Connect with us

Published

on

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.

How cloud seeding can help alleviate drought

Continue Reading

Technology

Amazon Web Services is building equipment to cool Nvidia GPUs as AI boom accelerates

Published

on

By

Amazon Web Services is building equipment to cool Nvidia GPUs as AI boom accelerates

The letters AI, which stands for “artificial intelligence,” stand at the Amazon Web Services booth at the Hannover Messe industrial trade fair in Hannover, Germany, on March 31, 2025.

Julian Stratenschulte | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

Amazon said Wednesday that its cloud division has developed hardware to cool down next-generation Nvidia graphics processing units that are used for artificial intelligence workloads.

Nvidia’s GPUs, which have powered the generative AI boom, require massive amounts of energy. That means companies using the processors need additional equipment to cool them down.

Amazon considered erecting data centers that could accommodate widespread liquid cooling to make the most of these power-hungry Nvidia GPUs. But that process would have taken too long, and commercially available equipment wouldn’t have worked, Dave Brown, vice president of compute and machine learning services at Amazon Web Services, said in a video posted to YouTube.

“They would take up too much data center floor space or increase water usage substantially,” Brown said. “And while some of these solutions could work for lower volumes at other providers, they simply wouldn’t be enough liquid-cooling capacity to support our scale.”

Rather, Amazon engineers conceived of the In-Row Heat Exchanger, or IRHX, that can be plugged into existing and new data centers. More traditional air cooling was sufficient for previous generations of Nvidia chips.

Customers can now access the AWS service as computing instances that go by the name P6e, Brown wrote in a blog post. The new systems accompany Nvidia’s design for dense computing power. Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 packs a single rack with 72 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs that are wired together to train and run large AI models.

Computing clusters based on Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 have previously been available through Microsoft or CoreWeave. AWS is the world’s largest supplier of cloud infrastructure.

Amazon has rolled out its own infrastructure hardware in the past. The company has custom chips for general-purpose computing and for AI, and designed its own storage servers and networking routers. In running homegrown hardware, Amazon depends less on third-party suppliers, which can benefit the company’s bottom line. In the first quarter, AWS delivered the widest operating margin since at least 2014, and the unit is responsible for most of Amazon’s net income.

Microsoft, the second largest cloud provider, has followed Amazon’s lead and made strides in chip development. In 2023, the company designed its own systems called Sidekicks to cool the Maia AI chips it developed.

WATCH: AWS announces latest CPU chip, will deliver record networking speed

AWS announces latest CPU chip, will deliver record networking speed

Continue Reading

Technology

Bitcoin rises to fresh record above $112,000, helped by Nvidia-led tech rally

Published

on

By

Bitcoin rises to fresh record above 2,000, helped by Nvidia-led tech rally

The logo of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin can be seen on a coin in front of a Bitcoin chart.

Silas Stein | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

Bitcoin hit a fresh record on Wednesday afternoon as an Nvidia-led rally in equities helped push the price of the cryptocurrency higher into the stock market close.

The price of bitcoin was last up 1.9%, trading at $110,947.49, according to Coin Metrics. Just before 4:00 p.m. ET, it hit a high of $112,052.24, surpassing its May 22 record of $111,999.

The flagship cryptocurrency has been trading in a tight range for several weeks despite billions of dollars flowing into bitcoin exchange traded funds. Bitcoin purchases by public companies outpaced ETF inflows in the second quarter. Still, bitcoin is up just 2% in the past month.

Stock Chart IconStock chart icon

hide content

Bitcoin climbs above $112,000

On Wednesday, tech stocks rallied as Nvidia became the first company to briefly touch $4 trillion in market capitalization. In the same session, investors appeared to shrug off the latest tariff developments from President Donald Trump. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite notched a record close.

While institutions broadly have embraced bitcoin’s “digital gold” narrative, it is still a risk asset that rises and falls alongside stocks depending on what’s driving investor sentiment. When the market is in risk-on mode and investors buy growth-oriented assets like tech stocks, bitcoin and crypto tend to rally with them.

Investors have been expecting bitcoin to reach new records in the second half of the year as corporate treasuries accelerate their bitcoin buying sprees and Congress gets closer to passing crypto legislation.

Don’t miss these cryptocurrency insights from CNBC Pro:

Continue Reading

Technology

Perplexity launches AI-powered web browser for select group of subscribers

Published

on

By

Perplexity launches AI-powered web browser for select group of subscribers

Dado Ruvic | Reuters

Perplexity AI on Wednesday launched a new artificial intelligence-powered web browser called Comet in the startup’s latest effort to compete in the consumer internet market against companies like Google and Microsoft.

Comet will allow users to connect with enterprise applications like Slack and ask complex questions via voice and text, according to a brief demo video Perplexity released on Wednesday.

The browser is available to Perplexity Max subscribers, and the company said invite-only access will roll out to a waitlist over the summer. Perplexity Max costs users $200 per month.

“We built Comet to let the internet do what it has been begging to do: to amplify our intelligence,” Perplexity wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.

Perplexity is best known for its AI-powered search engine that gives users simple answers to questions and links out to the original source material on the web. After the company was accused of plagiarizing content from media outlets, it launched a revenue-sharing model with publishers last year.

In May, Perplexity was in late-stage talks to raise $500 million at a $14 billion valuation, a source familiar confirmed to CNBC. The startup was also approached by Meta earlier this year about a potential acquisition, but the companies did not finalize a deal.

“We will continue to launch new features and functionality for Comet, improve experiences based on your feedback, and focus relentlessly–as we always have–on building accurate and trustworthy AI that fuels human curiosity,” Perplexity said Wednesday.

WATCH: Perplexity CEO on AI race: The market of providing answers to questions will become a commodity

Perplexity CEO on AI race: The market of providing answers to questions will become a commodity

Continue Reading

Trending