Climate change

 New Republic - Compared to a flood, a fire, or a heat wave, a bad air quality alert isn’t that inconvenient even when it’s happening. You can still go to work and otherwise go about your day. If you own property, it won’t be damaged. And because air pollution lacks visuals, it doesn’t lend itself to morbid doomscrolling or panicked media coverage.

Yet compared to floods, fires, and heat waves, bad air is much more deadly. In fact, the danger is barely even comparable. The World Health Organization estimates that air pollution kills about seven million people every year. The direct death toll from heat waves is under half a million, although that’s getting worse. The number of people who die in floods annually is in the thousands, and the direct death toll from wildfires is much smaller than that, though these threats are also getting worse.

The lethality of bad air is partly due to the range of illnesses associated with it. Bad air increases our risks of emphysema, chronic bronchitis, asthma, breast cancer, lymphoma, lung cancer, and heart attack. There is also significant evidence that air pollution takes a toll on mental health. Not only is it obviously depressing to be subjected to it, but the particulate appears to harm our brains in ways that impair our everyday functioning.