Orange Skies Are Our Future

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...

Wildfires Wipe Out 20 Years of Greenhouse Emissions Reductions

California's catastrophic wildfires in 2020 put twice as much greenhouse gas emissions into the air as the state's reductions in those same gases over nearly 20 years – erasing gains going back to 2003, according to a new study.

It's part of a positive feedback loop that's very negative, say the researchers.

"Climate change is creating conditions conducive to larger wildfires. And the wildfires are adding to the greenhouse gases that cause climate change," said lead author Michael Jerrett, a professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The historic megafires of 2020 released an estimated 127 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the air. That compares to the 65 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions California was able to reduce between 2003 and 2019, the study, published in this month's edition of the journal Environmental Pollution, showed.  READ MORE...

Climate Change Alters Wine

Soon after the devastating Glass Fire sparked in California’s Napa Valley in September 2020, wine chemist Anita Oberholster’s inbox was brimming with hundreds of emails from panicked viticulturists. They wanted to know if they could harvest their grapes without a dreaded effect on their wine: the odious ashtray flavor known as smoke taint.

Oberholster, of UC Davis, could only tell them, “Maybe.”

Industry laboratories were slammed with grape samples to test, with wait times of up to six weeks. Growers didn’t know whether it was worth harvesting their crops. About 8 percent of California wine grapes in 2020 were left to rot.

Winemakers are no strangers to the vicissitudes wrought by climate change. Warmer temperatures have been a boon to some in traditionally cooler regions who are rejoicing over riper berries—but devastating to others. Scorching heat waves, wildfires, and other climate-driven calamities have ruined harvests in Europe, North America, Australia, and elsewhere.

And as 2020 showed, climate change can take its toll on grapes without directly destroying them. Wildfires and warmer temperatures can transform the flavor of wine, whose quality and very identity depends on the delicate chemistry of grapes and the conditions they’re grown in. Many growers and winemakers are increasingly concerned that climate change is robbing wines of their defining flavors, even spoiling vintages entirely.

“That’s the big worry,” says Karen MacNeil, a wine expert living in Napa Valley and author of The Wine Bible. “That’s the heartbeat of wine—it’s connected to its place.”

The greatest challenge that climate change brings to winemaking is unpredictability, MacNeil says. Producers used to know which varieties to grow, how to grow them, when to harvest the berries, and how to ferment them to produce a consistent, quality wine—but today, every step is up in the air. This growing recognition is spurring researchers and winemakers to find ways to preserve beloved grape varieties and their unique qualities under the shifting and capricious conditions of today’s warming world.  READ MORE...