Canada’s wildfires have burnt an area 16 times larger than normal

“Blame Canada”, read the front page of the New York Post, when smoke from wildfires in Quebec blanketed the east coast of the United States last week. The average air quality of the country was its worst in a decade. New York was for a time the most polluted major city in the world. What had previously been a problem in Canada—of enormous wildfires—quickly became one in the United States, when abnormal winds pushed plumes south of the border. Since then, the winds have changed, sparing the populous east coast from smoke. But the blazes in Canada are still raging.