When dense clouds of smoke from wildfires in Canada last smothered large parts of North America in 2023, the hazy skies were a shocking new phenomenon for many residents.
But climate change threatens to make it a recurring problem.
“What we’re seeing here is a dramatic increase in wildfires in North America,” said Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist and professor at the University of Michigan. As long as humans continue to burn fossil fuels, Dr. Overpeck said, global temperatures will increase, droughts will worsen, and there will be bigger, more frequent wildfires and smoke events.
The haze hanging over much of the United States today, Dr. Overpeck said, is “the harbinger of worse times to come.”
For years, burning forests in Indonesia have sent a thick haze across Southeast Asia that can ground flights in Kuala Lumpur and envelope Singapore in smog.
In 2022, researchers found that the number of people in the United States experiencing an “extreme smoke day” increased by 27 times over the previous decade. That trend shows no signs of stopping.
The summer wildfire season in North America has already grown longer, Dr. Overpeck said, extending later into the spring and fall. And as a “wave of aridity” and extreme heat dries forests that haven’t yet burned, he said, blazes will move farther east and the smoke over eastern cities will “become more routine.”
Every county on the U.S. mainland now experiences degraded air quality because of wildfire smoke at least 16 times each year, according to Climate Central. The group also found that exposure to wildfire smoke on a per-person basis was on average four times higher between 2020 and 2024 than it was between 2006 and 2019.
Air pollution from wildfire smoke caused nearly 164,000 deaths in the 15 years leading up to 2020, and approximately 15,000 of the fatalities were a direct result of climate change. And if the current rate of global warming persists, exposure to wildfire smoke will kill an estimated 70,000 people each year by 2050, according to research published last year.
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