California and the West aren’t alone; Canada’s northern forests are on fire, too

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.