The Wisconsin Examiner in “Wildfire smoke blankets Wisconsin; advocates stress need to confront climate change” and the Investigative Post in “Why smoke is getting in your eyes,” both claim the current wildfires in Canadian and the smoke they are sending to the United States are due to climate change. These claims are false, and the articles misleading. While smoke from wildfires is real and the potential health impacts merit attention, there is no evidence that this particular wildfire season is due to climate change or that climate change is making wildfires worse. Instead, the articles ignore both the historical record and the broad scientific evidence, relying instead on advocacy-group talking points to make a connection between wildfires, drifting smoke, and climate change.
The Wisconsin Examiner’s article is especially revealing. After describing the smoke and its health impacts, it quickly pivots to quotes from environmental advocacy organizations such as Clean Wisconsin and Midwest Environmental Advocates, both of which insist that climate change is making wildfires more frequent or severe.
“Increasingly smoky skies underscore the importance of a rapid transition to clean energy rather than building more polluting fossil fuel infrastructure that further contributes to climate change,” Dr. Paul Matthewson, science program director for Clean Wisconsin, said in a statement.
“The wildfire smoke blanketing Wisconsin is a reminder that climate change is not a distant threat,” said Peg Shaeffer, spokesperson for Midwest Environmental Advocates.
These claims are presented as though they describe established fact, grounded in real-world data. They don’t. Indeed, its is misdirection since wildfires and the smoke they produce have nothing whatsoever to due with emissions from power plants or automobiles.
The smoke blanketing parts of the Midwest originated from lightning-caused fires in northern Minnesota and Canada. Smoke travels wherever the wind takes it. That is a feature of prevailing meteorological conditions, not evidence that greenhouse gases caused the fires in the first place. The media has increasingly adopted a simple formula: wildfire equals climate change.
Unfortunately, for their claims, nature is far more complicated.
The first graph, showing accumulated wildfire data for this and previous years, from climate scientist Bjorn Lomborg, Ph.D, tells an interesting story that readers did not see in either publication.
The data shows that thus far 2026 has experienced the lowest cumulative burned area across the Americas in at least the past decade. Oddly, the remarkably quiet 2026 fire season is not making headlines, but the smoke from the fires that are burning is being blamed on climate change.
In fact, it just isn’t the Americas experiencing this lower than normal for the 2026 fire season, as Lomborg reveals, it is the entire world, as is displayed in the second figure below.
Every continent is below average, and Africa, Americas, and Europe are at record lows for the date. With the media only showing areas that are burning, it leaves readers badly misinformed. The stories imply that wildfire seasons are getting worse, but the opposite is actually true.
The longer historical record is even more damaging to the “climate change is causing worse wildfires” narrative.
The third figure, seen below, is based on data published by the Royal Society from more than 800 fire-scar sites across western North America. It shows that large wildfires were substantially more common before about 1900 than they have been during the modern era. Fire frequency declined dramatically with European settlement, livestock grazing, organized fire suppression, and changes in land management.
populations, and subsequently organized and mechanized fire fighting by government agencies.
In other words, today’s forests are not burning at historically unprecedented levels. Quite the opposite. Much of North America experienced more frequent fire activity centuries before increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions became an issue.
That conclusion is consistent with the broader scientific literature.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded in its Sixth Assessment Report that there is low confidence in global trends of fire weather and burned area, and the report does not conclude that climate change has produced a worldwide increase in wildfire occurrence.
Climate at a Glance reaches the same conclusion for the United States. The data show no long-term increase in U.S. wildfire trends once the full historical record is considered. The apparent increase often cited by media outlets begins in the early 1980s only because earlier federal fire records were excluded. When the longer record is examined, today’s fire activity falls well within historical experience. Neither article mentions any of this.
Instead, readers are treated to emotionally charged photographs of smoke-filled skies followed by quotes asserting that climate change is responsible. That may make for compelling advocacy, but it is poor science, and even poorer journalism.
Wildfires occur because several factors come together at the same time.
Weather and wind matters. Ignition sources (lightning, accidental, or arson) matter, and forest management, insect infestations, and decades of aggressive fire suppression matter, because they have all resulted in a large increase in fuel load, allowing forests to become unnaturally dense.
These factors are all contributors to wildfire ignition, spread, and severity.
Reducing every wildfire to “climate change” ignores nearly the variables that actually determine how and where a fire starts, how intensely it burns, and whether it spreads.
Ironically, these two articles focus on the smoke rather than fire.
Smoke is a function of atmospheric transport. A season with relatively modest burned area can still produce severe smoke episodes if prevailing winds carry the plume toward major population centers. Conversely, enormous fires burning in remote regions may generate little public attention if the smoke disperses or the fire goes out before reaching a population center.
Smoke over Wisconsin tells us where the wind blew, it does not tell us why the fire started.
The public deserves better than this increasingly predictable pattern of reporting. Every wildfire season now follows the same script: smoke appears, advocacy groups are quoted, climate change is declared the culprit, and facts and historical evidence are nowhere in evidence.
The real story isn’t that smoke drifted hundreds of miles from Canadian wildfires. Wildfire smoke commonly does that and has throughout history, as was discussed at Climate Realism previously, here and here, for example. The real story is that despite one of the lowest cumulative burned-area totals across America in more than a decade, portions of the media still insist on treating every smoky sky as proof of climate catastrophe.
That isn’t honest journalism, it is advocacy disguised as news coverage.
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.
Originally posted at ClimateREALISM
