Record heat meets record wildfires in Canada, and scientists say this is the new reality
An aerial view of wildfire of Tatkin Lake in British Columbia, Canada on July 10, 2023.
BC Wildfire Service | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
Record high temperatures and a record fire season are hitting Canada at the same time this summer, leading to an unprecedented combination of heat, fire and dangerous smoke plumes.
“I can’t emphasize enough just how terrifying this moment is on our planet. With global temperature records breaking and fires and floods raging around the world, our house is truly on fire,” Kristina Dahl, principal climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told CNBC.
Climate change, caused by greenhouse gas emissions, is making the planet hotter and also increasing the potency of the ingredients that are necessary for wildfires to burn. Even if humans stopped burning all fossil fuels today, the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere is going to continue heating the planet for decades to come.
“If I had a magic wand and said, ‘no more greenhouse gases being produced from human activities as of now,’ we will continue to warm for 30 to 50 years,” explained Michael Flannigan, the research chair for predictive services, emergency management and fire science at Thompson Rivers University British Columbia.
That means what’s happening now is unprecedented, but it’s also a harbinger of what’s coming.
“This is the new reality, not the new normal, because we’re on a downward spiral,” Flannigan told CNBC.
Record-breaking wildfires with no end in sight
On June 27, Canada surpassed the record set in 1989 for total area burned in one season when it reached 7.6 million hectares, or 18.8 million acres, a communications officer for Natural Resources Canada, told CNBC.
The total has since increased to 9.3 million hectares, or 23 million acres, which is about the size of South Carolina. The average is around 2.2 million hectares, or 5.4 million acres, or about the size of Massachusetts.
“The current wildfire season in Canada has been astounding and record breaking,” Dahl told CNBC.
Soon, the total amount of land burned this year will hit the equivalent of Maine, Flannigan said.
“We’re used to getting fires in the West, or the East, or in the north, or the central — but not the whole country at the same time,” Flannigan told CNBC.
An aerial view of wildfire of Tatkin Lake in British Columbia, Canada on July 10, 2023.
BC Wildfire Service | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
And the fire season is not even close to over. There are currently 908 active fires burning in Canada, and 576 of those are classified as “out of control,” according to data in a real time dashboard operate by the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre as of 2:15pm EST on Thursday.
“I’m not sure where we’re going to end up with this because it keeps keeps on burning,” Flannigan told CNBC. “Some of these fires are huge. And they will burn all summer, all fall, and some of them will burn through winter. Underground they smolder and even though you can have snow on top, they keep burning underground. And then spring, the snow melts, stuff gets hot, dry and windy. They pop to the surface and start spreading again.”
Record heat turns vegetation into kindling
Earlier in July, the Earth recorded its hottest average day since records began — then repeated the feat three times in four days.
Temperatures in Canada are no exception. Earlier this year, Fort Good Hope, at about 66 degrees north latitude in the Northwest Territories, reached 37.4 degrees Celsius — more than 99 degrees Fahrenheit — setting a record for the warmest Canadian temperature at that latitude, according to the Canadian government. Subsequent readings in nearby communities were even hotter, according to news reports.
“We’re in uncharted waters here,” Dahl told CNBC.
“Since May we’ve seen a pattern of heat domes developing in parts of North America,” Dahl told CNBC. A heat dome is a weather event that occurs when the atmosphere traps hot air like a lid or a cap, as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration describes it. “These zones of extreme heat tend to persist for long stretches of time — weeks in some cases. The heat dome that developed in May was linked to the development and spread of the fires in Alberta that kicked off the start of Canada’s record-breaking fire season.”
“I’ve never seen it start so early that far north,” Flannigan told CNBC. Before he started working in academia, Flannigan worked for the Canadian Forest Service for 30-plus years.
Hotter weather dries out vegetation, which serves as fuel for the wildfires.
“The warmer it gets, the atmosphere gets more efficient at sucking the moisture out of the fuels,” Flannigan told CNBC. “It’s not a linear increase, it’s almost exponential.”
Also, warmer temperatures lead to more lightning, Flannigan said. In Canada, about half of wildfires are started by lightning, but they are responsible for 80% to 90% of the land burned, since these areas tend to be remote and harder for firefighters to reach.
A future of more fire and smoke
Three key ingredients for a wildfire spread are fuel, ignition and weather, Sarah Burch, a climate change professor at the University of Waterloo and the executive director of the Waterloo Climate Institute, told CNBC.
“While wildfire is a natural feature of healthy ecosystems, climate change affects all three of the factors” that cause wildfires, Burch told CNBC. So, too, does land management. For example, the mountain pine beetle is killing trees and turning them into fuel for wildfires, Burch told CNBC. And long-duration droughts also make forests more flammable.
“This means that we expect fires to increase in frequency and intensity in the future,” Burch told CNBC.
People will have to learn to live alongside those wildfires.
Smoke from wildfires in Canada shrouds the Empire State Building on June 30, 2023 in New York City.
David Dee Delgado | Getty Images
“This is a common misconception of people that fire management can stop all fires all the time. Obviously, that’s not true,” Flannigan said.
If firefighters arrive when a fire is still small, they can put it out. But sometimes a fire can balloon into a high-intensity blaze in as little as 15 minutes. When a wildfire becomes a “crown fire,” meaning it jumps from tree top to tree top, “the horse has left the barn,” Flannigan told CNBC. “It’s too late. You’ve missed your window.”
Some fire mitigation techniques can work to slow the back end of a fire that’s already burning at full intensity, but when “that head is just racing across the landscape, you just have to get out of the way.”
This means more smoke from these wildfires traveling to other parts of the globe, too. Earlier in July, wildfire smoke from Canada blanketed much of the United States mid-west and Eastern seaboard.
There is no silver bullet to solving this problem, Flannigan says. Drones and artificial intelligence can help scientists track and monitor fire movement, but they are tools, not solutions. The only long-term solution is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions on a global scale to mitigate the effects of climate change.
“I think there’s still time if we get our act together as a global society to deal with this. And sometimes people need a bloody nose or two before we change our behavior. We can change. And I’m hoping that we’re getting the bloody noses and now we’ll actually do something about fossil fuels,” Flannigan said.
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, US, on Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is sounding a familiar tune when it comes to artificial intelligence: better to invest too much than too little.
On his company’s third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, Zuckerberg addressed Meta’s hefty spending this year, most notably its $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI as part of a plan to overhaul the AI unit, now known as Superintelligence Labs.
Some skeptics worry that the spending from Meta and its competitors in AI, namely OpenAI, is fueling a bubble.
For Meta’s newly formed group to have enough computing power to pursue cutting-edge AI models, the company has been building out massive data centers and signing cloud-computing deals with companies like Oracle, Google and CoreWeave.
Zuckerberg said the company is seeing a “pattern” and that it looks like Meta will need even more power than what was originally estimated. Over time, he said, those growing AI investments will eventually pay off in a big way.
“Being able to make a significantly larger investment here is very likely to be a profitable thing over, over some period,” Zuckerberg said on the call.
If Meta overspends on AI-related computing resources, Zuckerberg said, the company can repurpose the capacity and improve its core recommendation systems “in our family of apps and ads in a profitable way.”
Along with its rivals, Meta boosted its expectations for capital expenditures.
Capex this year will now be between $70 billion and $72 billion, compared to prior guidance of $66 billion to $72 billion, the company said.
Meanwhile, Alphabet on Wednesday increased its range for capital expenditures to $91 billion to $93 billion, up from a previous target of $75 billion to $85 billion. And on Microsoft’s earnings call after the bell, the software company said it now expects capex growth to accelerate in 2026 after previously projecting slowing expansion.
Alphabet was the only one of the three to see its stock pop, as the shares jumped 6% in extended trading. Meta shares fell about 8%, and Microsoft dipped more than 3%.
Zuckerberg floated the idea that if Meta ends up with excess computing power, it could offer some to third parties. But he said that isn’t yet an issue.
“Obviously, if you got to a point where you overbuilt, you could have that as an option,” Zuckerberg said.
In the “very worst case,” Zuckerberg said, Meta ends up with several years worth of excess data center capacity. That would result in a “loss and depreciation” of certain assets, but the company would “grow into that and use it over time,” he said.
As it stands today, Meta’s advertising business continues to grow at a healthy pace thanks in part to its AI investments.
“We’re seeing the returns in the core business that’s giving us a lot of confidence that we should be investing a lot more, and we want to make sure that we’re not under investing,” Zuckerberg said.
Revenue in the third quarter rose 26% from a year earlier to $51.24 billion, topping analyst estimates of $49.41 billion and representing the company’s fastest growth rate since the first quarter of 2024.
WATCH: Meta reports Q3 earnings beat, company takes one-time tax charge.
Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc., during the Bloomberg Tech conference in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, June 4, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google parent Alphabet is planning a “significant increase” in spend next year as it continues to invest in AI infrastructure to meet the demand of its customer backlog, executives said Wednesday.
The company reported its first $100 billion revenue quarter on Wednesday, beating Wall Street’s expectations for Alphabet’s third quarter. Executives then said that the company plans to grow its capital spend for this year.
“With the growth across our business and demand from Cloud customers, we now expect 2025 capital expenditures to be in a range of $91 billion to $93 billion,” the company said in its earnings report.
It marks the second time the company increased its capital expenditure this year. In July, the company increased its expectation from $75 billion to $85 billion, most of which goes toward investments in projects like new data centers.
There’ll be even more spend in 2026, executives said Wednesday.
“Looking out to 2026, we expect a significant increase in CapEx and will provide more detail on our fourth quarter earnings call,” said Anat Ashkenazi, Alphabet’s finance chief.
The latest increases come as companies across the industry race to build more infrastructure to keep up with billions in customer demand for the compute necessary to power AI services. Also on Wednesday, Meta raised the low end of its guidance for 2025 capital expenditures by $4 billion, saying it expects that figure to come in between $70 billion and $72 billion. That figure was previously $66 billion to $72 billion.
Google executives explained that they’re racing to meet demand for cloud services, which saw a 46% quarter-over-quarter growth to the backlog in the third quarter.
“We continue to drive strong growth in new businesses,” CEO Sundar Pichai said. “Google Cloud accelerated, ending the quarter with $155 billion in backlog.”
The company reported 32% cloud revenue growth from the year prior and is keeping pace with its megacap competitors. Pichai and Ashkenazi said the company has received more $1 billion deals in the last nine months than it had in the past two years combined.
In August, Google won a $10 billion cloud contract from Meta spanning six years. Anthropic last week announced a deal that gives the artificial intelligence company access to up to 1 million of Google’s custom-designed Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs. The deal is worth tens of billions of dollars.
The spend on infrastructure is also helping the company improve its own AI products, executives said on the call.
Google’s flagship AI app Gemini now has more than 650 million monthly active users. That’s up from the 450 million active users Pichai reported the previous quarter.
Search also improved thanks to AI advancements, executives said. Google’s search business generated $56.56 billion in revenue — up 15% from the prior year, tempering fears that the competitive AI landscape may be cannibalizing the company’s core search and ads business.
AI Mode, Google’s AI product that lays within its search engine, has 75 million daily active users in the U.S., and those search queries doubled over the third quarter, executives said. They also reiterated that the company is testing ads in that AI Mode product.
WATCH: Google catching up with Meta pulled on shares following earnings, says D.A. Davidson’s Gil Luria
Technology
ServiceNow CEO denies AI companies are threatening enterprise software: ‘They don’t do what we do’
ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott pushed back against the idea that artificial intelligence technology will make enterprise software redundant in a Wednesday interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer.
“We realize the world needs access to the great hyperscalers, and so we integrated with all three of them. So that’s a cooperative,” McDermott said. “The world’s going to benefit from the large language model providers, but they don’t do what we do.”
As AI continues to develop, some on Wall Street are worried that companies will be able to rely solely on automated models — making many enterprise software companies’ products obsolete.
ServiceNow makes software for companies including the National Hockey League, FedEx, Ulta Beauty and AstraZeneca.
McDermott detailed some of the functions of ServiceNow’s platform, including management of assets, operations and security.
ServiceNow’s software is needed to perform complex functions — such as regulatory environment processes for financial services firms with decades-old legacy technology — McDermott suggested. He brushed off specific concerns that systems of record, which store data and information, might be “eaten by AI.”
He indicated that agentic AI isn’t up to the task of entering the “already complex environment.”
“Those agents are being sold into silos, and that’s the very reason why AI won’t work,” McDermott said. “AI is a cross-functional sport.”
McDermott also explained why ServiceNow proposed a five-for-one stock split on Wednesday during earnings.
“I feel strongly that we’re right now ready for more than just institutional investors,” he said. “We know the consumer investor wants in, and I don’t want you to have to buy fractional shares and go through all that.”
ServiceNow topped expectations when it reported after close, and shares jumped more than 4% in extended trading.
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