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Earth

Wildfire Smoke and Haze in the Eastern United States Should Peak This Week (arstechnica.com) 77

An anonymous reader shares a report: There is nothing new about Canadian wildfires in the spring and summer, but what is extraordinary about this year's fires is that so many are active in Quebec, the country's largest province. Typically wildfire season in Canada affects mostly western provinces, such as Alberta. However, this year nearly half of the 423 active wildfires in Canada are in the eastern part of the country, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre. Many of these fires are located within a few hundred kilometers of the border with the United States, and with a northerly flow in place, the smoke and haze has swirled down into the Eastern United States.

The effects have been profound. On Tuesday, for a time, IQ Air ranked New York City as having the worst air quality in the world, above cities like Delhi, India, and Dhaka, Bangladesh. As of Wednesday morning, New York only had the second worst air quality in the world. On a normal day, it would not rank among the top thousand cities. Such air, with small particles, is unhealthy. Officials and physicians in New York City have urged residents to remain indoors or wear a mask if they venture outside. For people who are outdoors for an extended period of time, there are serious respiratory issues and other health concerns, physicians said.

Air quality problems on Wednesday are likely to be worse farther south in the United States, in areas such as New Jersey and the District of Columbia, due to prevailing wind patterns. A low-pressure system over the northern Atlantic Ocean is driving a northerly flow of winds over Canada and down into the United States. Models of smoke patterns, vertically integrated through the atmosphere, suggest that this flow will reach its greatest extent on Wednesday and Thursday, with the Mid-Atlantic states seeing the worst effects then. Major cities at risk include Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, DC. Overall the effects could be widespread, with smoke and haze trailing as far south as into the Carolinas.

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Wildfire Smoke and Haze in the Eastern United States Should Peak This Week

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  • by Merk42 ( 1906718 ) on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @10:34AM (#63583394)
    We have bad air quality from something perfectly natural like wild fires, so we might as well roll coal.
  • The last three summers we've had a blanket of haze over us in South Dakota. It's said to have originated in California, and other locations out west. Far enough away for it to be concerning that it's a repeating pattern.

    It's going to be a very interesting ride watching capitalism and greed continue to destroy what's left of the biosphere in the name of the almighty profit. "Sure, we destroyed the world, but for a brief moment we created shareholder value!"

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by jellomizer ( 103300 )

      These are wild fires, which do happen naturally without human intervention... However with Climate change, basically putting all the areas natural state in a new normal, there is an increase risk of wildfire, now that normally wet areas are now dry, dry areas are now wet, causing a lot of runoff, or causing increased growth in (flammable) plant matter.

      • by omnichad ( 1198475 ) on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @11:51AM (#63583630) Homepage

        That's part of it, but we also have a lot of deferred natural wildfires happening. Too much effort has been put into preventing wildfires that we actually made the fuel more dangerous. Now we can't even slow or stop wildfire boundaries effectively. These are ecosystems that depend on regular (smaller) wildfires for renewal. They are still a net carbon sink.

        • by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @01:28PM (#63583866)

          The continued suppression of naturally occurring underbrush fires leaves a LOT of dead, dried-up fuel available to begin with. The depressed rainfall over the last couple decades leaves that underbrush even more dried out. We've really kinda done everything we could to create the perfect environment for constant out of control wildfires. Climate change is speeding those fires right along.

    • How funny that you blame capitalism on this. Fact is, most of these fires came about because western forest trees have been killed by pine beetles. Numerous companies wanted to cut these trees down and use them for furniture, housing, even bio-energy. But the dem governors in colorado, California, and Oregon blocked these. So NOW these forests are burning, and these democrats governors do not want to plant new trees to replace the dead ones. So, new ones WILL grow, but will be slow and will not take up much
      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by way2trivial ( 601132 )

        "governors in colorado, California, and Oregon blocked these."

        Caused wildfires in Canada and NJ?
        Please expand on your claim- I do not see the connection.

        • You might wish to READ the conversations BEFORE posting:

          The last three summers we've had a blanket of haze over us in South Dakota. It's said to have originated in California, and other locations out west.

          The conversation had absolutely NOTHING to do with Canada or New York (and it is mostly NY that is impacted, not NJ).

      • by Pascoea ( 968200 ) on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @11:39AM (#63583590)

        most of these fires came about because western forest trees have been killed by pine beetles

        Most? That's a pretty dubious claim.

      • Wildfires are the best way to control pine beetle populations. Trying to prevent fires for too long just makes more destructive wildfires. Managed forestry isn't the answer either because what grows in place of the harvested wood is just a tree farm. Only the most profitable trees are replanted and not what makes a healthy mix for a forest. And it doesn't create the underbrush necessary to fuel the next forest fire.

        • The best way to control any natural population is to leave it alone.
          • Right. The best way to manage any complex interdependent relationship is to leave as much of it alone as possible and stop pretending like you've seen every side of it. Still, we do still use wood as a society so we have to find a way to have access to it without attempting to replace the natural order of things.

            We would probably be better off moving toward some sort of synthetic wood fiber or alternative cellulose source - ideally something not involving epoxies.

            • The best way to manage complex interactions is to understand them. If humans' tiny flawed organic state machine cant, builds a better machine that can (Ai). then Fix it. Don't ignore it and just say whelp its too hard!
        • Hey, they way we manage forests is RIPE for ripping apart. We pretty much do everything we possibly can to create perfect storms for massive fires, then stand around with our thumbs up our ass wondering why they burn. But... we still somehow have escalated the potential into something a lot bigger than it used to be with the ridiculously dry conditions we now find ourselves in.

          It almost feels like the planet as a whole is going, "Humans? Time to face the consequences of your actions." And in multiple ways a

        • Nope.
          I am guessing that you do not live in the west, or at least around these forests.
          What controls them, is the type of trees and temperature. In New Mexico, Arizona, Southern Colorado/Utah, etc, the 'forests' are quite limited and most of the trees are pinyon pines. RMPBs rarely go for the pinyons. Just as important is that the trees grow in large groves, that will be seperated by 5, 10, even 100 miles. As such, the beatles do not transfer easily.
          Now, from mid Colorado on up north into Canada, we see
      • You mean the native pine beetle whose very existence helps keep the ecosystem in balance? Yeah lets get rid of em. While we're at it, we don't need bats, or birds, or deer, or vultures....the list is endless. Man knows what is best for Nature, she just won't listen!
        • In what way does a naturally checked pine beetle, that is no longer checked, help keep ecosystem in balance?
          Please explain this to foresters, environmentalist, and let us know how dead trees standing around for 15 years will absorb CO2?
      • You're halfway there, but need to keep pulling on the string to get all the way there... do you understand why all the trees are being killed by pine beetles? Answer: climate change. The lack of sufficiently cold winters has allowed pine beetles to survive year-round in higher elevations where they would normally be killed off by cold temperatures, thus leading to the huge amount of dead beetle-kill pines in Western forests. Thus closing the circle back to the GP's point about capitalism being the cause of

        • Oh absolutely it is climate change. HOWEVER, the problem here is one of mis-governing of this issue.
          BUT, it was NOT capitalism that created AGW in the first place. If it was capitalism, then why does China and Russia and other command economies keep growing their emissions so much? And China is MOSTLY a command economy. They are NOT capitalist.
          • I mean sure, China is growing their emissions now, because they are a modernizing country with a huge population. But to say they are not capitalist is pretty disconnected from reality. Sure there are elements of their economy that are controlled by the state, but it is absolutely a capitalist economy. Private companies are responding to across sectors in China by producing goods driven by market and consumer needs. The bulk of their economic growth is dictated by this, not any kind of 'command economy' whe

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      I'm concerned about the repeating pattern of climate activists committing arson and posing for social media pictures.

      Yes, yes, I'm very sure you have no idea what I'm talking about. That's even more concerning.
      • I'm concerned about the repeating pattern of climate activists committing arson and posing for social media pictures. Yes, yes, I'm very sure you have no idea what I'm talking about. That's even more concerning.

        Oh, have we stopped blaming coming out parties for the fires now?

  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @10:41AM (#63583416)

    I wonder how many Canadian wildfires are natural versus ones which are deliberately set. In California, come wildfire season, it usually is more than half of them that are works of arson, and finding who did it is pretty much impossible, so there are a lot of people who would go into the backcountry to do this, be it eco-terrorists, or terrorists in general, because it gives unstoppable destruction for almost no risk to them.

  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @10:41AM (#63583418)
    over State Farm & All State exiting California because of the wild fires.

    Turns out they've been making bank even with the wild fires. Billions. California made home owners insurance more or less mandatory, similar to how car insurance works. As a result it's a quasi-private business now (if the gov't mandates your product you're not really a private business anymore, are you?). So CA regulates how much they can charge.

    The rate regulations are very generous, but enough is never enough and State Farm & All State are using the wild fires and climate change as a smokescreen (see what I did there?) to hide the real reason they're pulling out, which is they want to price gouge on a mandatory product.

    It might backfire. California told the insulin producers "cut your price to $35/mo or we'll start making it ourselves". No reason they can't do the same for homeowners insurance.

    I ran across this little bit of info because a local California news station popped up in my feed. The national news sucks hard now, so naturally they didn't mention the negotiations going on, they just took State Farm & All State's word for it. If you want actual journalism you've got to go local.
    • by HBI ( 10338492 ) on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @10:59AM (#63583472)

      I'm not having a brief for insurers here, but it's a simple equation; if they take risk of loss, they have to be compensated with something that would make them a profit if the actuarily assessed worst possible risk came to pass. I know you're going to call that 'gouging', but i'm going to call that 'intending to stay in business'. If the state wants to pay claims out of the general tax receipts, that's their business I guess, but the rest of the world would call that "bankruptcy" in a private insurer.

      Whether the rest of California wants to subsidize high risk insurance is their business, I suppose. The NFIP analogy is pretty strong here.

      • by way2trivial ( 601132 ) on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @11:41AM (#63583594) Homepage Journal

        I thought that is what reinsurance is for.
        Insurance companies get a policy for 1 in 1000 odds with someone like lloyds for extreme circumstances, and the premiums for all the policies paid for at 1:1000 odds are paid at 1:1100 ratio, and the reinsurer gets (in this case) 10% more than the payout for all the rare events...

        https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
        "A reimbursement system that protects insurers from very high claims. It usually involves a third party paying part of an insurance company's claims once they pass a certain amount. Reinsurance is a way to stabilize an insurance market and make coverage more available and affordable."

        • by HBI ( 10338492 )

          I was avoiding the reinsurance discussion, but if you want to have it: if I took too little at the outset to insure the risk, do you think i'm going to have an easy time reinsuring that risk at a reasonable price? It's going to make the whole situation worse in terms of my bottom line. Keep avoiding your fiduciary duties in the interest of practical state politics, and you then have a systemic problem in the insurance industry with reinsurance sprinkled on. Kind of like 2008...

          There's a certain number th

      • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @02:14PM (#63583954)
        than they need to for a modest profit then yes, it's gouging. When your business is endorsed and mandated by the gov't you don't get to complain just because you could be making *more* money by jacking up the price on your mandatory product. Especially when something like that ought to be run by the public anyway.
    • by necro81 ( 917438 ) on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @11:13AM (#63583520) Journal

      No reason [California] can't do the same for homeowners insurance.

      That hasn't work out too well for Florida. Flood insurance and/or wind insurance isn't mandatory per se, but most folks with a mortgage in Florida are required by their lender to have it. Starting with Hurricane Andrew in '92, and especially in the past few years, many insurers have either 1) jacked premiums and deductibles, 2) left the state entirely, or 3) been totally wiped out by losses from a particularly bad storm (or season). I don't think any of the major insurance companies are left in the state. Six smaller insurers liquidated last year alone.

      The market is a mess [forbes.com]. Florida keeps getting hit with billion-dollar disasters year after year, and that's not gonna change. (Insurance [fiu.edu] fraud [bankrate.com] also plays a significant role, but that's a separate issue.)

      To help fill the gap, there's the state-run Citizens Property Insurance Corporation [wikipedia.org]. This is supposed to be the insurer of last resort, and increasingly it's the only option available to property owners. But their premiums aren't enough to cover their losses, and haven't been for years. ("Undercapitalized" is the actuarial term - like some of the recent bank runs.) State-wide, Citizens has about $400 billion in exposure, but only about $14 billion in assets. One substantial hurricane to a major metro area will wipe them out. Taxpayers will end up backfilling.

      The podcast How We Survive [marketplace.org], from the folks that produce Marketplace, spent all of season 2 discussing the precariousness of Florida. Episode 5 [marketplace.org] in particular discusses the insurance market.

      • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @11:51AM (#63583632)
        and their Republican party is actively sabotaging and undermining government programs. Look at what they're doing to their pubic school system if you doubt me. They're always trying to privatize anything public and turn it into a cash cow for their buddies. Like DeSantis' "Special District" with it's big, big salaries.
      • To help fill the gap, there's the state-run Citizens Property Insurance Corporation. This is supposed to be the insurer of last resort, and increasingly it's the only option available to property owners. But their premiums aren't enough to cover their losses, and haven't been for years.

        And now: State-run insurance company expected to drop thousands of policyholders [abc-7.com].

        The bottom line is that the risk of natural disasters should force people to into building either better (more expensive), or else disposabl

    • over State Farm & All State exiting California because of the wild fires.

      Turns out they've been making bank even with the wild fires. Billions.

      Are you kidding? They make money elsewhere so they should deliberately stay in an unprofitable market?

      • they're profitable in California. They're lying to you. They want *more* money. And because there are laws and rules that require the purchase of their product they know that they can get it unless there are price controls.

        This is just price gouging, and if we had a functional media you'd know that without having to dig up stories from local journalists. But CNN/MSNBC/Fox just parrot what the corps tell them.
    • by Fly Swatter ( 30498 ) on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @12:03PM (#63583680) Homepage
      Mandatory home insurance issued by the government sounds like a property tax increase to me. The reason insurance companies are pulling out is not just because it is unprofitable - the current costs to rebuild in California makes it unsustainable for insurance in general.

      The rest of the nation simply doesn't want to incur the insuring costs and resulting insurance premium increases of over-priced California.
    • You think two of the four largest insurers in the state of California are pulling our because they... are making so much money that theyre in a frenzy to make more? That sounds stupid just on its face. NPR had said yesterday that one of the california insurers had 20 years of underwriting profit wiped out by one wildfire event. I don't have a source for that number but it's a lot more believable than what you're saying.

      California, via another genuious vote ammendment, has insurance premium caps that keeps t

  • by Chiasmus_ ( 171285 ) on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @10:49AM (#63583446) Journal

    ...this is not news. Everyone knows that the four seasons are Winter, Spring, Fire, and Fall.

  • And yesterday was quite special, sky was orange, you could watch the sun without sunglasses, it smelled smoke, it looked like hazy, and after a minute outside, you cough...
    In my part the air quality reach ~160 while the normal is less than 5
  • by Joey Vegetables ( 686525 ) on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @11:59AM (#63583670) Journal

    We have weird conditions near where I am, near Cleveland, Ohio.

    There is haze that resembles heavy cloud cover, except just a little off-color, and tiny little particles lightly coat outdoor surfaces. Not visible unless they happen to condense on windows or windshields, but I'm sure they are everywhere

    People with respiratory problems are being urged to stay inside.

    It was a little like this during the 2020 California fires, although those were 4000km away. These ones are maybe half that distance.

    • Same here in upper Manhattan at about 1:15 pm. I went for my usual early morning bike ride today and it was tolerable. Wouldn't attempt it now. I was just outside and it is nasty.

      • by Anonymous Coward
        LGA just issued a ground stop due to visibility so it must be bad...
  • by muh_freeze_peach ( 9622152 ) on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @01:37PM (#63583894)
    With the Eye of Sauron hanging in the sky, the ride into work is a bit more stressful than usual. I was able to get a great photo of the sun with my phone, with a large sunspot visible in the lower right quadrant.
  • If you want to interactively view the surface PM2.5 which comes from the RAQDPS-FireWork model from Environment Canada, here you go: https://eccc-msc.github.io/msc... [github.io]

    The same but for PM10: https://eccc-msc.github.io/msc... [github.io]

    This tool enables you to interactively view the associated forecast across for North America, and create video animations . There's actually a lot more content suitable for plenty of different weather events (over 8,000 weather & climate layers in there). Enjoy!

  • by Petersko ( 564140 ) on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @02:55PM (#63584086)

    So how about insurers simply not insuring against natural disasters? So, insure against your house or apartment burning down for localized reasons... and theft, pipe-related flooding, etc.. But no wildfire, overland flooding, hurricane/storm insurance...It would be highly disruptive, and it would ruin a bunch of financial lives... but 25 years from now, people won't be building on flood plains, on the coast in hurricane prone areas, in forests, or in tornado alley.

    Paying to rebuild in situ is a bit silly.

  • I'm in the Midwest and over the last 2 weeks, some morning the drive to work looks like a post-apocalyptic hellscape of dull orange smoke and someone needs to turn up reality's draw distance. I can deal with that though. What I can't deal with is the burning nose and eyes. I had to work from home with two 22" box fans with furnace filter attachments running at 75% speed just to make the air breathable. I do have quite severe allergies but no asthma so there are probably people worse off than me!
  • Those photos of NYC remind me of photos of Los Angeles back in the late 60's.
  • The east coast elites laughed at calif when the bay area had this smoke. Joke's now on them.

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