Posts overstate emissions impact of Canadian wildfires

"You can TRY all that electric car, solar power, zero emissions BS all you want but the facts remain: When Mother Nature is done with us, WE'LL KNOW IT!," says musician Dave Bray in a June 7, 2023 Instagram post.

The post shares an image of New York's Statue of Liberty surrounded by smoke and text saying: "The amount of carbon that wildfires have put into the atmosphere in the last 3 days ... is more carbon than what the entire, post-industrial, human race has put out in the last 100 years."

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Screenshot of an Instagram post taken June 28, 2023

Similar claims circulated elsewhere on Instagram.

Human-induced climate change is intensifying wildfire seasons, scientists say -- and this year's blazes are Canada's largest ever recorded.

Although they have darkened Canadian and US skies with smoke and haze that contain particles harmful to people sensitive to pollution, experts say the comparison made in the posts is inaccurate.

"There is in no way that the Canadian fire emissions would be comparable to the fossil emissions since industry evolution," Junjie Liu, principal scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told AFP. "Even if the whole boreal forest were to be burned, it is not comparable to the fossil emissions during the last 100 years."

According to Joel Thornton, chair of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington, "nearly all vegetation on land across the entire planet would have to burn in a few days to put a similar amount of carbon into the atmosphere as that which has been emitted by human activities burning fossil fuels over the past 100 years."

Mark Parrington, senior scientist at Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), also said the claims did not add up.

"The current fire emissions from Canada for the year-to-date total is approximately 170 megatonnes of carbon (equivalent to about 620 megatonnes of CO2)," he said on June 30 -- a record amount for the region in recent years. But he noted that is still about 61 times less than global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels in 2021 alone.

Human activity produced 36.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide in 2021, according to the International Energy Agency.

"This is a completely absurd statement that is not based on any facts," Werner Kurz, senior research scientist at the Canadian Forest Service, said of the claim shared on social media.

The worst fire season in Canada in 2021 represented "about 43 percent of the emissions from all other sectors" of the country that same year, he told AFP.

Global carbon emissions from fossil fuels have significantly increased since 1900, according to data from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

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A screenshot taken June 30, 2023 shows an EPA graphic illustrating the increase of global carbon dioxide emissions in the last century

Similar false comparisons have spread in climate-skeptic circles for years. More of AFP's reporting on environment and climate misinformation is available here.