Never mind the Anthropocene. After a temporary bout of forest fires the New York Times Climate Forward has called the present age the “Pyrocene”, linking to a piece in which David Wallace-Wells thunders: “The skies above New York are now cleared of smoke, after several grim and portentous days when parents worried over whether to keep their children indoors and the middle-aged worried over the health and safety of their parents and plenty of others endured just a throat-burning dread, with déjà vu indistinguishable from environmental foreboding.” Yes, indistinguishable because they treat every bit of bad weather with the same boilerplate hysteria.

Wallace-Wells gets back to the same point he always arrives at: we are all going to die:

“Per-person smoke exposure in the United States has surged over the last decade, now four times as high as it was between 2006 and 2019. And even before the apocalyptic Canadian wildfire summer of 2023 – when Americans on the Eastern Seaboard were introduced to the eerie orange skies they had previously believed only possible in fire-prone places like California and Australia – more Americans were dying of wildfire smoke-related deaths east of the Mississippi than west of it.”

But how can it be, if fires are decreasing? Calling something the Pyrocene doesn’t make it one. So he goes all kitchen sink, throwing in “thousand-year floods in the Texas Hill Country” long infamous for floods, “European heat waves that have historically come once every 26,000 years but have grown a 100 times [sic] more likely over the last couple of decades” (someone’s been smoking World Weather Attribution) and of course:

“oppressive smoke events blanketing the East Coast: However unusual the weather patterns that carry ash and particulates from Canadian megafires to American megalopolises to the southeast have been in the past, those fires are going to be common enough that we’ll have to get used to encountering them in our eyes, our throats and our lungs. Our emergency rooms, too.”

Wanna bet? And how does anyone think they know how often Europe experienced heat waves in 8,000 BC? We do concede that it was unlikely to experience temperatures comparable to the present when it was under a kilometer or more of ice 20,000 years ago. But it seems a tendentious measure. (And even there, there is at least some evidence of brief hot spells during glaciations; see for instance Professor Gernot Rabeder’s Chapter 17, “The Conturines Cave in the Dolomites”, in the Canary in a Climate World vol 3 other contributions to which we are discussing in a series in these newsletters.)

Also undeterred, something called “New Mode” informs us that the Canadian state broadcaster the CBC is in some sort of conspiracy to hide the climate connection:

“We are facing a climate crisis across Canada right now as millions are choking on smoke and running from wildfires. Yet when we tune into news programs like CBC’s The National, it’s as if the out of control forest fires have no relationship to the burning of fossil fuels. We can’t address climate change if the media refuses to connect the dots between the burning of fossil fuels and the lived reality of the climate change it produces. This is extremely urgent. Climate change is being felt as never before and people across Canada need to understand the cause before the forest fires leave the headlines.”

And here we thought the CBC was left-wing and climate-obsessed. Mind you we also hadn’t realized millions were choking and fleeing. Not good activities to combine, we might add. But anyway, you can send their form letter to the CBC if you want all climate all the time. Before the forest fires leave the headlines because… um… the whole country was on fire. Or wasn’t. Or something.

The Carney administration leaped into committee: “Prime Minister Carney convenes the Incident Response Group”. And into rhetorical overdrive:

“Canada is home to 28% of the world’s boreal forest, and extreme heat waves and record-breaking dry conditions are resulting in one of the most intense wildfire seasons in our nation’s history. They noted the devastating fires in Northwestern Ontario this month, where over 3,000 people from more than 12 communities, including a number of First Nations communities, have already been evacuated.”

Record-breaking dry conditions? How were those measured? One of the most intense? As we’ve pointed out before, historical data show the number of fires declining for decades and the area burned doing not much, until a few bad years in the very recent past on the latter metric. But three years is not a climate trend and the number of fires has not increased which does make it a bit odd and raises the question whether Canadian governments’ fire-fighting ability has collapsed along with pretty much all their other abilities.

Whatever the reason, the recent record for number was set in 1989, waaaaay above anything since climate change hit. And it was also the third-highest for area even with 2023 and 2025 (but not 2026). And it may be that the PM doesn’t think our “history” goes back very far because the Oct. 7, 1825 Miramichi fire alone burned 1.2 million hectares, albeit a quarter were in Maine. A fire in the Saguenay in May 1870 burned 0.4 million hectares. And so on. Including fires in Saskatchewan and Alberta that merged in May 1919 into a conflagration that may have incinerated over 2.8 million hectares. And as the last was post-Confederation it must count as our history.

If only they had Google on their computers they’d know fires smoke and always have. If only.