Lori Daniels

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. …Bernie Moreno, a Republican senator from Ohio, said he will introduce legislation to sanction Canada for the “atrocity” of not managing its forests properly. Such threats have been met with shock in Canada, where thousands of people have been evacuated from fires that have badly burned remote towns. …Attacking Canada over the fires is “unfounded, uninformed and even insensitive to people losing homes and fire fighters putting their lives on the line”, said Lori Daniels, an ecologist and wildfire expert at the University of British Columbia.