Canada's 2023 wildfires burned huge chunks of forest, spewing far more heat-trapping gas than planes

WASHINGTON (AP) — Catastrophic Canadian warming-fueled wildfires last year pumped more heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air than India did by burning fossil fuels, setting ablaze an area of forest larger than West Virginia, new research found.

Scientists at the World Resources Institute and the University of Maryland calculated how devastating the impacts of the months-long fires in Canada in 2023 that sullied the air around large parts of the globe. They figured it put 3.28 billion tons (2.98 billion metric tons) of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air, according to a study update published in Thursday's Global Change Biology. The update is not peer-reviewed, but the original study was.

The fire spewed nearly four times the carbon emissions as airplanes do in a year, study authors said. It's about the same amount of carbon dioxide that 647 million cars put in the air in a year, based on U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data.

Forests “remove a lot of carbon from the atmosphere and that gets stored in their branches, their trunks, their leaves and kind of in the ground as well. So when they burn all the carbon that's stored within them gets released back into the atmosphere,” said study lead author James MacCarthy, a research associate with WRI's Global Forest Watch.

When and if trees grow back much of that can be recovered, MacCarthy said, adding “it definitely does have an impact on the global scale in terms of the amount of emissions that were produced in 2023.”

MacCarthy and colleagues calculated that the forest burned totaled 29,951 square miles (77,574 square kilometers), which is six times more than the average from 2001 to 2022. The wildfires in Canada made up 27% of global tree cover loss last year, usually it's closer to 6%, MacCarthy's figures show.

These are far more than regular forest fires, but researchers focused only on tree cover loss, which is a bigger effect, said study co-author Alexandra Tyukavina, a geography professor at the University of Maryland.

“The loss of that much forest is a very big deal, and very worrisome,” said Syracuse University geography and environment professor Jacob Bendix, who wasn't part of the study. “Although the forest will eventually grow back and sequester carbon in doing so, that is a process that will take decades at a minimum, so that there is a quite substantial lag between addition of atmospheric carbon due to wildfire and the eventual removal of at least some of it by the regrowing forest. So, over the course of those decades, the net impact of the fires is a contribution to climate warming.”

It's more than just adding to heat-trapping gases and losing forests, there were health consequences as well, Tyukavina said.

“Because of these catastrophic fires, air quality in populated areas and cities was affected last year,” she said, mentioning New York City's smog-choked summer. More than 200 communities with about 232,000 residents had to be evacuated, according to another not-yet-published or peer-reviewed study by Canadian forest and fire experts.

One of the authors of the Canadian study, fire expert Mike Flannigan at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia, puts the acreage burned at twice what MacCarthy and Tyukavina do.

“The 2023 fire season in Canada was (an) exceptional year in any time period,” Flannigan, who wasn't part of the WRI study, said in an email. “I expect more fire in our future, but years like 2023 will be rare.”

Flannigan, Bendix, Tyukavina and MacCarthy all said climate change played a role in Canada's big burn. A warmer world means more fire season, more lightning-caused fires and especially drier wood and brush to catch fire “associated with increased temperature,” Flannigan wrote. The average May to October temperature in Canada last year was almost 4 degrees (2.2 degrees Celsius) warmer than normal, his study found. Some parts of Canada were 14 to 18 degrees (8 to 10 degrees Celsius) hotter than average in May and June, MaCarthy said.

There's short-term variability within trends, so it's hard to blame one specific year and area burned on climate change and geographic factors play a role, still “there is no doubt that climate change is the principal driver of the global increases in wildfire," Bendix said in an email.

With the world warming from climate change, Tyukavina said, “the catastrophic years are probably going to be happening more often and we are going to see those spikier years more often.”

Read more of AP’s climate coverage at http://www.apnews.com/climate-and-environment

Follow Seth Borenstein on X at @borenbears

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FILE - The McDougall Creek wildfire burns on the mountainside above houses in West Kelowna, British Columbia, Aug. 18, 2023. Catastrophic Canadian warming-fueled wildfires last year pumped more heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air than India did by burning fossil fuels, new research found. (Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press via AP, File)

FILE - New York City is visible in a haze-filled sky due to wildfires in Canada, photographed from the Staten Island Ferry, June 7, 2023, in New York. Catastrophic Canadian warming-fueled wildfires last year pumped more heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air than India did by burning fossil fuels, new research found. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura, File)

FILE - Smoke fills the air as Pat Manzuik and his wife Trevor use a paddleboat to get to shore after being given a boat ride by good samaritan Christy Dewalt, back right, back to their home they were evacuated from due to the Lower East Adams Lake wildfire, in Scotch Creek, Canada, Aug. 20, 2023. Catastrophic Canadian warming-fueled wildfires last year pumped more heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air than India did by burning fossil fuels, new research found. (Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press via AP, File)

FILE - A wildfire burns south of Enterprise, Northwest Territories, Aug. 17, 2023. Catastrophic Canadian warming-fueled wildfires last year pumped more heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air than India did by burning fossil fuels, new research found. (Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press via AP, File)

FILE - A person rides a bicycle on a smokey day due to wildfires in Fort McMurray, Canada, Sep. 2, 2023. Catastrophic Canadian warming-fueled wildfires last year pumped more heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air than India did by burning fossil fuels, new research found. (AP Photo/Victor R. Caivano, File)

FILE - Wildfire evacuees get supplies and get checked in at the evacuation center in Edmonton, Alberta, May 7, 2023. Catastrophic Canadian warming-fueled wildfires last year pumped more heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air than India did by burning fossil fuels, new research found. (Jason Franson/The Canadian Press via AP, File)

FILE - Smoke from the McDougall Creek wildfire fills the air as people take in the view of Okanagan Lake from Tugboat Beach, in Kelowna, British Columbia, Aug. 18, 2023. Catastrophic Canadian warming-fueled wildfires last year pumped more heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air than India did by burning fossil fuels, new research found. (Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press via AP, File)

Louisiana’s Republican attorney general was indicted Thursday on criminal charges by a grand jury in New Orleans, accused of trying to intimidate local officials who fought a law enacted by GOP legislators to overhaul the local courts.

Attorney General Liz Murrill told eight New Orleans officials, including Mayor Helena Moreno and District Attorney Jason Williams, that they could face removal from their jobs for opposing the law. It eliminated the position of Orleans Parish criminal court clerk after a man who spent decades in prison for a wrongful conviction was elected to the post with 68% of the vote.

Legislators approved the law at Republican Gov. Jeff Landry’s urging just days before Calvin Duncan was to take office in May. Duncan’s supporters saw it as a move by a majority white conservative Legislature to thwart the will of voters in a predominantly Black Democratic hub in a red state.

Duncan was a jailhouse lawyer who later graduated from law school. He founded a nonprofit dedicated to expanding incarcerated people’s access to the court system and was the driving force behind a 2020 U.S. Supreme Court decision that ended nonunanimous jury convictions. Murrill and other Louisiana officials have long denied his innocence even though he is listed on the National Registry of Exonerations.

Bond for Murrill was set at $400,000 on Thursday, according to court records. Landry slammed the indictment in a social media post on Thursday, promising to pardon Murrill “as fast as the law allows.”

“The criminal justice system is a circus at its finest in Orleans and we will not have any of that!” he wrote on X, where he called the system a “Kangaroo court.”

The Republican Attorneys General Association called the indictment “as outrageous as it is dangerous.”

The GOP group said in making her statements that Murrill was simply “issuing a legal opinion and warning public officials about the law” as part of her official duties. Murrill’s critics saw it as an attempt to intimidate them into accepting the law.

Local officials had a swearing-in ceremony for Duncan on the steps of the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court two weeks before he was to take office — while lawmakers still were considering the measure to eliminate his job, combining its duties with those of the civil court clerk.

The City Council also sought to oust the civil court clerk in May and set a special election for November to fill the combined job — and give Duncan a chance to claim it. That prompted Murrill to warn local officials that they could lose their offices for violating the state “usurper” laws, which forbid support for an unauthorized officeholder.

Moreno, a Democrat, said in a statement that the indictment is “a matter for the courts” and did not directly address the allegations against Murrill.

“My focus, as always, remains on fulfilling the responsibilities the people of New Orleans elected me to carry out,” Moreno said.

Assistant District Attorney Laurie White, who is prosecuting the case, addressed reporters after the indictment.

“We’re very interested in elected officials in New Orleans not being intimidated or threatened by letter or any other way,” White said.

She said she expected the case will be “very simple” and “very open and shut.”

In response to Landry's promise to pardon Murrill, she said, "Let’s get her convicted, and then he can pardon her.”

Those who backed the law eliminating Duncan’s elected position argue that it promotes government efficiency and tries to improve a dysfunctional court system in Orleans Parish. They also said the offices of criminal and civil clerks of courts are combined in other parishes.

But Duncan has said he believes state officials were retaliating against him.

He sought compensation from the state over his imprisonment but withdrew his petition after Murrill threatened to go after his law license because he referred to hisself as exonerated. She also demanded during his campaign that he stop describing himself that way or face “further action.”

Duncan spent more than 28 years in prison in connection with a fatal shooting during a robbery in 1981.

The night before a 2011 hearing to consider new evidence, prosecutors offered to reduce Duncan’s sentence to the time he’d already served in prison if he pleaded guilty to manslaughter and armed robbery. Duncan took the deal and was freed but didn’t give up on clearing his name.

In 2021, a judge agreed that Duncan had been unjustly convicted and vacated his sentence altogether. Landry and Murrill have pointed to the 2011 plea deal in objecting to Duncan calling himself exonerated.

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This story has been corrected to show that the title of prosecutor Laurie White is assistant district attorney, not assistant attorney general.

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Associated Press reporter Jack Brook contributed from New Orleans.

FILE - Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill speaks with attendees during an election night watch party for U.S. Senate candidate Rep. Julia Letlow, R-La., May 16, 2026, in Baton Rouge, La. (AP Photo/Matthew Hinton, File)