The air quality in New York City has been badly affected by wildfires in Canada since last week. But after dissipating, the wildfire smoke may return. What caused the wildfires in the first place? (Hint: It isn’t climate change)

As Canadian wildfire smoke chokes large swaths of the U.S. northeast, there have been a not-insignificant number of voices suggesting that the fires causing it may not be an accident.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith hinted in a recent radio interview that arsonists were behind the province’s unprecedented fire season. “We are bringing in arson investigators from outside the province,” she said, adding that Alberta has “almost 175 fires with no known cause at the moment.”

Maxime Bernier, leader of the People’s Party of Canada, pointed to several recent arrests of wildfire arsonists, adding that the “lying woke media and politicians keep repeating that global warming is the cause.”

And several social media posts have gone viral with satellite video showing nearly a dozen Quebec wildfires erupting on June 1 at virtually the same time, with the implication that it is evidence of human coordination.

Arson is definitely a cause of some wildfires and is certainly a valid concern. But some of the fires are even caused by careless campers too and, as National Post reveals citing a recent analysis conducted by Fox Weather meteorologists, the vast majority are caused by lightning:

The viral satellite video showing the simultaneous June 1 fires does indeed coincide with data showing that the affected areas had all just been battered by lightning storms.

By the time the fires exploded into view, the storms had all drifted south, leading to satellite images wherein plumes of smoke seem to erupt under blue skies.

The specific arson case cited by Bernier was a 29-year-old man arrested on April 30 in connection with a string of 10 intentionally set fires in the area around Cold Lake, Atla. Notably, the accused exclusively seemed to target buildings, cars and other human structures — all of which were extinguished rather quickly, and well before the province began experiencing wildfire evacuations.

Not surprisingly, Great White North leftist politicians, like Justin Trudeau, attempted to assert the wildfires were caused by climate change in an obvious attempt to publicize their imagined truth. Then again, there’s also the multiple doom-and-gloom assertions by people such as Al Gore, Paul Erlich, and Alexandria Occasio Cortez literally claiming the world will end if mankind doesn’t tackle climate change only to later move the goalposts when their predictions don’t come true.

PHOTO CREDIT: Wikimedia – The Rim Fire in the Stanislaus National Forest near Yosemite National Park, California.