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Comment by etaioinshrdlu | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if there's a point at which the particulates from the fire become globally relevant. Knowing what we know now about how awful particulates are for health and cognition, we would be in a bad place as a species if none of us can breathe clean air.

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Australia fires: Smoke turns New Zealand skies 'eerie' yellow

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-50969488

Maybe not exactly global but the smoke made it ~2000km to New Zealand!

Try Brazil: smoke made it to southern states, ~7700 miles

https://www.correiodopovo.com.br/not%C3%ADcias/geral/fuma%C3...

It was terrifying. The sky gradually changed colour and we, in Auckland, felt as though we were living in a post apocalyptic dystopian future.

Which, clearly, we are. What I never imagined is that people would be _paid_ to actively fight the fight against climate change.

According to CIMSS Satellite Blog [0], the cloud of smoke from the Jan 4th flare up (the one that reached New Zealand) is still visible from space - traveling across the Pacific with some of the smoke even reaching Antarctica.

Satellite imagery of the cloud from GOES-17: https://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/satellite-blog/images/2020/01/20...

[0]: https://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/satellite-blog/archives/35342

You could clearly see the plume going twice as far (as NZ) into the Pacific on the satellite photos. Apparently it made it as far as South America. Once it gets into the upper atmosphere, the jet streams and currents take it far. That said, it probably has little impact on humans when its that high up.

Check the video here: https://mobile.twitter.com/passantino/status/121336729416160...

I'd say that's definitely globally relevant. On the day that was posted you could look on Himawari and clearly see huge smoke clouds from space. It's terrifying.

The last time I saw, they were estimated to have released 75% of Australia's annual emissions budget from burning coal. The scale of them is mind-boggling. The total estimated to have burned is 5M hectares, which is twice as much as the recent fires in the Arctic, and over 5x the recent Amazon fires. And there's no sign they're coming under control yet.

> the recent fires in the Arctic

The where?

maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Siberia_wildfires

Yes, those were the ones I meant, although from that page it's not clear whether the fires were above the Arctic circle or not. I thought they were but may have misremembered.

Minor correction but it's closer to 11M hectares. The 5M hectares is just New South Wales alone:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_Australian_bus...

Wow, it's worse than I thought, and of course still ongoing - that is crazy.

Define globally relevant.

Particulates in the air can carry a few thousand kilometers, but they will also disperse and settle as they travel.

Living within a few hundred yards of a major street, or within a few miles of a major industrial district is going to have more impact on your health then smoke travelling from the other side of the world. Smoke particulates are also reasonably easy to remove from the air, using standard consumer filters.

"Particulates in the air can carry a few thousand kilometers"

Particulates in the air can circumnavigate the globe if they get high enough in the atmosphere.

The bigger problem is that a lot of carbon offset measures involve planting trees/forests. But forests burn (and will do so with greater frequency as the temperature increases).

This article enumerates the numbers of deaths expected from increased particulates at a local scale at least.

https://insidestory.org.au/slow-burn/

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