setting the stage for even lower sea ice extent next summer. Greenland remains a wildcard. I wonder if huge heat waves - at least by their standards - will cause even greater ice loss than in recent years. 

Remember the quote cited above: What goes on the Arctic doesn't stay in the Arctic. It's part of the reason we in Vermont choked on wildfire smoke last summer. Gawd knows what a hot Arctic will bring us next year. 

Climate Change: New York City Now Considered "Subtropical"

Want to go to a nice subtropical location this winter?

Try New York City.  

Springtime in Vermont. It's earlier now than'
it used to be, largely because of climate change
By the way, New York City is now "subtropical"

Yep, back in July, the New York Times reported that the climate classification for the Big Apple was now 

Says the New York Times:

"New York City, after years of being considered a humid continental climate, now sits within the humid subtropical climate zone. The classification requires that summers average above 72 degrees Fahrenheit - which New York's have had since 1927 - and for winter months to stay above 27 degrees Fahrenheit, on average The city has met that requirement for the last five years, despite the occasional cold snap. And the winters are only getting warmer."

Yes, at first glance, this is just an esoteric shift mainly of interest to climate geeks. This climate reclassification, though, is not limited to weather statistics. It reflect in what we notice around us.

The ecosystem has changed due to the Earth's warming. It's noticeable in New York City. It's also noticeable here in Vermont, though nobody is suggesting the Green Mountain State is anything close to subtropical.

As the New York Times points out, you can't exactly plant palmetto trees in Brooklyn and expect them to survive. The Northeast still gets wintertime Arctic blasts, after all.

But people in New York are noticing cherry trees blooming in March, fig trees surviving winters to later bear fruit

As the New York Times notes, crepe myrtles are thriving in New York now. The used to grow no taller than a shrub, because winter cold would nip them. Now, some of them are 20 feet tall. 

The downside to all this is that storms are also more intense in a changing climate, and invasive plants and bugs that used to die off in cold winters survive to cause more damage.

In a grander scheme, ecosystems are now slowly changing everywhere. For instance, southern oaks are creeping northward along the Eastern Seaboard, and so are sugar maples.

In the Mid-Atlantic States, and in the New York metro area, sugar maples are struggling because they need harsh cold to "winter off" before spring arrives. Sugar maples also don't do well in consistently very hot weather, though they're OK during brief heat waves.

Of course, sugar maples are near and dear to us here in Vermont. The Green Mountain State is the nation's top maple syrup producer, and those gorgeous maples are a centerpiece of our storied fall foliage season..

According to a 2016 Maplesource blog article, citing data from UVM's Proctor Maple Research Center, the Vermont maple sugaring season starts on average 8.3 days earlier than it did five decades ago and ends 11.6 days earlier than 50 years ago.

In other words, the maple season is getting shorter as our weather warms. 

Anecdotally, I notice differences in Vermont compared to when I was a kid, also five decades ago. In the spring, daffodils blooms flourish in mid and late April.  We often had to wait until early May to enjoy them years ago. Fall foliage season is mid-October now in the valleys, not the around the first of October, like it was a few decades ago.

It snows more than it used to in the winter, but that snow dissolves in more frequent January and February thaws. I used to be able to count on not sweating through oppressive heat waves after Labor Day. Now, most Septembers feature at least one humid or hot spell. (One such spell is likely during the second half of next week).

The changes happen slowly, and we don't notice them right away. But then, decades later, we find ourselves, quoting an old Talking Heads song: "And you may ask yourself, well/How did I get here?"