Scientists decry Trump’s ‘blame game’ after he claims Canada ‘poisoning’ US air

A person rides a scooter in Brooklyn Bridge Park as wildfire smoke from Canada causes hazy conditions in New York City on 16 July. Photograph: Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images View image in fullscreen A person rides a scooter in Brooklyn Bridge Park as wildfire smoke from Canada causes hazy conditions in New York City on 16 July. Photograph: Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images Scientists decry Trump’s ‘blame game’ after he claims Canada ‘poisoning’ US air Trump told Mark Carney ‘you got to stop these fires from coming in’ as experts say wildfires symptom of climate crisis Scientists have reacted with incredulity after Donald Trump accused Canada of “poisoning” the US’s air with smoke billowing from a slew of forest fires and threatened sanctions upon the country’s northern neighbor. The US president has said that he raised the issue of smoke wafting into the US from nearly 1,000 Canadian wildfires with Mark Carney, the country’s prime minister, at the weekend’s World Cup final. “I told him, you got to stop these fires from coming in and poisoning our air,” Trump said. “If we can help them, we’ll help them. But maybe they should pay us some damages or something, or we should do some tariffs.” Trump, who has previously advocated the “raking” and “cleaning” of forests to prevent major conflagrations, this week announced 50% tariffs upon Canada, a long-term US ally that he has previously threatened with annexation. The US is being “unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted and unhealthy air”, Trump claimed last week. With palls of wildfire smoke causing unhealthy, hazy skies in cities including New York, Washington DC, Detroit and Toronto in recent weeks, some Republicans in Congress have issued further threats against Canada. Bernie Moreno, a Republican senator from Ohio, said he will introduce legislation to sanction Canada for the “atrocity” of not managing its forests properly. View image in fullscreen Donald Trump walks ahead of Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum and Canada’s Mark Carney at the World Cup final in East Rutherford, New Jersey, on 19 June. Photograph: Alex Livesey/Danehouse/Getty Images Such threats have been met with shock in Canada, where thousands of people have been evacuated from fires that have badly burned remote towns. More than 8.1m acres (3.3m hectares) have been consumed by fires across Canada’s vast, mostly unpopulated boreal forests, a steep increase on the long-term average . Such fierce wildfires are a symptom of the climate crisis rather than a lack of management, experts warn, with the current blazes worsened by the recent severe heat dome that expanded from the US into Canada. The world is rapidly heating up due to the burning of fossil fuels, a process that Trump has actively sought to accelerate . “This is like crashing into the car in front of you because you were speeding and tailgating, and then demanding they pay for the damage to your headlights,” said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, of