Wildfires

NY Times -  Particulates still hang thick as soup over large parts of the Upper Midwest…. Already, they have burned hundreds of thousands of acres, spewing plumes of hazardous air across the Pacific Northwest and western Canada. So when the sky cleared over the Meadowlands on Sunday, with billions of eyes turned toward the World Cup to be played there, what future did we all see?

Per-person smoke exposure in the United States has surged over the last decade, now four times as high as it was between 2006 and 2019. And even before the apocalyptic Canadian wildfire summer of 2023 — when Americans on the Eastern Seaboard were introduced to the eerie orange skies they had previously believed only possible in fire-prone places like California and Australia — more Americans were dying of wildfire smoke-related deaths east of the Mississippi than west of it.

Those 2023 fires alone contributed to the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans, according to one estimate. All told, the monetary damages from wildfire smoke deaths are now expected to exceed those from all other climate impacts combined, as Robinson Meyer noted last week, and yet until very recently climate scientists and climate economists were not even counting them at all when projecting future costs from warming. That wasn’t because nobody knew to expect more fire; everyone knew to. It was just that we hadn’t really started to think about all that smoke.

Smoke events like these aren’t exactly unheard-of on the Eastern Seaboard, though there aren’t too many people still alive to remember the “Great Smoke Pall” from the Chinchaga fire of 1950, for instance.