Air quality: Noxious smoke eases over US but wildfires still major threat in Canada

An icon from the world of sports brought some much-needed levity to raising awareness about dangerous air quality in the US Northeast this week.

Under a sky thick with smoke, Gritty, the official mascot for the Philadelphia Flyers National Hockey League (NHL) team, posed up in Washington DC on Thursday with the US Forest Service’s icon of wildfire prevention, Smokey Bear.

US meteorologists have announced the return of the weather cycle El Nino, which could lead to record global temperatures in the next couple of years.

After three years of the cooler La Nina pattern, which often lowers global temperatures slightly, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced on Thursday that El Nino conditions were present and are expected to gradually strengthen into the winter.

Read more below on what typically happens during El Nino - and why this time could be different.

Thick, smoky air from Canadian wildfires made for days of misery in New York City and across the U.S. Northeast this week. But for much of the rest of the world, breathing dangerously polluted air is an inescapable fact of life — and death.

Almost the entire world breathes air that exceeds the World Health Organization’s air-quality limits at least occasionally. The danger grows worse when that bad air is more persistent than the nightmarish shroud that hit the U.S. — usually in developing or newly industrialized nations. That’s where most of the 4.2 million deaths blamed on outdoor air pollution occurred in 2019, the UN’s health agency reported.

“Air pollution has no boundaries, and it is high time everyone comes together to fight it,” said Bhavreen Kandhari, the co-founder of Warrior Moms in India, a network of mothers pushing for clean air and climate action in a nation with some of the world’s consistently worst air. “What we are seeing in the U.S. should shake us all.”

“This is a severe air pollution episode in the U.S.,” said Jeremy Sarnat, a professor of environmental health at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health. “But it’s fairly typical for what millions and millions of people experience in other parts of the world.” Read more at the link below

After a smoke-filled few days across large parts of the US, extreme heat is on the way next week, according to the National Weather Service on Friday.

The US South is likely to be hit the hardest as temperatures soar into the 90s and low 100s.

As wildfires rage in Canada and smoke blankets the eastern US, the climate crisis has moved ever-more-firmly into the present. The air quality in New York City became the worst on the planet. Schools across the eastern US cancelled outdoor activities, flights have been halted, and Broadway stages have gone quiet. Welcome to the apocalyptic haze of the new AbNormal, write climate experts Susan Joy Hassol and Professor Michael E. Mann for The Independent.

One of us is haunted by an eerily similar experience during the 2019/2020 “black summer” of Australia, when that continent was set ablaze by an unprecedented combination of record heat and drought. And just as was the case then, and again during the western US wildfires of summer 2020, the fossil fuel industry-coddling conservative media – in particular the Murdoch media empire – engaged in a massive disinformation campaign to convince us that it’s natural. Or a result of forest management policies. Or arson. Anything to draw our attention from the real culprit – the incendiary combination of greater summer heat and worse summer drought that is a direct result of fossil fuel burning and the warming of our planet. You can read more of their piece at the link below