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A burning issue
Across North America and beyond, climate change is making wildfires and smoke worse and worse, write SETH BORENSTEIN and MELINA WALLING
Smoke from a wildfire in the Columbia River Gorge in Washington State rises in the background in this view Hood River, Ore, Sunday, July 2, 2023

IT WAS a smell that invoked a memory. Both for Emily Kuchlbauer in North Carolina and Ryan Bomba in Chicago. It was smoke from wildfires, the odour of an increasingly hot and occasionally on-fire world.

Kuchlbauer had flashbacks to the surprise of soot coating her car three years ago when she was a recent college graduate in San Diego. 

Bomba had deja vu from San Francisco, where the air was so thick with smoke people had to mask up. They figured they left wildfire worries behind in California, but a Canada that’s burning from sea to warming sea brought one of the more visceral effects of climate change home to places that once seemed immune.

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