David J.T. Pedersen is a clean air advocate and a member of the Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment and the Bay Area Clean Air Coalition. Thomas F. Pedersen is a professor emeritus at the University of Victoria and author of The Carbon Tax Question (Harbour Publishing, 2024).

We are slow learners. Global warming is killing us; there is an avalanche of temperature data, model results — both as hindcasts that reconstruct the past and forecasts that portend a hotter future — and exhaustive statistical analyses that confirm this.

Examples are rife. In the record summer of 2003, Europe sweltered under a heatwave that pushed thermometer temperatures to levels not seen since well before Anders Celsius proposed his temperature scale three centuries ago.

Some 70,000 citizens, mostly elderly, perished in 2003 across Europe, their obituaries falling into what an actuary would call the “excess deaths” category. Heatstrokes and dehydration took their toll; those with compromised pulmonary function were on the front line. Urban heat-absorbing concrete apartment buildings that radiated heat all night, coupled with a near-absence of air conditioning, severely exacerbated the death rate.

Decades later, how has society responded? The simple answer: Not well. At least three heatwaves plagued Europe again this past summer. Analysis of public health and temperature records, publicly reported by the Grantham Institute in the U.K. on Sept. 17, indicates an “excess” heat-related body count this year of some 16,500 Europeans from June through August, with Italy (4,597) and Spain (2,841) being particularly in the crosshairs.

Installation of air conditioners and heat pumps — key, but not cheap, adaptation technologies — remains a work in progress. In the interim, urban elderly apartment dwellers in Europe remain highly vulnerable in the looming face of what can only be described as an acute public-health emergency, undeniably driven by global heating.

But there is another dimension to the global warming challenge that is at least equally troubling. Heatwaves that kill directly in largely urban settings have a second impact: They foster wildfires in forested rural and remote regions, and nowhere is that more true than in the vast forests of Canada.

It’s not the heat in this case that directly kills humans; it’s the smoke. More specifically, it is tiny particulate matter, termed PM2.5 (particles less than 2.5 millionths of a metre in size), that presents the primary........

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