These wildfire smoke episodes are disasters as serious as hurricanes, floods or heat waves, and come with a steep human toll. Whether in the East or in the West, they are just one tragic example of how climate change is coming.
The choking siege of smoke over much of the Eastern U.S. from wildfires in Canada has exposed millions of Americans to dangerous levels of lung-damaging pollution.
Wednesday was by far the nation’s worst day in recent history for wildfire smoke pollution, with more people exposed to higher levels of soot than any day since 2006, according to a rapid analysis by Stanford University scientists.
That’s hardly a surprise to people from New York to Minnesota who have been suffering under this acrid, life-threatening pall. And it’s the type of in-your-face environmental health crisis that Californians know too well, with authorities urging people to stay inside and filter the air they breathe and canceling outdoor activities, and large numbers of people almost certainly getting sick or dying.
The second-worst smoke day, after all, was in September 2020, when the haze from an explosion of climate-fueled wildfires up and down the West Coast blotted out the sun, shrouding San Francisco in an apocalyptic orange and contributing to potentially thousands of early deaths.
The otherworldly veil that has hung over some of the nation’s most densely populated areas is the latest illustration of the fact that an overheating planet knows no human-made boundaries, and that as much as we try, no one will be spared the impacts. Everyone, after all, has to breathe. READ MORE...
