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.
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.
Fighting climate change is pointless (Score:4, Funny)
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Don't let conservatives see you supporting Russia's opposition.
Re: Fighting climate change is pointless (Score:3, Funny)
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Trust me, most people are buying their last IC engine vehicle now. It is only a matter of time before IC vehicles are given an expiration date burned in the ECU where after that, the vehicle stops working and only EVs are on the road. For the uneducated morons who think that EVs are not a car for everyone, it will be an EV or a bicycle. We have plenty of charging stations (not hard at all to have one installed in a garage or outside), so the infrastructure for EVs is as good, if not better than it is for
Welcome to the new normal. (Score:2, Insightful)
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!"
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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.
Re:Welcome to the new normal. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Welcome to the new normal. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re: Welcome to the new normal. (Score:2, Insightful)
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"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.
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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).
Re: Welcome to the new normal. (Score:4, Insightful)
most of these fires came about because western forest trees have been killed by pine beetles
Most? That's a pretty dubious claim.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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Please explain this to foresters, environmentalist, and let us know how dead trees standing around for 15 years will absorb CO2?
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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
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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.
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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
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Sure there are elements of their economy that are controlled by the state, but it is absolutely a capitalist economy.
Sure there are elements of their economy that are capitalist, but it is absolutely controlled by the state economy.
FTFY.
U obviously NEVER saw soviet or early russian set up. Their emissions/pollution was ALWAYS growing.
cumulative emissions is the figure that is most important since the current state of the atmosphere is what matter.
If the entire west went to zero TONIGHT on emissions, we would still be in trouble. Emissions would continue to grow.
And if you want to talk about cummulative, then you need to go back to how long CO2 lasts, which is the bulk of it.
CO2 stays in the atmosphere for up to 1000 years. That means that we need to quit cutting studies at 150 years and go back 1000 years, where it all started. [nasa.gov]
Capitali
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Yes, yes, I'm very sure you have no idea what I'm talking about. That's even more concerning.
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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?
Wonder how many Canadian wildfires are arson (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
There was a big bruhaha (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:There was a big bruhaha (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:There was a big bruhaha (Score:5, Informative)
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."
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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
If they're charging significantly more (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:There was a big bruhaha (Score:5, Informative)
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.
That's because Florida is a red state (Score:5, Interesting)
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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
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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?
You missed the point (Score:1)
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.
Re:There was a big bruhaha (Score:5, Insightful)
The rest of the nation simply doesn't want to incur the insuring costs and resulting insurance premium increases of over-priced California.
Re: There was a big bruhaha (Score:2)
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
Speaking as a West Coaster... (Score:4, Funny)
...this is not news. Everyone knows that the four seasons are Winter, Spring, Fire, and Fall.
Re:Speaking as a West Coaster... (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah but it's special for us. Usually in Quebec our 4 seasons are Early Winter, Mid Winter, Late Winter and Road Construction.
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Road construction being the 2 week construction holiday when replacement workers can be brought in from outside for "emergency work."
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What natural disaster blocks out the sun and stops wind?
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Night time.
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THis is a first explanation for what causes wind. Roughly, temperature differences in the land caused by uneven heating from the sun. Temp difference accounts for more than 75% of all the winds. This is more so in the mid-west. [eia.gov]
Here are 3 volcanoes that you might want to attention to. Mt St. Helens would make less than 1% difference to PV output for east coast. However, back in the 80s, when it erupted, winds in the Midwest WERE impacted and no doubt PV [arcgis.com]
Re:Solar owners need to check output (Score:4, Interesting)
You said yourself, the production drops a small amount. That doesn't make it "not available" as you said just a few sentences later. Actual numbers are about 10-30% depending on how close to the source you are. It does highlight the importance of a stable national grid since a wildfire area might need to import more energy from other states.
On the bright side, wildfire smoke can also reduce the air temperature by about 5-10 degrees so you need less air conditioning energy in the first place.
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It has been oddly pleasant in my part of the country. Low temps and low humidity and the haze keeps the bright sun at bay. They just downgraded the air quality from orange to red, so there is that to deal with.
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This was on simple FOREST FIRES. Mt. St. Helen would have blocked more sun, and yes, winds did slow down during that time. No doubt PV output
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Here in NJ, wind power is far from threatened. Our smoke right now is as bad as it is because there's a steady 10-15mph north-to-northwest wind blowing it directly from the fires to the eastern seaboard. My solar panels are whimpering, though, because it looks like dusk out there.
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As to the PV, the output is interesting to watch. I was real surprised when forest fires in California and Colorado impacted us that much. 10% over the summer. That is a large amount considering that they were so far away.
I'm in QC (Score:2)
In my part the air quality reach ~160 while the normal is less than 5
Northeast Ohio (Score:3)
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.
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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.
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Scary (Score:3)
Haze forecast: PM2.5 and PM10 interactive maps (Score:5, Informative)
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!
All this insurance talk... (Score:3)
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.
it's AWFUL! (Score:2)
SMOG (Score:1)
God is punishing them (Score:2)
The east coast elites laughed at calif when the bay area had this smoke. Joke's now on them.