Wildfire Smoke in Northeastern US Visible on GOES East Images
star.nesdis.noaa.gov
star.nesdis.noaa.gov
1) Even if it seems counterintuitive, try not to move air. Don't run fans or open windows. Do run filtration systems, but preferably interior ones. Even exhausting outside will draw new air (and particles) inside. Keep doors and windows closed as much as possible.
2) Run humidifiers if you have them. If you don't, and you just desperately need relief, close the bathroom door and run the shower hot for 10-15 minutes (i.e. make a steam room). That usually helps my sinuses and eyes quite a bit. You can also try breathing through a warm damp rag, although that gets pretty old pretty quickly.
3) No science behind it that I'm aware of, but I find that carrot juice really helps my throat when it's sore.
4) Be sure to try and enjoy at least one sunset. They will be glorious.
You can build a cheap but effective filter with a box fan, duct tape and a furnace filter.
The best setup is to use multiple filters arranged in a box shape, since more filter surface area = less restriction on air flow.
There's some great examples here:
I guess pulling seals the gap between the fan and the filter and pushing only widens it.
As the pressure in front of the fan builds up, it starts to push back against the blades of the fan until it reaches an equilibrium.
Sounds like you built it wrong, it's supposed to pull air through filters, not push it.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/home/how-to-make-a-box-fan-air...
My learning of that was after taking days and once weeks to recover from smoke exposure. I don't think the gravity of how bad it is really sinks in until the super long recovery is observed
And don’t exercise at all. If you’re head hurts and your heart starts racing just lay in bed and wait it out.
It's a great beginner hobby project requiring ~100-200 dollars of hardware. There's also a large community of enthusiasts and it also opens up a gateway into RF hobby, other RTL-SDR things, ham radio, and other fun engineering time sinks that really helped pass the time during the Pandemic years.
I wrote a small writeup on how to get started a while ago: https://gist.github.com/lxe/c1756ca659c3b78414149a3ea723eae2
Canada used to have many controlled burns throughout last century until the last quarter - Nova Scotia is a typical example (1979 paper):
https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/abs/10.1139/x79-031
California is dangerously behind on forestry and therefore fire management compared to earlier decades. Fuel has to be removed or fire and smoke will cause massive damage and have a very serious psychological and economic impact.
Native Americans conducted controlled burns for thousands of years until they started getting shot by forestry rangers a hundred years ago.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/3/new-california-law-...
There are no saw mills left in Northern California and strict rules about not cutting trees down. Wood is imported from Canada at massive expense, driving up the cost of housing. we seem to have lost the plot a bit here.
We have been conditioned to believe humans are destroying the fragile planet but ironically the reality is that we are increasingly irresponsible stewards of it, flying in the face of thousands of years of evidence.
https://medium.com/climate-conscious/how-the-loss-of-phytopl...
This is not true.
Ocean photosynthesis produces about 50% of the oxygen in the atmosphere, but ocean respiration also consumes about the same amount. The oceans are about oxygen neutral. Same goes for the other 50%, but in land ecosystems.
https://theconversation.com/humans-will-always-have-oxygen-t...
The air we breathe is processed by Phytoplankton
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Phytoplankton#:~:....
They will move out when they can’t insure their properties anymore. [1] Note the refusal to cover properties isn’t a blanket withdrawal; I got a call from State Farm just last week - but I live in a major metro.
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/california-insurance-mar...
I'd like to know more about this. Do you have a reference?
But also the most beautiful state, if you get off on that sort of thing.
Once this is accomplished (as ugly as it might be for the residents) then you can possibly do some forest management and fire control.
This same thing is playing out in FL, but over there the insurance commission isn't as stringent so insurers are just flat out not paying claims.
Suppose you can't get insurance and you can't get a mortgage without insurance. The house still exists. Its value will crash. But having crashed, now someone can afford to buy it without a loan. Meanwhile there is still a massive housing shortage, so somebody will.
And that's the thing that caused this, and the only way out of it. You have to build enough housing in the areas that aren't in the direct path of wildfires that nobody is being forced by those high prices into the housing that is.
Meanwhile CA also recently revamped how local regulators are allowed to regulate things like more duplexes and multiplexes in all residential areas.
Prescribed burns aren't going to stop these forests from dying out over the next 50 years.
Opting to finger point and use misdirection to avoid the inescapable fact this is primarily the fault of the environmentalists paradoxically harms environmental causes even more.
Congrats, you got your story that makes you feel good about your ideological beliefs
Nobody wants to live in a toxic environment or leave one for their children. There might be disagreement about how to solve these problems and what those problems are, but you're conflating several things.
Whining and complaining like a petulant child because people disagree with your approach isn't going to help the environment at all. It does raise questions about the underlying motives and the legitimacy of solutions that can't stand up to the slightest bit of scrutiny.
Source: https://www.fao.org/3/X4995e/X4995e.htm A snapshot of current conditions is as follows:
After two centuries of decline, the area of US forestland stabilized in about 1920 and has since increased slightly. The forest area of the US is about two-thirds what it was in 1600. The area consumed by wildfire each year has fallen 90 percent; it was between eight and twenty million hectares (20-50 million acres) in the early 1900s and is between one and two million hectares (2-5 million acres) today. Forest growth nationally has exceeded harvest since the 1940s. By 1997 forest growth exceeded harvest by 42 percent and the volume of forest growth was 380 percent greater than it had been in 1920.
Controlled burns btw also easier quickly said then done...
I will second the point about lack of controlled burns and logging absolutely being a problem. Look at photos of western forests from the late 1800s and you'll see that we have far more trees now than a century ago. Here's an example of Yosemite valley: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/29/opinion/sunda.... A century of fire suppression and climate change have proved to be a dangerous combination. One of these is easier to correct though if we could get past the idea that every tree must be saved at all costs.
See what happened with the Russian wildfires in 2010 [1] - this is a consequence of climate change and unfortunately many of the old fire prevention strategies won't work with Canadian peatland drying out.
Invest in indoor hockey rinks.
The brush ends up being the thing that starts massive forest fires.
This is environmental crime. And when there is a crime, there is a benefit for criminals. Saying that if we burn some, here and there, the criminals will stop, is like saying that if we paint the banks in a nice pastel tone and put a banner asking politely not to rob, the bank robbers will agree to stop and go away.
Europe tried that in the past repeatedly. It didn't worked. Even worse, the trend is increasing among farmers manipulated by extreme European political currents that overlap extensively the Putin and Trump speeches. Places of Europe that never had a problem with wildfires started to burn since a couple of years. We hear political parties trow the first stone and claim that environmental laws are unfair. Just one week later, the place burns down magically. Is environmental boycott, and will not stop until we stop them or remove the benefits.
Either we wake up and strike back, or we accept that the extinction whirl will be much closer than we expected, and much faster than we can adapt.
Source: I currently work for a startup that makes software that shortens the time necessary to prepare this paperwork which potentially could cut the time it takes in half or more.
Then the other hard part is gathering all this data from all the people in one place and writing documents that will be published or submitted to various government agencies. This process is at the moment manual and extremely time consuming (because it’s basically an email back and forth that can take weeks or months). And that’s only the planning phase.
The app I’m working on tries to automate as much as possible both the data gathering part and the document preparation part, letting multiple people collaborate together to create necessary paperwork. This drastically cuts on the time needed to complete the planning phase and thus lets them do more projects in the same amount of time.
ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATIONS ON
TIMBER HARVEST PLANNING COSTS
(2005)
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
Sierra is processing imported lumber mostly
https://www.spi-ind.com/OurForests/ForestManagement#:~:text=....
There have been big fires in Oregon and Washington in recent years as well, not just in California. And the Tillamook Burn was big, but that was a long time ago.
I take it you haven't spent much time out in the sticks of Oregon or Washington.
Part of the problem is that people built next to the logging areas since they're so quiet and pretty with relatively good roads. That really makes it hard to do controlled burns. And people moved there for the trees so they don't want you to cut them down.
Look at a map of northern California and you see that the landscape is dominated by a checkerboard pattern of logging/no-logging (the most efficient way to maintain a forest and create firebreaks, even if that wasn't the original intent and people are trying their damndest to break the system).
https://eros.usgs.gov/media-gallery/earthshot/checkerboard-p...
https://www.truckeedonnerlandtrust.org/sierra-nevada-checker...
So the workaround becomes creating corridors of excess-fuel-free forest via "controlled burns". But that's not the fix! The problem was preexisting.
At this point in history there is illegal logging going on to create fire breaks around properties, such are the state restrictions on trees. We have lost sight of the forestry management practices that worked with nature, not against it.
Controlled burns won't fix the fact that the Sea Surface Temperature anomalies are in the region of 2C in some areas.
Or that the 2m Temp Anomalies are of the order of 6-10C across most of the US and large parts of Russia.
Neither of those is going to make future fires less likely, controlled or otherwise.
https://climatereanalyzer.org/wx/todays-weather/?var_id=ssta...
From the indigenous viewpoint, there is little distinction; humans are part of the physical/natural world, same as a mountain lion or a worm, albeit a very powerful part capable of wielding great power and thus responsibility. There is no concept of wilderness.
It's worth over-emphasizing that the indigenous viewpoint in North America was sustainable (and was actually sustained) for thousands of years. The modern industrial culture of bipolar consumption/reverence of wilderness is showing severe signs of overshoot after a couple hundred years. That's not to say that indigenous land practices are more ethical or wise... merely that they've been proven more effective by the test of time.
I've been thinking about this lately. My wife and I were reading about a study of an old growth oak - hickory forest in the eastern US which without human intervention is slowly transitioning to maple - beach forests. Presumably this is because it is no longer experiencing the burns it would have historically.
This transition is generally considered problematic since oak hickory forests supposedly support more biodiversity (and conveniently more profitable timber harvests).
But this all raises the question for me - how did this all work before any human intervention?
What's the natural rate of forest fires? We have species (such as giant sequoia) that seem to require fires, so they must have happened, but they must have been quite rare. Would there have been a truely horrible fire caused by lightning every 1000 years? Or perhaps would the megafauna that went extinct around the time native Americans arrived have played a similar role in clearing out underbrush while foraging?
Does anyone know of studies on this?
Here’s an article that talks about a few papers and some research as this relates to Arizona forests: https://azdailysun.com/news/local/setting-the-record-of-ariz...
First nations here also did controlled burns to open cultivation for maize agriculture and to encourage open grazing areas for deer.
Regardless, the forests that are burning in this case causing smoke in the northeast are quite far north, in Northern Quebec mostly, in what is boreal forest; pine & spruce mainly, on thin granite soils (Canadian shield).
beech
truly
deer
lightning
Eg, coast range burns every few centuries while cascades and sierras it is more like every other year.
Sorry for no references, so please have a large grain of salt with those stated frequencies. IIRC those are the tight order of magnitude. Though, we are also talking much smaller fires compared to the mega blades we see today that kills everything rather than rejuvenates. These fires today burn everything and down to 4 feet under the soil. It's a different beast.
And the timber companies are definitely not involved in any prescribed burning efforts (don't want to lose out on all that inventory).
This is comically false. The USFS absolutely engages in controlled burns.
The USFS does a lot of controlled burns, and has done them for a long time. Not sure where you heard otherwise: it's a significant part of what they do.
They briefly paused doing them last year after a controlled burn got out of control in New Mexico, resulting in a high-profile wildfire. But that's only evidence that they were already doing them. Anyway, after updating their policies, they resumed prescribed burns later that year.
The silver lining, I guess, is that it won’t be a profoundly unfortunate tragedy. As a species, we’ll have really earned the ultimate Darwin award.
Blame everything bad on the environmentalists, ignore the rest we all did and still do, and just let nature rule! Hehe..
Especially, as while totally agree and true that it is right that this was the wrong approach, the denial that this is currently maybe only 10% of the problem is also funny. We lost nature, just wait it out and let it go its natural way here now until most is burned down and then desertificated, which will inevitably come. No more fire problems, just some others then..
The private sector hasn't solved the problem either, in part because a lot of the fuel isn't desirable timber. Californians who are serious about this issue should lobby their federal and state representatives.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-023-05997-w
> Our results show that California and Oregon are the only severe-risk US states to conduct prescribed fire programs that are impactful at reducing wildfire risks, while other southeastern states such as Florida maintain fire-healthy ecosystems with very extensive prescribed fire programs. Our study suggests that states that have impactful prescribed fire programs (like California) should increase their scale of operation, while states that burn prescribed fires with no impact (like Nevada) should change the way prescribed burning is planned and conducted.
> California has historically resisted prescribed burning to control their already big smoke problem
> There are various reasons preventing California from conducting more Rx [prescribed burns], including lack of enough firefighters and 57% of land being owned by the Federal Government which lacks the funds to conduct Rx, especially after recent budget cuts to the U.S. Forest Service
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0451-7
> Academics warned that the financial incentives offered by mechanical thinning may be elusive, given the high ratio of thinning to merchantable timber in many locations. Legislative staff and analysts criticized the traditional forestry model of removing large-diameter, valuable trees and leaving smaller, less valuable and more flammable biomass.
Total fire suppression dates to the early 20th century, not the 1960s. It was driven largely by the forest / wood products industry, not environmentalists. Formal adoption of "the 10 am rule" (all fires must be suppressed by 10 am the following morning) was in 1935. Formal adoption of prescribed burns by the USFS was in 1978.
<https://web.archive.org/web/20070810191055/http://www.nifc.g...>
California has had numerous controlled-burn projects for decades. They are limited in scope, and opposed, usually by local residents and businesses, for ... somewhat understandable reasons, though in the long run more-frequent controlled burns are better than the megafires of the past few decades.
Genocide of the indigenous North American population, especially in California, was transacted first by Spanish and Mexican missionaries, then by Americans, both private citizens and government agents (mostly military), and was largely completed by 1873.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_genocide>
The US Forest Service was not organised until 1905. Its antecedents date only as far back as 1875, after the dates given above for the California genocide.
Yes, controlled burns would help with some of California's wildfire issues, but evidence from elsewhere, including Canada and Siberia in which total fire suppression was never policy or effectively achieve, recent history suggests that megafires are not strictly dependent on overgrowth and fuel accumulation. Regions of California such as Santa Barbara experience recurring fires over the same terrain at intervals of a decade or two, suggesting that even short-term fuel-load accumulation is sufficient to give rise to huge and uncontrollable fires which intrude well into the urban region, and are not limited to remote bush or the urban-wildland interface. See particularly the 2017 Tubbs Fire which obliterated a Santa Rosa neighbourhood, and Thomas Fire, also 2017, which reached downtown Ventura.
Not to be snarky, but I think that they were uncontrolled burns... Once they started there was no Native American Fire Department to put them out, they just burned until they wefe done.
The forests are on fire because it has barely rained in most parts of the country since April.
I find this 'sweep your floors' meme a bit of an oddity:
1. It involves conservatives casting native americans in a good light. Who's going to argue with that?
2. It contains a false epiphany which just feels right (the solution to forest fires is...fires)
3. It contains a grain of truth. Native americans did perform controlled burns, and in the NW they did take care of salmon streams etc, but not on a scale that would prevent today's wildfires.
It's a classic diversion from climate change, and our terrible 'foresty' practices of cutting down forests and planting monocrops of high resin species all packed together and calling it reforestation and finally, spraying entire valleys with roundup (often where indigenous people live of course)
We've effectively stopped this with modern fire suppression techniques and have fewer managed burns...Parks Canada only had 12 last year. And here's a story where they ran out of funding and had to defer burns:
https://www.rmoutlook.com/local-news/parks-canada-prescribed...
Not good. I think you can focus on climate change while at the same time have a conservationist approach.
[1] https://foresthistory.org/research-explore/us-forest-service...
But I also know that folks in California and Australia have been dealing with exactly this, for a long time. It's news, because it's happening to the Northeast US.
I was watching AppleTV+ Extrapolations[0], which is actually damn depressing. The first episode has wildfires everywhere, and air quality around the globe sucks.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrapolations_(TV_series)
I'm in Rhode Island this week. Same deal, although not as bad I suspect, based on a photo of NYC I saw.
And somehow this is a lot better than when I was in Delhi one winter. Some nights I'd see 500+, and there wasn't much escape from it in our airbnb in hauz khas, I'd just sleep with a keffiyeh around my face. People are living like this almost daily in cities around the world, to the point where the locals are sort of just used to it. Pretty depressing, but hopefully we'll start doing something about it.
The current forecast calls for smoke in NYC through end-of-day Thursday:
<https://archive.is/3PAtG> (NY Times)
https://map.purpleair.com/1/m/i/mAQI/a10/p604800/cC0#4.46/36...
Wall Street, meet Climate Change.
Probably too optimistic of me to hope this might change some attitudes.
(Also fuck East Coast media bias and sports reporting -- Sincerely, Seattle)
Wall Street will is a tool, it does whatever makes the most money, and it seems to act pretty greedily (in the greedy algorithm sense). If you want to fix the environment, convince the rest of the country to pass some better laws. Wall Street is part of the engine, not the steering wheel.
It is estimated to cost between 2-6% of global GDP each year until 2050 to prevent exceeding 1.5 C mostly by building out renewables.
I could imagine that many people will start investing in air quality filtering solutions for their private home on a scale that matches what we should be spending on climate efforts per person per year.
China is reducing its import of fossils by building renewables on a massive scale.
Fighting climate change is a losing battle until China and India change their ways. To deny this is quite foolish.
What India is doing despite more than 1 billion people mustn't be used to stop our own (developed country) focus on reducing our emissions.
As for the link:
https://www.google.com/search?q=china+renewable+share
China is investing at an unprecedented scale into renewables because it is cheaper for them than buying fossil fuels abroad in many cases.
https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china/
BLUF: China saving money is their objective, it is a happy accident that it may possibly help a little bit in reducing emissions.
They don't care.
But again, I think pointing to others is a straw man in the debate. Each country need to go ahead and shoulder their share. For a country such as Germany the estimates point to 2.5% of GDP per year to be spend over the next 27 years to achieve a net zero economy. This is an effort that is so miniscule that it is embarrassing. And it is mostly domestically spend money to build wind mills and install PVs. The component cost is becoming less and less of a share.
I think China is well aware that their country is one that is very negatively affected by climate change. The continental climate will turn China into a desert if climate change isn't reduced.
The cost trajectories are so much in favor of renewables that spending money to build them is starting to make even financial sense.
(P.s.: My low effort google was an answer to a bullshit Youtube channel)
e: Although I do remember a few days where I believe it might have broke 300 on purpleair
""" On June 7th, 2023, 4:12:06 PM PDT 10 Minute Average US EPA PM2.5 AQI is now 320 Sensor: Bill Nye the AQI """ https://map.purpleair.com/1/m/i/mAQI/a10/p604800/cC0?select=...
https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2020/09/portlands-air-qualit...
Mine has some VOC mode too, when I took the thing to the gas station that number went way up which was pretty illuminating how much VOCs we breathe in at the pump.
Another angle to the experimentation was with and without the HEPA filter being ran. When smoke would infiltrate the indoor numbers would be like 10 or 12. Run the HEPA for say 20 min the numbers get down to 2 or 3. To me that thing was doing what I expected and served us well in the wildfires.
It's more like you're surrounded by campfires except there are no fires, only smoke, and no way of turning away or escaping from it.
Today (NYC) I went outside briefly and started coughing within a couple of minutes, and then my eyes started watering.
It's nothing like being by a campfire. It's way worse. Campfire smoke goes straight up, or if it's windy nobody stands with the smoke blowing directly in their face for minutes/hours.
With a campfire, you can always scoot your chair back if you are getting too much smoke, but you are probably getting much more smoke all at once. With a wildfire, you can't escape it and normal activities like going for a jog or walking to your office become a problem.
is actually bad though. You may not feel it, but as an asthmatic, I can tell you quite certainly that this is dosing you with PM2.5 unless you have a really clean burning convective fire or smokeless pit.
Source images:
http://www.ap-tyler.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Night-O...
https://www.earthcam.com/share/temp_images/1686190731284.jpg
Sci-fi interpretation: Humans are a highly aggressive species derived from predatory apes, given to unpredictable violence, not very capable of long-term planning. Quarantined by alien civilizations for that reason.
That is the wrong way to think about it. Any action we take now is affecting all future years. Replacing fossil fuels with renewables not only reduces carbon emissions this year but also over all the next years. Additionally, taking action now tips the economies of scales further. Renewables come cheaper, fossil investment unattractive.
Thus I think the best way to face the looming catastrophy is to act more decisively and invest much more heavily now.
Didn’t Alberta have that one big town burn down a few years ago?
We called the season "Smogust" when we lived there.
That would definitely suck. Here on the other side of the country, in the Puget Sound area, we get some bad days of wildfire smoke every year, but I don't think I've ever seen it that high. The highest I recall is around 250.
A good HEPA filter can really help. I use an older version of this [1]. It can generally keep my living room AQI below 10ish. I read that the Whirlpool brand name was sold off to some generic oversees appliance maker several years ago, so I don't know if that one on Amazon is as effective as my 20+ year old one.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Whirlpool-Whispure-Purifier-Cleaner-A...
I had to seal up every door and window to my house with plastic, then put three 1200 sq. ft. rated HEPA filters in a single bedroom to get the air quality in that one room down to livable.
That's also when I discovered the real difference between an N95 mask and a N100 respirator.
I've found their air quality map the most helpful: https://map.purpleair.com/1/mAQI/a10/p604800/cC0#5.16/41.047...
I haven’t had time to play with it yet, but they have an API for the Home Assistant types out there.
The EPA published a paper calibrating the sensors PurpleAir uses with their much more expensive sensors and found it was fairly close after applying a correction factor (which I also used in my implementation). https://github.com/shanet/ClearAir/blob/master/docs/PurpleAi...
One of the monitors is an outdoor monitor similar to the Purple Air that uses dual PM sensors for enhanced accuracy. You can find more information of the kits here [1] and the built instructions including files for schematics, enclosure here [2].
[1] https://www.airgradient.com/open-airgradient/kits/
[2] https://www.airgradient.com/open-airgradient/instructions/di...
I recommend limiting time outside as much as possible when the levels are high, like over 100. You might not notice it at first, but over time it can start to make you feel pretty bad--coughing, itchy eyes, fatigue, etc. Especially avoid doing any kind of vigorous exercise like running or cycling that makes you breathe hard. I learned that the hard way.
Also, if it's anything like smoke season in CA, air filters are probably back-ordered and sold out at stores, but I recommend getting at least one so you have it for next time. They are so worth the cost. We have one for each room in our home, but we have a young child so we go a bit overboard.
Other than telling you not to cook inside and not to open the windows they didn't say much. AQI inside didn't change much with ac on or off... or when I quickly went outside.
The purples were usually good but also not way off in a few cases. I drove to one that had crazy high readings and it was actually the lowest reading I found on 2 different devices.
Basically all the monitor is going to have you do is fret. Like watching pandemic case load statuses. Take a bunch of anti-histamines, don't go outside, drink water, wear a respirator. Run in house hepas if you have em. Hope/cross fingers/pray for rain.
Spend your money on a real respirator or filter. Work from the office, they yusuallly have good filters.
Humans are just a step up from chimpanzees, and long-term planning doesn't seem to be what evolution has selected for.
Source: https://www.nrk.no/sorlandet/vg_-roykpartikler-fra-canada-ha...
Here's the view from Fort McMurray, Alberta -- a drone video I took last week. Check out the swarm of birds at 2:30 or so in the video.
Fort McMurray had Canada's largest wildfire in 2016, and we don't have much more left to burn, but nearby smoke makes this place surreal.
Also, this is such a regular occurrence these days that we have websites that predict the smoke, like https://firesmoke.ca
That's some "yummy" drone footage. I remember one summer in the mid 90s when it got like that in Edmonton for a bit. Good times.
On some streets, I couldn’t see the end of the street it was so smoky.
Just got home to southern Ontario from a work trip (in South Dakota, where there was no smoke at all) and I was expecting it to be pretty bad, but it really isn't (though I won't be exerting myself outside or anything). It's sitting mostly east of here, so far.
Rain coming next week, that should relieve things.
One of the reasons we decided to buy land in the first place was because of Climate Change, and a desire to get hands on in doing something – even if at a small scale. We've learned a lot in the process – there's no substitute for 'doing'.
I'm chiming in because I feel like this experience has given me a fairly deep perspective on the matter. Fire prevention is on the minds of everyone. Even the most conservative farmers I know are in their own way environmentalists. That's the interesting thing about getting out into the country and off the internet is that you meet a lot of people, and you find common interests – even if you disagree on a lot of stuff.
The issue is, this stuff is expensive. You can mow, do manual limbing of trees to prevent 'ladder fires', you can get goats, you can try converting over to ecosystems that are more fire resilient, create smarter development plans and keep structures 100' away from dry woodland, etc.
But all of that costs time and money. There are grants, yes, but even that isn't available to everyone, and even that takes time.
Because the Climate is become more chaotic, you end up with intense rain fall in the cooler months, leading to explosive growth of brush that is dry fuel/tinder by the end of the long hot summers. And because of the way communities are being planned and developed – closer and deeper into the wild/urban interface – fires become more 'destructive' in terms of property and loss of life.
Climate change is a systemic problem. There's no one thing you can point to and say, change this and it will fix the problem. Except maybe drastically reducing the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.
Lastly, I'm a huge fan of controlled burns. But they're not without risk, and the liability of conducting them is largely than the people seem to realize. We had an agricultural burn set of a tree 30' away during a rainstorm, in the deepest part of burn season, during extremely high humidity. Why? Because the summer had been freakishly hot. According to the fire department, it was a happening a lot. It's getting harder and harder to safely use fire as a preventative measure in a lot of areas.
Anyway, just some perspective from someone who's actually been living this.
It's cleared up a bit now but still quite bad.
I’ve said a lot on here about the climate. If we don’t stop or slow new consumption we will lose our planet.
https://www.earthcam.com/usa/newyork/worldtradecenter/?cam=s...
It looks like a rust-only paint swathes.
https://cdn.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES16/ABI/SECTOR/ne/GEOCOL...
This is the Nullschool Earth Weather Visualiser showing fire activity and PM2.5 particulates (smoke) about 24 hours ago, showing the plume approaching NYC from the north.
<https://earth.nullschool.net/#2023/06/06/1700Z/particulates/...>
[1]https://www.nwcg.gov/publications/pms437/fuel-moisture/proba...
On the evening of June 1, a large lightning storm passed through the area. (You can even see the storm's clouds continuing on towards Maine in your video.) https://imgur.com/a/LcM8sMe https://www.blitzortung.org/en/historical_maps.php?map=30
Waves of wildfires starting in the same day can happen by natural causes like a dry storm, but are also a typical signature in wildfires linked to criminal activity. Example: 121 provoked wildfires in the same night and council in North Spain March 2023, a few days after the police stopped a narco operation.
There are some suspicious trends, there is a wave of fires aiming to overpower the firefigthers capability to react. Often at night or weekends. The first spots burnt are often delimited by administrative frontiers, the string of fires follow a road, and fires extinguished reactivate often in the next nights.
The fire starts first on internet. Wildfires are also typically coupled with cyberwarfare mocking environmentalism and scientific facts on social webs and journals.
The criminal thinks that is a hero or adopts a role of victim. There is a lot of self-justifying and blame deflection towards other targetted groups.
At least in Southern Europe this is a reaally common pattern. Your mileage may vary.
2) While imperfect, there is some historical record of how this process plays out via volcanic eruptions
3) SAI is never going to perfectly solve all problems associated with carbon pollution. But it doesn't need to be perfect-- just better than the alternative.
I don't see how you could form consensus behind this approach. The alternative is world war.
I would also point out that megafires are not the only symptom. Drought, floods, heat waves, hurricanes, and sea level rise are all driven by a warming planet. Surely there is a break even point where it's worth taking on additional risk in order to mitigate some of these problems.
Getting back to my original question: Where is that break-even? Maybe there simply isn't one, and we'd rather collectively go down with the ship.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab94eb posits that moving off coal as an energy source drops SO4 in the atmosphere so precipitously that geoengineering would largely just keep it at the current baseline (Figure 1).
I'd rather not pollute the atmosphere on purpose, but I find that there's a moral hazard in not considering all possible mitigation strategies. Keeping in mind that those of us posting on Hackernews are among the least affected and least vulnerable people on the planet.
But when the same thing happens in NYC we have screaming headlines about how terrible the air quality is.
Montana has a million people and NYC has almost 9 million people.
There are 4 NYC neighborhoods with over 200,000 people [1].
So we can say Montana makes up five NYC neighborhoods (out of 55 neighborhoods total).
Close enough!
[1] https://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/cancer/registry/appendi...
I live in Washington State, and I refer to that time of year as "headache season."
California has wildfires literally every year but they still make the news when they’re particularly damaging and record breaking. Fires have never impacted NYC to this extent in living memory - it’s deeply unusual for the region and inherently newsworthy.
<https://www.axiapr.com/blog/elements-of-news>
NYC is the largest city and metro region in the US, and quite arguably one of the two most prominent cities in the world (with London, per GaWC: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalization_and_World_Cities...>).
It's also the media centre of the United States (and, again, arguably the world).
The Mid-Atlantic states (NY NJ PA DE MD DC VA WV) is home to 60 million people. Events there affect 20% of the population of the United States.
Montana is a beautiful state. But just 1.1 million people live there. The largest city, Billings, ranks 243 in the US (between Lakeland, FL, and Ann Arbor, MI and just ahead of Fairfield and Berkeley in California).
The smallest borough of New York City is Staten Island with a population of 495,747, or nearly 5 times that of Billings, MT. The total population of the City of New York is 8.8 million, and of the New York Metropolitan Statistical Area is 20.1 million. That's more the entire states of Wyoming, Alaska, North & South Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Nebraska, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah combined (19.6 million).
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...>
There are billions of people worldwide who are directly connected to New York City and New York State through personal links and association.
New York also dominates both state and city mentions in Hacker News stories reaching the front page, though much of that is by mentions of the New York Times. (I've been doing analysis of HN front page story characteristics.)