Skip to main content

Smoke in NYC result of Canadian wildfires, not geoengineering | Fact check

Isabella Fertel   Paste BN

The claim: Smoke in New York City result of solar geoengineering, not Canadian wildfires

A June 18 Facebook video (direct link, archived link) shows an image of the Empire State Building in New York City blanketed by a thick haze.

“Canadian wildfire smoke, or Bill Gates’ ‘sun-dimming technology,’?” reads superimposed text included in the video. 

The social media user shared an identical post on Instagram that garnered more than 800 likes before it was deleted. Other versions of the post continue to circulate on Facebook and YouTube.

Follow us on Facebook! Like our page to get updates throughout the day on our latest debunks

Our rating: False

Multiple climate and air quality agencies confirmed that a significant amount of smoke from wildfires in Canada has periodically drifted down into the U.S. since early June, yielding poor air quality in parts of the country, including New York City. Researchers say geoengineering technology is not yet in use and is still being researched.

Multiple agencies confirm smoke in NYC due to wildfires 

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has announced multiple Air Quality Health Advisories for fine particulate matter impacting the New York City metropolitan area since June 6. 

Those advisories “are connected to the particulate matter from the Canadian Wildfires,” Jeff Wernick, a spokesperson for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, told Paste BN. 

Multiple other weather and climate agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, National Weather Service and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, have also reported the poor air quality in New York City – and other parts of the U.S. – is the result of smoke drifting south from Canadian wildfires. 

Agencies are able to use “satellite images of smoke plumes, weather models and air quality monitors on the ground” to confirm the source of the particulate matter affecting air quality, according to Shayla Powell, a spokesperson for the EPA. 

Fact check: Geoengineering technology not yet in use, despite posts to the contrary

Wildfire smoke can travel and contribute to air pollution thousands of miles from the fire’s origins, Powell told Paste BN in an email. 

Smoke from Canadian wildfires has continued to negatively impact the air quality of large swaths of the Midwest and East Coast since early June, including Detroit, Milwaukee, Boston, Washington D.C. and parts of South Carolina.  

As of July 11, Canada has more than 500 fires burning “out of control,” according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre.

Solar geoengineering technology doesn't exist yet

Billionaire Bill Gates has contributed funding to Harvard’s Solar Geoengineering Research program, as the post references. 

Solar geoengineering, one of the two broad categories of emerging climate intervention technology, aims to modify the amount of solar radiation absorbed and released by the Earth’s atmosphere.

“The idea is that dispersing aerosols – tiny particles – at high altitude would reflect a small fraction of incoming sunlight back to space and cool the planet, offsetting some global warming," Joshua Horton, a geoengineering research director at Harvard University, previously told Paste BN.

Fact check: False claim geoengineering is behind climate change

But this technology is still being developed and studied, Horton and Alan Robock, a climate science professor at Rutgers University, previously told Paste BN.  

Both scientists explained that much of the technology necessary to make it work does not yet exist, and neither was aware of any significant experiments or operations using geoengineering technology. 

Paste BN reached out to the Instagram user who shared the post but they did not provide any evidence to substantiate their claim. 

PolitiFact and Check Your Fact also debunked this claim.

Our fact-check sources:

Thank you for supporting our journalism. You can subscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or e-newspaper here.

Our fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.

Facebook Twitter Email