How a dangerous stew of air pollution is choking the United States
nature.com
nature.com
A US-wide view also obscures the air quality where it matters most, which is population centers. They are too small to show up on the blurry, smoothed heat map provided. In population centers (big cities), smog from personal and commercial vehicles is the primary contributor to poor air quality.
I spent Thanksgiving week on Catalina Island and I personally watched the smog roll over greater Los Angeles. However on Thanksgiving Day I woke up and looked east, and the air was incredibly clear like I've never seen. On Friday morning it was still pretty good. But by Saturday the smog was back to normal. The weather was the same all week - this had to do with the number of vehicles on the road in a given day.
And even setting aside climate change, we should also be worried about all the pollution we're breathing in. Lots of health issues there.
https://www.insider.com/vintage-photos-los-angeles-smog-poll...
Yes, and also discourage private car use in general in the city in favor of less polluting alternatives. Cities are where mass transit and cycling are most viable as alternatives to driving and where the effects of air pollution from driving are most pronounced.
very interesting read for people curious -- one way that tire wear pollution is causing problems
https://e360.yale.edu/features/air-pollutions-upside-a-brake...
that would mean getting rid of coal, oil and gas as a first, and biggest, and maybe even only, step. we could have already been solving this issue if we hadn't stopped allowing nuclear to be built in the 90's, as in, we could be completely coal free by now and on the road to eliminating gas in our electricity infrastructure. then as grid-scale storage is developed over the next few decades, we could move steadily over to solar and wind over the next century (for both electricity and transportation) as the nuclear plants go out of commission at the end of their 50-70 year lifecycle.
the climate change narrative is amorphous and far in the future, so it's easy to deflect criticism and solutions. not so much with pollution, which has been a problem for over a century already. care deeply and fiercely about pollution, not CO₂.
Does agricultural and industrial pollution not contribute to climate change?
https://www.sciencealert.com/air-pollution-cools-climate-mor...
Car traffic doesn't make that much daily difference.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-11-11/how-an-i...
Without pollution earth may warm 0.5C and more within a year or so.
https://www.sciencealert.com/air-pollution-cools-climate-mor...
Yes, absolutely. The changes in the views in the LA basin after a good rainfall are stunning, especially taken from the hills. After a month or so of life in the smog, the sudden visibility is amazing! But then, day-by-day, the smog gradually builds back up again. It's perceptible. The only silver lining may be that the smog is what makes the sunsets so amazing.
That's not a map of pollution, it's a map of satellite measured smoke plumes. I also completely disagree that it aligns well with agricultural and industrial pollution. Northern Nevada and Montana have hardly anything going on and you would expect the Imperial Valley to be deep red.
But it’s not turning anything into a climate change debate to recognize that some places which used to seldom or never have serious impact to air quality from wildfires but now quite do. It’s definitely a change in climate (hotter, drier weather over longer periods) that leads to longer, more severe fire seasons. And they’re definitely happening… again, even if just in some locales.
Sulfur oxide comes from homes being heated by oil, coal plants burning coal, chemical industries, and boat traffic.
After those two main components there are secondary pollutants like ozone, smoke (primarily from burning wood) and other particulates.
So simplified one can say that cars and trucks are responsible for half of slightly less then half the picture, but naturally ratios can differ depending on the exact environment.
The Santa Ana Winds [0] were blowing very strong right up until Thursday afternoon according to weather reports [1].
But regarding air quality, a lot of the particulate matter in the air in LA is blown in from the desert. Due to the mountainous geography east of LA, there's a corridor leading up from the Gulf of California over the Salton Sea funneling right into LA. The Salton Sea is an ecological disaster created by farm run off that's drying up. As such there's a lot of toxic pollutants in the dry lake bed that are picked up by those winds creating toxic dust clouds that get blown right into LA.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Ana_winds
[1] https://www.foxla.com/news/santa-ana-winds-thanksgiving-2022
This year we had another wildfire event where it got kinda gross outside, but not at all on the same scale. In 2020 the smoke was so bad that the AQI numbers were literally off the scale, above the claimed maximum value.
In Washington state, a Vietnam vet pilot started working on forest fires after the Vietnam war and has been doing work in it ever since, though he's going to retire whenever he wants as he's past retirement age now.
What he says has changed is:
* lack of smoke jumpers -- the state thinks it costs too much to have adrenaline junkies waiting to fly out and put out a fire.
* lack of will to fight forest fires as they are deemed "good"
* inter-department fighting between federal and state managed land. Doesn't matter what state does if federal has land right next to it that they think is "good" to burn.
--
Also, my wife's cousin is an Alaska smoke jumper. He says that smoke jumpers in the lower 48 are waaaay more safety conscious than they used to be and they're vastly more unwilling to get into the fray of the fire than previously. Whether that safety is warranted or not, I do not know, but it definitely could contribute to the problem.
Do you think that's bad?
We're not burning 1/100th of the forest every year, so we will never catch up.
It is a totally different type of pollution than California burning fires too... a lot of it is burning trash (plastic), industrial and/or automotive (motorbikes and diesel trucks).
I got used to changing clothes and taking a shower every time I came back to the house because I smelled so awful from the exhaust and pollution.
I left right before covid and this is definitely one of the things that is keeping me from going back after covid. It isn't healthy at all.
'Newsom overstated, by an astounding 690%, the number of acres treated with fuel breaks and prescribed burns in the very forestry projects he said needed to be prioritized to protect the state’s most vulnerable communities. Newsom has claimed that 35 “priority projects” carried out as a result of his executive order resulted in fire prevention work on 90,000 acres. But the state’s own data show the actual number is 11,399.'
This is outrageous on so many levels, but the media is far more interested in the relentless drum beat around climate anxiety than they are in pushing for any practical measures.
Meanwhile the Sierra club are heavily invested in burning wood to make electricity. What a mess!
Look up 'biomass' here:
https://planetofthehumans.com/2020/04/29/response-to-the-sie...
I'm not saying we (in Calfornia) should continue to contribute to the problem, but the problem is a lot bigger than what we can see or do anything about.
That's a pretty useless qualifier. There's no massive conspiracy amongst journalists. In fact, one of the single most popular news outlets in the world is actively pushing an agenda opposite of climate anxiety.
If that's your idea of a massive conspiracy, I don't know what to say, other than thank you for affirming that 'the media' does not describe anything like a monolithic group of people with shared ideology (aside, from, you know, thinking it is important to report the news).
Don't hold your breath.
I think that narrative is appealing in a way that is harmful.
We have somewhere in the range of 360 million acres of forest in the western United States, counting Alaska [0].
Wildfires in the US burn about 7 million acres a year [1].
> To date, 61,390 wildfires have burned 7,251,835 acres. This is the most wildfires reported to-date in the past 10 years. The number of acres burned this year is above the 10-year average of 6,859,200 acres.
That's about 2% of the "western forest land" burned every year, and do recall that it grows back. We are nowhere near being out of forest to burn.
[0]: https://www.nwf.org/Educational-Resources/Wildlife-Guide/Thr...
If we knew that, we could calculate backwards from 360 million acres to work out how many acres "should" burn a year.
Of course, there are different kinds of "forest fires" - quick ground ones in forest without much brush and slow hot ones that eat everything, including the biggest trees in clogged forests.
That's a good point. Maybe we need to do a better job clearing the brush near roads? Seems like that's a common place for fires to start. One careless cigarette, or a malfunctioning wheel bearing that sparks, or a blowout that puts the rim on the pavement. All sorts of things can go wrong mechanically that will start a fire when things are dry enough.
That's always what sort of amazes me. I gather there must be sparks all the time, but normally things are humid enough that it just goes out. When we get a few days of abnormally dry, hot weather, fires seem to start practically out of thin air. Everyone starts getting jittery wondering why people are starting fires. That can't really be the reason, right? The triggers are always there but usually amount to nothing, that has to be it.
You can think of a forest like a giant spring or capacitor. The more it grows (and doesn’t burn or rot), the more energy is in the system, and the bigger ‘sproing’, ‘zap’, ‘omg wildfire’ you’ll get.
The forests evolved to deal with fire because fire is inevitable. Eventually, something always triggers the spring release or touches the capacitor, either people (pre-historic or modern), lightning, rocks falling and sparking, whatever.
more frequent fires means less explosive fires, and more moderate ones. Which are easier for everything to recover from and less damaging. The Sierras have had humans setting fires for 10k+ years for this reason.
The fires in Yosemite back in the 90s sterilized the ground for 10+ ft under the surface because it had been 100+ years since anyone had been allowed to burn anything there because of the western ‘fire bad’ mindset.
And to be honest, our building and development practices don’t integrate with wildfire. We build too much, too into forests, and are too established.
Pre-historic populations were nomadic and set fires on their way out for the year.
Many of those areas still haven’t recovered to even have trees - just dense manzanita. It will be 100’s of years before they look anything like they did before.
[http://npshistory.com/series/symposia/1/chap6.htm]
So we’re in a bit of a catch 22 in a lot of places. We have a huge volume of overgrown, dangerous forest ripe to explode in extremely damaging super hot fires, and we also need to get in the habit of letting things burn (when it won’t be catastrophic!) to reduce the accumulation of even more dangerous fuel.
But the graph actually shows the opposite: Notice how there is no change until year 2000, and only after that do wildfires get larger. And they get larger - and then stay at a larger size, they don't keep getting larger. Their trendline is so inaccurate it's basically false info.
Climate change did not start in year 2000, what did change then is wildfire policy: "The Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management, and Bureau of Indian Affairs joined the other two agencies by implementing fire use programs in the late 1990s and early 2000s." https://fireecology.springeropen.com/articles/10.4996/fireec...
It's good that they are bringing awareness to the problem, but when their entire article is predicated on the wrong cause, I'm not sure how valuable it is.
Yes, because wildfires are so good at obeying laws passed to regulate them...
We talk about "fire season" out here now (Treasure Valley, southwest Idaho) as a distinct season - often overlapping with summer and fall, but sometimes doing other things. It's the time when the air ranges from "a bit gross" to "quite human-toxic." It sucks, and really wasn't a thing before about 7-8 years ago. You'd have the occasional "smoke day," but it wasn't a distinct season.
Some years, it's not bad - 2022 wasn't bad, we had some days that were bad, a couple weeks of "Eh, this isn't great to be in..." - but that was about it. Last year, from June to somewhere in October was just vile to be out in.
I've started trying to more deliberately manage indoor and personal air quality (which, yes, is slightly at odds with my winter kerosene lantern habits, but different things for different seasons). We have a "box filter" sort of arrangement on a fan in one of the rooms in the house that's gone from being a seasonal thing to "always on, fan speed varies based on how bad the air is." Indoor PM in the winter is quite low, and even when it's vile outside in the summer, I can usually keep indoor air quality more or less acceptable. Though CO2 levels climb due to the lack of venting... pick your poisons, literally.
My social circle has largely settled on 3M half face painter's masks with P100 filters for outdoor work during smoke season (and they're handy the rest of the year too if you're mowing or trimming - it keeps the pollen and dust out of your lungs too). The newer "white with pink stripes" filters breathe better than the old pink ones, and while I wouldn't really want to go running in them, you certainly could. A few of us are looking at how to do something more PAPR-like with a face mask, for less than the cost of the "certified" solutions. Tired of my eyes burning when outside...
My office has a HEPA filter I run basically all day in the summer, which helps with PM levels in my shoffice (shed office). Again, you can kind of trade CO2 and PM and a few other things, though I'm seriously considering an algae based absorber...
There's no great solution, unfortunately. The jokes about "being out of forest to burn" run squarely into the reality of "Most of the western US forest hasn't burned yet," and we're far from out of areas that can burn given incentive. The last 80 years of forest management of "not letting it burn" has caught up to us, and until it's all burned back down to a sustainable level, this is likely to be the future. Unfortunately, decades of debris buildup means that when a forest (not if, when) lights, you get incredibly destructive crowning fires that just sterilize an area, not the lower burns that leave stronger pines intact (consider that many pines require fire for their cones to open - that requires a pine cone left behind after the fire has gone through).
But a couple years on a set of furnace filters for indoor air cleaning, wrapped around a box fan, is well worth doing at this point. As is a P100 mask of some variety for outdoor use in these conditions. Neil Stephenson's "Earthsuits" are a concept whose time, unfortunately, seems to be coming.
https://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/documents/Geoengineering...
What baffled me the most was how locals reacted to it. They called it "fog" and didn't complain.
And that wasn't the only instance of such behaviour. Apparently there's some kind of taboo surrounding smog and places where it is a result of heating with questionable fuels.
It really doesn't make sense.
We should build Hydrogen powered fire-fighting planes that store the H20 output from the fuel cell and dump it onto the fire rather than (or in addition to) scooping up water from lakes.
> EPA creates air quality trends using measurements from monitors located across the country. The table below show that air quality based on concentrations of the common pollutants has improved nationally since 1980.
> emissions of the common air pollutants and their precursors have been reduced substantially since 1980.
> from 1990 to 2017 emissions of air toxics declined by 74 percent
Cultural burns were banned in California before California was even technically a state. It's moronic. These practices have been in place for thousands of years and much of the flora of at least California shows many signs of adaptation to these frequent, low-frequency burns. These types of burn practices reduce the amount of fuel for wildfires, help fight invasive species while promoting native species, produce charcoal that purify the waterways, protect the soils from the higher intensity fires that can often turn soil infertile, and increase the production of certain native foodcrops like acorns and blueberries.
Indigenous people throughout the west coast are fighting for their rights to reclaim their stewardship role. Frankly, we should be paying them, not challenging them
https://www.nps.gov/subjects/fire/indigenous-fire-practices-...
https://www.vox.com/22518592/indigenous-people-conserve-natu...
I could even imagine that, for political reasons, some indigenous entity is the right hand for the job. But surely not because they possess some secret hereditary epistemology in 2022.
Besides that, prescribed burns and cultural burns often have different goals. Firefighters sole goal is to use up residual fuel sources to prevent larger fires. Cultural burning practices are often done with the aim of supporting the health of forests and other ecosystems. They're often much more narrowly scoped and frequent and require much more intimate knowledge of specific ecosystems and landscapes. Given that so many tribes have been displaced from their homeland, a lot of this knowledge is lost. But the goals of these communities are to revitalize landscapes with the intent of returning to them and make use of them. I think it's that fundamental difference in goals that tends to cultivate much more thorough ecological knowledge about specific landscapes often shown in cultural burning practices
Hazard-reduction burns also simply use different techniques. They tend to rely on drip-torches to burn through control lines. These types of fires are controlled but still very hot and damaging to the soil. Compare that to indigenous experts that use a wide range of techniques to ensure the fires are as slow moving and cool as possible
> But there are important differences in philosophy and execution between prescribed burns and cultural burning in their approach to the land, Goode says. Agencies tend to focus on acreage and fuel reduction, relying upon natural features or previous fires to control potential spread. Forestry technicians may prioritize large-scale pile burning, for example, then leave when it is done.[0]
> This style of burning is a planned and deliberate fire used within control lines to manage a Forest to reduce fuel loads for the safety of people/ townships/ assets and infrastructure. One of the main reasons is for wildfire suppression. [...] Cultural Fire practices are quite different, it is just one tool to help manage Country. Cultural Fire is used in unison with the landscape and the environment. Working with the Local First Nations community is essential. It is the local Mob who know their Country and their connection to Fire and knowledge of the local Forest. This knowledge is important to the way that fire is implemented. Using the local knowledge of reading Country an area will be selected to put in fire.[1]
Additionally, you may be right that "current conditions" are a significant determiner to fire intensity, but I think that also falls into the same issue of the need for localized ecological and geographical knowledge:
> Aboriginal people must be involved as they know when to burn, where to burn and how to execute a burn.[2]
Keeping fires "cool" is particularly focused on by aboriginal burners:
> The central idea of Cool Burns is fire management using a ‘cool’ fire. Night times and early mornings are ideal for these fires as nightly dew helps cool down the fire and the winds are often gentle. The practice involves lighting low fires in small areas on foot, with matches or, traditionally, with fire sticks. These fires are closely monitored, ensuring that only the underbrush is burnt. Cool Burns not only clear areas of land, they also ensure that seeds and nutrients in the soil are not baked and destroyed. In fact, these fires assist in changing vegetation structures by reducing the density of risk factor plants such as Bracken Fern or Casuarina which lead to extreme fuel loads.[3]
[0] https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/how-indigenous-p...
[1] https://australian.museum/learn/first-nations/cultural-fire-...
[2] https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/land/abor...
[3] https://www.watarrkafoundation.org.au/blog/aboriginal-fire-m...
These are meaningless distinctions.
> the need for localized ecological and geographical knowledge
Fire managers and all of the other resource specialists for the majority of agencies are already local.
> cool fires
not anything unique here. depends entirely on the objectives/goals. if it is to remove juniper in the southwest US, a smoldering fire won't be enough. wildland fire fighters already almost exclusively do the most work at night whether it is a prescribed fire or wildfire. it's a distinction without meaning.
techniques used today are almost always a function of numerous risk calculations and political factors; not some lack of understanding of fire behavior or local knowledge
Also if there was an easy way to quantify how much damage controlled burns have prevented vs the amount of damaged done by escaped burns like this I think we'd still find a net benefit
Lastly, I'd like to point out the difference between cultural burn practices and the controlled burns often practiced by firefighting agencies. The former are much smaller, cooler, and slower burns whereas the latter tend to follow specific lines and cover larger distances
Again this has no basis.
The prescribed fire that caused this 300k+ acre fire was supposed to be 1204 acres. That 1204 is the boundary of the possible burn area and the actual area burnt with even moderate intensity was probably planned to be much smaller.
> Researchers say that laws intended to combat air pollution don’t address increasingly important sources, such as wildfires and dust. In fact, the EPA created an exemption for the increased air pollution that occurs during wildfires, dust storms and similar events considered to be ‘natural’. The agency’s ‘exceptional events rule’, adopted in 2007, excludes days when such events happen from consideration by regulators.
> By pruning outliers deemed ‘natural exceptions’, the regulatory data set is skewed, says Katie Clifford, author of a paper this year that called the practice into question.
"The bulk of the rollbacks identified by the Times were carried out by the Environmental Protection Agency, which weakened Obama-era limits on planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and from cars and trucks; removed protections from more than half the nation’s wetlands; and withdrew the legal justification for restricting mercury emissions from power plants."
We are not good, not by any metric.
Unfortunately we can't, because Trump brought it up one day in his patented ham-handed way. Now people just talk about "raking forests" and laugh it off.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/01/why-isnt-california-...
Funding is an inherently political subject, and we've never been great as a country about working together and thinking ahead. I acknowledge all the problems mentioned and I realize the cost is huge to address them. But I live in the PNW and have seen the air quality get so bad due to locally close fires that I couldn't see the house across the street from my doorstep due to the smoke.
For whatever reasons, movement politically on this subject has been a non-starter. I just hope we decide somewhere along the line that some preventative maintenance might go a long way to helping mitigate this.
As for taxes, we can either pay them on the front end by doing more preventative maintenance or we can pay them on the back end handling damages and knock on costs. In reality it will be a mixture of both, but the more we put up front the less we would (should) have to pay later. Of course, one stroke of bad luck can throw all our best laid plans to the winds.