I find it difficult to believe that people would be shocked to discover that datapoints can be removed as a result of the spike identified as non-human-caused pollution.

We can’t regulate acts of nature, even if these acts are made worse by carbon emissions, as it’s useless to include data about these events as the EPA regulations are focused on voluntary emissions.

The real problem is that we rely on the blunt instrument of overall air quality to measure elective pollution in a shared atmosphere. This is far from my area of expertise so I don’t know how or if it’s possible to fix this measurement problem.