14 ms·

Wildfire smoke is exposing millions of Americans to extreme pollution levels

168 points by nabla9 4y ago

Proven 4y ago
lightedman 4y ago
The smoke levels in the Western USA are horrible, and are only going to get worse due to the inability of state administrations to allocate proper funding for brush clearing and controlled burns, and this is only compounded by the drought we're experiencing.
- mc32 4y ago
  The western US is only able to support this level of population due to modern infrastructure. In other words the population density is being subsidized by technology to accommodate beyond its carrying capacity. So more technology and resource management (diversion) or relocate the population to naturally sustainable areas.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - buscoquadnary 4y ago
    We have been above the environmental carrying capacity due to technology since the first guy in Mesopotamia realized if he dug a ditch to grab some of the water from the Euphrates he could get water to repeatedly water his crops. Thats the whole history of humanity has been figuring out a way to make a locality more hospitable to human beings using technology. What you say on the surface sounds reasonable but really is just a veneer of neo-ludtisim over a malthusian mindset. Humanity has changed the environment, we will do so again and again to improve the quality of life we experience.
    - mistrial9 4y ago
      > veneer of neo-ludtisim over a malthusian mindset sure, I will take that veneer and counter -- there is such a thing as balance in dynamic systems. Tragedies of excess are being played out now, seventy years after a "boom times for all" expansion by any means necessary. Before 1970, outrageously excessive pollutors in many areas of the USA were given slap on the wrist oversight, calling the outraged greens things like "neo-luddites" ..
    - mc32 4y ago
      You can't expect things to output 100% 100% of the time. Things will fail and if you make plans on 100% always being there, you will then have catastrophic failures. That is if your plan is to rely on your ducks always being in a row, you will fail because systems being systems will have ducks that stray resulting in failure. So yeah maybe we can sustain 100MM people in the west if all things work perfectly, but when they fail, then there will be pain and suffering because there is no surplus to play with.
      - buscoquadnary 4y ago
        “spend all the wages they earn and enjoy themselves while they can appears to be evident from the number of families that, upon the failure of any great manufactory, immediately fall upon the parish,” - Sir Thomas Malthus Who predicted that we'd all be dead and the collapse would come hundreds of years ago, and said letting the Irish potato famine kill them off was natural, requisite and just. Yet, here we are still defying the Malthusian imperative, just like when everyone said the world was going to end when the Gulf states controlled all the oil, then we figured out how to make shale oil work, or before that when we invented the iron plow, or a dozen other things that have shown Malthus wrong time and time again. Meanwhile the people protesting scarcity and the need to reduce the consumption of resources have consistently been behind the greatest man made famines in history. We figured out things before we will figure it out again, I have faith in the ability of humanity to innovate, to adapt and to overcome.
      - 8note 4y ago
        This is why we have so much food waste - things are running way above 100% all the time, and failures bring us closer to 100%
- someguydave 4y ago
  Not to mention millions of acres of federal forests where natural fires are quenched and logging is prohibited
- pengaru 4y ago
  In CA, which amounts to a good junk of the west coast, over half the forest acres are under the Fed's purview. AIUI that split of jurisdictions is a significant part of the problem.
  - jfk13 4y ago
    > a good junk of the west coast What a delightful turn of phrase!
    - pengaru 4y ago
      Hah! The sad thing is that wasn't even autocorrect, just being half asleep.
- newaccount2021 4y ago
  Plenty of CA money available to fund pissing-match billboards in FL and TX though, go figure Apparently the people have spoken...teacher pay, water management, brush clearing? These are less important than the "war" with Rick DeSantis over....what exactly?
  - azinman2 4y ago
    Most of what burns is federal land.
- DiffEq 4y ago
  This is a wild idea…but perhaps people can spend a few less hours watching the tv and surfing the social web and volunteer to clean up the dead underbrush that allows such fires to spread so violently and frequently.
  - dbrueck 4y ago
    Hehe, you are woefully underestimating the size of the Big Blue Room.
  - hindsightbias 4y ago
    They never talk about who did all that brush clearing and controlled burns back in the day. Something something native Americans did 200 years ago, do they expect them to return?
  - bombcar 4y ago
    This basically occurs in other parts of the country where much of the existing forest is maintained timber land. The problem is the absolute scale of the size of the western "unmaintained forest land" which includes national parks, state parks, BLM land, etc.
- x86_64Ubuntu 4y ago
  I remember reading an article about the wildfires which was super eye-opening. Basically they said they could burn 100K acres a year, and still have an unacceptable fuel load for about 40 years. While controlled burns are the prescription, the political risk is too high in the sense that if a controlled burn breaks containment heads will roll. It doesn't help that even during controlled burns that don't escape, localities will complain about the smoke to their local reps who put the kibash on controlled burns.
  - jerlam 4y ago
    100K burned acres a year though isn't a lot though. The past five years, California has averaged well over 1 million acres burned a year. Even in the decade before that, 250K burned acres would be considered a light year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_wildfires#Area_burned_per_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_wildfires#A...
    - x86_64Ubuntu 4y ago
      Goodness, the amount of area burned in the past two years is enormous compared to the years prior.
- dahart 4y ago
  > are only going to get worse I’m so thankful this year was mostly smoke free, but last year was a dystopian nightmare for like 3 or 4 months, it ended all outdoor activity for most of the summer and fall. Out of desperation, I resorted to riding my bike a few times wearing a ventilator mask, but wow was that uncomfortable. I’m really not looking forward to worse, but of course I know you’re probably right. With the size & scale of these fires I keep wondering how everything flammable hasn’t burned already in the last five or six years?
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Which mask were you using? The quite expensive "all day" ones for painters can be relatively comfortable, and the ones that look like beekeeper hats even more so.
    - dahart 4y ago
      I was using a cheap disposable N95 ventilator from Home Depot. Yeah if it gets bad again I will take your advice and invest in a professional mask. Sweating into the mask was probably the worst part, I was having to remove it often to wipe everything down, and the mask was kind of starting to disintegrate after a couple hours. It was, in a weird way, nice to get shocked with the taste & smell of smoke every time I took off the mask, I could tell it was working and helping keep my air much cleaner.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        Yeah, the slightly more expensive N95s are nice (I use https://www.homedepot.com/p/Milwaukee-N95-Professional-Multi-Purpose-Valved-Respirator-10-Pack-48-73-4014/310392944 https://www.homedepot.com/p/Milwaukee-N95-Professional-Multi... for example) but the big ones are really more comfortable. Sweat is always the main problem after you tighten the bands enough that you're not leaking air on the sides. And if you're getting irritants in your eyes, you may want to go to a full face mask; zee goggles don't do much except against falling nails, dirt, etc.
        4y ago
- FollowingTheDao 4y ago
  > brush clearing and controlled burns If you think you can combat climate change with "brush clearing and controlled burns" you are mistaken.
  - mistrial9 4y ago
    that brush clearing and controlled burns is specific to drought-stricken forests
    - FollowingTheDao 4y ago
      So maybe just burn the whole forest down? That'll solve it.
      - MomoXenosaga 4y ago
        This happend in France last summer a few times. Control fires got completely out of hand and turned into full apocalypse wild fires. Turns out that fire is hard to manage...
        mistrial9 4y ago
        yeah - here also with the Hermit's Peak fire due to a prescribed burn, Las Dispensas, Sante Fe New Mexico National Forest, May 2022. They had to evacuate the Los Alamos National Labs ! iir.. catastrophic wildfire
- ortusdux 4y ago
  https://crosscut.com/environment/2022/02/billions-federal-dollars-headed-western-forests-manage-fires https://crosscut.com/environment/2022/02/billions-federal-do... https://crosscut.com/politics/2021/04/inside-washingtons-328m-push-prevent-disastrous-wildfires https://crosscut.com/politics/2021/04/inside-washingtons-328... Unfortunately, it seems that forest management funding is a political issue, so there is a good chance these funds will dry up depending on the outcome of the midterms.
JoeAltmaier 4y ago
It's not good of course, and will have health repercussions. But I remember that sitting around a campfire or in a hut with a fire going all your life is the way people lived for the first million years. And I hope we have some resilience to smoke.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  True, but the problems with soot and smoke in densely populated areas were a well known downside of urban life. Rich kids with asthma spent summers at the country manor.
- dymk 4y ago
  Most of us died before the age of 30 during that period of time
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    Low life expectancy at birth due to humans dying during infant/child years due to disease and other causes is not indicative of effects of living in huts around campfires.
    - Spooky23 4y ago
      My ancestors lived in thatched roof cottages with open fires and livestock. Soot and smoke was one of many hazards.
  - FiberBundle 4y ago
    Average life expectancy for hunter gatherers was low due to infant mortality. If people didn't die as an infant their life expectancy was actually fairly high (~70 years).
    - gruez 4y ago
      While you're right in principle, the life expectancy after childhood is nowhere as high as you claim. From wikipedia >Based on the data from modern hunter-gatherer populations, it is estimated that at 15, life expectancy was an additional 39 years (total 54), with a 60% probability of reaching 15.
linuxftw 4y ago
- ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
  Everyone knows climate change is a hoax perpetrated by Big Science. Get this misinformation off of HN!
  - Tagbert 4y ago
    Hey, we're all getting rich off of the hoax. Don't kill that sooty goose. /s
- elil17 4y ago
  Hmmm, perhaps this "climate change" causes things to happen?
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  Fun that you think this is a "trend" on hackernews rather than growing awareness of an issue that already does and certainly will effect nearly every facet of life for every living person.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Madmallard 4y ago
- belval 4y ago
  > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. HN is not a single-minded hyperfocused community nor should it be. It covers most topics under the sun. If you are interested mostly in tech topics I highly recommend browsing "best" which tends to be mostly tech related: https://news.ycombinator.com/best https://news.ycombinator.com/best
  - Madmallard 4y ago
    We don't need it becoming another Reddit that gets overrun by mainstream media agendas compounded by astroturfing.
cagenut 4y ago
This reminds me, and is as good a place to ask as any. Does anyone know how to get custom cardboard boxes made? Are there particular tools or vendors (or even just keywords to search on upwork/fiver) where you can design custom-cut cardboard that will fold in specific ways to build a cube?
Syonyk 4y ago
Yeah... living in the Treasure Valley area (Boise metro region), it's been getting pretty bad out here. And they don't have 2021 data listed, which, IMO, was worse than 2020. It just settled in early and never left all summer long. Quite vile, and makes being outside a challenge. I did a lot of outdoor work in 2020 and I'm pretty sure I've not been quite the same since, and I seem far more sensitive to smoke than I was. > ...“which means an increasing portion of the particulate matter that people are exposed to is unregulated.” Forests, annoyingly, don't respond to regulations on if they're allowed to burn or not. And while it's certainly popular and at least somewhat reasonable to blame a lot of it on climate change, the reality is that this has been inevitable for quite a few decades - the question was just, "When?" Starting in the late 1930s, the US Forest Service had their 10AM Policy of basically putting forest fires out as soon as possible. Starting in the late 1940s, after WWII, they actually had the mechanized equipment and airplanes to start doing that effectively - with a corresponding reduction in acres burned. Unfortunately, "things that can't go on forever won't," and that approach to forest management can't go on forever. The forest ecosystems, especially in the west, need to burn. Lots of species of pine only seed after fire, and it goes through clearing the underbrush, killing weak trees, etc. But the "standard forest fires" of the western pine forests aren't the catastrophic crowning events that have been more and more standard for the past decade or two - because there's so much fire load from 70 years of not burning, when they do catch fire, they go off like a bomb. And that's before you find things like the pine beetle killed swaths of forest down in New Mexico, which means thousands of acres of wind-dried, long dead pine, waiting to catch fire. One doesn't fight that, one gets out of the way. So, unfortunately, climate change or not, this sort of thing was inevitable, eventually. And there's really no chance to do much until the forests "reset" back to a more sustainable fire load. And, yes, I'll agree with "extreme" pollution levels. I've measured PM2.5 into the 150s, and PM10 north of 250 out here before. It's... disgusting? Vile? Human-toxic? Just being outside is painful. I've been dealing with it indoors with air filters - I have one of the "build a box of filters around a fan" style filters that does a fine job of keeping indoor air quality acceptable, at least on a fairly tight house. The furnace filter does a good job too, though I'm pretty sure I need to get the ducts cleaned. For outdoor work, I've given up and gone to wearing a 3M painter's half mask with P100 filters. They do a fine job of it, and the newer-style P100s (white with pink grids, not the solid pink ones) breathe freely enough for just about anything with two of them on the mask. One could run with them, though I'm not sure that sounds a great idea. I'm seriously considering a winter project of building something positive pressure, though. A filtered feed into a face mask would be very nice for outdoor work on the "really bad" years. It's not just breathing the air that's vile, it's the air in my eyes. Running down the road on a motorcycle in bad air is just... not enjoyable. And we don't have the surplus vehicles to all take cars when there's vehicle conflict. I'm seriously debating rigging the positive air pressure filtration setup to a motorcycle helmet as well. Just... get me something less-vile when riding. All this to say, "Yeah, it's gotten really bad out west." I just don't see a path for it to change any time soon, so I'm trying to adapt to it as best I can. Some writings of mine on non-internet-connected air quality sensors and details on the filters I've built: https://www.sevarg.net/2021/08/28/temtop-air-quality-sensors/ https://www.sevarg.net/2021/08/28/temtop-air-quality-sensors...
mistrial9 4y ago
fantastic hindsight math here from Stanford University. It was five years ago that the San Francisco Bay Area, rivaling Beijing in yet another way, had the worst PM2.5 air quality in the entire world for a few days. (insert dramatic pictures here) It was more than ten years ago that the Jerry Brown appointed head of the California Air Resources Board Mary D. Nichols, was named a national public enemy by privately funded experts and their political area commanders. The situation at hand in the forests of California, with >100 million dead trees standing, is a direct result of 100 years of belligerent, unyielding control of fire fighting by the USDA-USFS, with their alliances among what is now known as 30x30 program. Their cozy allies want to make monarchical statements of Science to accompany the massive budgets being thrown at this problem. They have "AI" which clearly makes them authoritative and worthy of leadership? Combine this with an invite session at Stanford Woods Institute for maybe fifty leaders, to address "inequity" .. also apparently worth billions in budget. Maybe there is merit to their math, but the agenda here is running huge, huge budgets .. to whom? for what?
FollowingTheDao 4y ago
Since I know many people here struggle with mood issues, just know that higher PM2.5 leads to greater mood instability. https://ps.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ps.201800565 https://ps.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ps.20180056... https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(22)00017-1/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...
guitarbill 4y ago
A comparison would be nice. The smoke can be awful, no doubt - but is it worse for a person's health than living near a busy road or highway? That is 24x7, and cumulative over many years.
- wonder_er 4y ago
  I am curious to know this comparison as well. I moved across town two years ago, into an expensive house (it's not a nice house, just an expensive house) that's directly adjacent to a road with lots of traffic, and I think every day about air quality now. I also started riding a motor scooter around Denver (and across the country to British Columbia, then to Seattle, and back) and I wonder about protecting myself from road pollution while riding, especially in rush hour in cities. I wonder if an n95 would improve things for me, and I wonder how much damage I'm doing to myself by breathing vehicle pollution (emissions, brake dust, tire rubber micro-plastics), eg: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/03/car-tyres-produce-more-particle-pollution-than-exhausts-tests-show https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/03/car-tyre... I'm 33, I'm already resigned to not-great long-term health outcomes based on environmental contaminants in food and the air. I avoid most meat (that gets me out of the factory farmed meat harm universe) and avoid most processed food, and am generally "healthy and active", but I despair of the world, for many reasons. Ugggghhhhhhhh.
  - landemva 4y ago
    Denver geography traps bad air into the occasional brown cloud. Get higher.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Get some N95s and wear them for a few days, then look at how dirty they are. Unscientific, but it'll tell you a bit. Much of emissions may not be caught, but those are relatively "clean" now, brake dust and tire rubber falls to the ground relatively quickly (unless it's being kicked back up by the vehicles). You can get various air quality meters, too.
  - thegjp210 4y ago
wintermutestwin 4y ago
If you want to get an indoor air filter to clean up the toxic air that enters your home, I recommend an industrial solution. Go down to your local indoor growing shop and check out the carbon filters that the pot growers use to scrub the weed smell. Get a filter like this: https://indoorgrowing.com/collections/vortex/products/profilter-70s-non-reversible-carbon-filter-6-with-flange https://indoorgrowing.com/collections/vortex/products/profil... And pair it with an inline fan to match like this: https://indoorgrowing.com/collections/vortex/products/vortex-vtx-series-powerfan-6-497-cfm https://indoorgrowing.com/collections/vortex/products/vortex... That gets you 400CFM of air cleaning power for ~$500. (you can get this stuff for much cheaper used as the margin on indoor pot growing has tanked) Compare to a "designed for the home" air purifier like this: https://oransi.com/products/mod-hepa-air-purifier https://oransi.com/products/mod-hepa-air-purifier Compared to my proposed industrial solution, the air purifier costs $100 more and is about 1/4 the CFM. The only pluses are that it looks pretty and is roughly 2/3 the DBA when running.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- keneda7 4y ago
  I recently switched from a carbon filter with a canfan to a medifyair MA-40. I think the medifyair is far superior to the straight carbon filter. It also is significantly quitter than my old set up and still pushed ~220 CPM. They are a little pricey but well worth it in my opinion.
- hnuser123456 4y ago
  The home unit claims it goes up to 350 CFM
  - wintermutestwin 4y ago
    That's just the fan speed rating - not the filter's rating. It's specs say it covers 1,312 sq ft (2 air changes per hour) Assuming 10foot ceilings, that comes out to 109CFM
- 4y ago
jjcon 4y ago
Would having a few days of bad air a year due to forest fires be worse than camping a few days a year sitting next to a big campfire? Depends on if the fires are burning things other than trees?
- sbdncuvh 4y ago
- Syonyk 4y ago
  The problem is that it's not "a few days." It varies from "Several weeks of absolutely toxic outside air" to "several months." Typical campfire exposure is "A few hours, and if you're not downwind of it constantly, not inhaling that much smoke off it." Jokes about how 360 degrees of campfire are "downwind" ignored... But a good hot campfire shouldn't be smoking that much, either.
- marricks 4y ago
  It's not just a few days though. I can only speak anecdotally for the pacific north west but... We used to be known for clean air, rating were typically below 20 AQI for almost all of the year. Now, come fall we have weeks/months hovering around 50 AQI. How much smoke does it take to move places like Seattle and Portland from clean air paradises to "LA of the 00's" where just living there gives you the lungs of a light smoker?
- bombcar 4y ago
  Yes, by far, and you can even see it. When the entire air is foggy and orange with dust and ash and smoke, it's much different than when you are near a fire.
- dylan604 4y ago
  Just think of it as training for when the Yellowstone super volcano lets go and burns the entire American NW.
2devnull 4y ago
I wonder if this could help explain the sudden increase in excess mortality that has come about in the past year or two?
- jonnycomputer 4y ago
  help yes. but covid and drug overdose would be the other two.
- ehnto 4y ago
  Pandemic not-withstanding or are you accounting for that?
- coding123 4y ago
  Excess mortality is nearly 95% covid related.
  - 2devnull 4y ago
    After controlling for that I meant. But smoke and wildfire could have exacerbated Covid in certain areas too.
- boomchinolo78 4y ago
  I'm not calling it settled science but I don't think anyone is looking for explanations. People live in pretty polluted places and surprisingly good lives. Beijing and Mexico City are like this if not worse, many many days of the year.
mensetmanusman 4y ago
Highly recommend room air purifiers for your kids at least. I like to tell new parents a trick that worked well for us: use a nice filter-based air purifier for white noise. It has deep bass, and it keeps the air near the child extremely clean. We have been doing this for our many kids for almost 10 years now since birth. A fun experiment for kids: if you have a laser pointer, shine it close to the ground indoors and kick up dust near the floor. If you see any light in the air, that is all stuff you are breathing in (works really well on carpet)… Air quality associated with: Alzheimers: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-new-alzheimers-air-pollution-link/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-new-alzheimer... Cancers, plural: https://www.aacr.org/patients-caregivers/progress-against-cancer/air-pollution-associated-cancer/ https://www.aacr.org/patients-caregivers/progress-against-ca... Sperm Quality: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4443398/#sec99552title https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4443398/#sec995... Female Fertility: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2207560-exposure-to-air-pollution-seems-to-negatively-affect-womens-fertility/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2207560-exposure-to-air... Autism: https://www.sciencealert.com/particulate-matter-in-air-pollution-raises-autism-risks-in-the-first-few-years https://www.sciencealert.com/particulate-matter-in-air-pollu... Bipolar/Depression: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/air-pollution-linked-to-bipolar-disorder-depression https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/air-p...
- pesfandiar 4y ago
  My understanding is the stuff you can see are not a huge problem. They get trapped in the nose, sinuses, or lungs and get pushed out eventually. The problem is much finer particulates (PM2.5) that enter your bloodstream.
  - mensetmanusman 4y ago
    This is true, the stuff you see with a laser is very small and would fit within the PM2.5 range. (That’s because green light will scatter from particles less than 100 nm in diameter, and our eyes are super sensitive to green).
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
throwaway1777 4y ago
Lest you think you are safe outside of the west there were wildfires in Massachusetts this year…
jonnycomputer 4y ago
Fire suppression is not the answer, though. North American ecosystems depend on regular fire to function. The increase in out-of-control wild fires on the west coast is a function of the coincidence of two trends: drought and a century of fire suppression and accumulating fuels.
- julienchastang 4y ago
  Exactly. Fire suppression leads to even bigger fires down the road. Yet controlled burns are getting increasingly problematic. The New Mexico fires we had earlier this year were initially controlled burns that became dormant and spun out of control later. The yearly controlled burn time window is shrinking by one day a year because of climate change [0]. [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/forest-service-to-halt-prescribed-burns-after-destructive-new-mexico-wildfire-11653081275 https://www.wsj.com/articles/forest-service-to-halt-prescrib...
  - jonnycomputer 4y ago
    It's very easy to forget how long a big log can burn
- coding123 4y ago
  So basically no data to back this up.
  - jonnycomputer 4y ago
    No data to back what up.
  - nomel 4y ago
    There’s massive amounts of data, which is what drove the recent legislation to help with some of the hurdles that were preventing controlled burns: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-10-07/newsom-signs-fire-law-paving-way-for-more-prescribed-burns https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-10-07/newsom-s... As evidence of the smoke filled past, some of our plants even require fire to germinate! https://www.fire.ca.gov/media/8657/live_w_fire.pdf https://www.fire.ca.gov/media/8657/live_w_fire.pdf
TurkishPoptart 4y ago
Is smoke inhalation really that deadly? Human beings for centuries gathered around bonfires and campfires. As far as I know, the lungs are designed to filter out (and you cough out) particulate matter.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Yes. There's a vast difference between "we're near a campfire" (where almost all the smoke and ash goes straight up and disperses over a very large area) and "the entire world is covered in smoke and ash". The first is like walking near a car idling, the second is like living in Mexico City or LA before anti-smog devices were added. Your lungs do work out some of it, but they will eventually get overloaded.
tzs 4y ago
I was surprised by how many people go out on very bad air days without taking precautions. We had a couple days or so here (Puget Sound area of Washington) with the AQI somewhere in the 150-200 range. I needed to go shopping on one of those days. I stepped outside and took a couple of breaths just to check how bad it was. It was terrible. I then put on a KN95 mask which made it a lot better and went to do my shopping. Almost no one else I saw was wearing a mask. When masks were still required for COVID around 98% of people I saw while shopping were wearing masks, so I'm pretty sure a majority here still have masks leftover from that. Does it just not occur to them that those masks also help with wildfire smoke?
- puffoflogic 4y ago
  Given that 99% of mask use was signaling, it might really not occur to most people that they actually have some effective use.
  - zamfi 4y ago
    I assume yours is an off-the-cuff take here, but more than 1% of people wearing masks thought they were at least somewhat effective at reducing spread, and not just a shibboleth.
    - puffoflogic 4y ago
      Someone thinking that the masks were somewhat effective at reducing spread, but still only wearing them because signal, is entirely consistent.
      - zamfi 4y ago
        Sure, so I'll spell it out for you: More than 1% of people wore masks because they thought it would have an effect, not "only wearing them because signal".
- boomchinolo78 4y ago
  They certainly don't help with PM2.5 Also let's not forget some people come from places where the AQ is like that, constantly for a big fraction of the year. Ever been to China or Mexico City? Edit: Ok, if we're talking about KN95 then that's another story, I'm talking about the usual "face mask" which is little more than a fashion piece.
zamfi 4y ago
"Extreme" for the years since 2000, yes. But folks living in cities in the 1970s-1990s were exposed to this level of particulate pollution almost half the year, not just a couple of weeks here and there. For example, in 1980s Los Angeles, over 40% of the year had a modern AQI equivalent of 200+, "very unhealthy / hazardous air". [0] None of this is to diminish the negative effects -- we know air quality is very important, it's why we've been fighting for it for decades. [0] https://www.laalmanac.com/environment/ev01b.php https://www.laalmanac.com/environment/ev01b.php
- arcticbull 4y ago
  I mean yeah, but that's like saying 'extreme quantities of river fire? maybe for the 2000s! the cuyahoga used to catch fire every few months and thats the way we liked it.' [edit] Fun fact: the cuyahoga did used to catch fire regularly, so much so that the famous photo people think of in reference to the incident that led to the creation of the EPA was actually from a previous fire.
  - gleenn 4y ago
    Wow that's an image: https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images/cleveland-oh-firemen-stand-on-a-bridge-over-the-cuyahoga-news-photo-515303088-1560971127.jpg?crop=1.00xw:0.771xh;0.00160xw,0.229xh&resize=1200 https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images...:*
    - nneonneo 4y ago
      Your link got a bit mangled; try this: https://hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images/cleveland-oh-firemen-stand-on-a-bridge-over-the-cuyahoga-news-photo-515303088-1560971127.jpg https://hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images/cleveland-oh-fireme...
      - arcticbull 4y ago
        It also caught fire briefly in 2020. [1] [1] https://all-geo.org/highlyallochthonous/2020/08/the-cuyahoga-river-burned-today-for-the-first-time-in-51-years-heres-what-we-can-learn-from-it/ https://all-geo.org/highlyallochthonous/2020/08/the-cuyahoga...
rpz 4y ago
What is the carbon footprint of a wildfire? Ban wildfires!

168 points by nabla9 4y ago

The smoke levels in the Western USA are horrible, and are only going to get worse due to the inability of state administrations to allocate proper funding for brush clearing and controlled burns, and this is only compounded by the drought we're experiencing.

mc32 4y ago
The western US is only able to support this level of population due to modern infrastructure. In other words the population density is being subsidized by technology to accommodate beyond its carrying capacity. So more technology and resource management (diversion) or relocate the population to naturally sustainable areas.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- buscoquadnary 4y ago
  We have been above the environmental carrying capacity due to technology since the first guy in Mesopotamia realized if he dug a ditch to grab some of the water from the Euphrates he could get water to repeatedly water his crops. Thats the whole history of humanity has been figuring out a way to make a locality more hospitable to human beings using technology. What you say on the surface sounds reasonable but really is just a veneer of neo-ludtisim over a malthusian mindset. Humanity has changed the environment, we will do so again and again to improve the quality of life we experience.
  - mistrial9 4y ago
    > veneer of neo-ludtisim over a malthusian mindset sure, I will take that veneer and counter -- there is such a thing as balance in dynamic systems. Tragedies of excess are being played out now, seventy years after a "boom times for all" expansion by any means necessary. Before 1970, outrageously excessive pollutors in many areas of the USA were given slap on the wrist oversight, calling the outraged greens things like "neo-luddites" ..
  - mc32 4y ago
    You can't expect things to output 100% 100% of the time. Things will fail and if you make plans on 100% always being there, you will then have catastrophic failures. That is if your plan is to rely on your ducks always being in a row, you will fail because systems being systems will have ducks that stray resulting in failure. So yeah maybe we can sustain 100MM people in the west if all things work perfectly, but when they fail, then there will be pain and suffering because there is no surplus to play with.
    - buscoquadnary 4y ago
      “spend all the wages they earn and enjoy themselves while they can appears to be evident from the number of families that, upon the failure of any great manufactory, immediately fall upon the parish,” - Sir Thomas Malthus Who predicted that we'd all be dead and the collapse would come hundreds of years ago, and said letting the Irish potato famine kill them off was natural, requisite and just. Yet, here we are still defying the Malthusian imperative, just like when everyone said the world was going to end when the Gulf states controlled all the oil, then we figured out how to make shale oil work, or before that when we invented the iron plow, or a dozen other things that have shown Malthus wrong time and time again. Meanwhile the people protesting scarcity and the need to reduce the consumption of resources have consistently been behind the greatest man made famines in history. We figured out things before we will figure it out again, I have faith in the ability of humanity to innovate, to adapt and to overcome.
    - 8note 4y ago
      This is why we have so much food waste - things are running way above 100% all the time, and failures bring us closer to 100%
someguydave 4y ago
Not to mention millions of acres of federal forests where natural fires are quenched and logging is prohibited
pengaru 4y ago
In CA, which amounts to a good junk of the west coast, over half the forest acres are under the Fed's purview. AIUI that split of jurisdictions is a significant part of the problem.
- jfk13 4y ago
  > a good junk of the west coast What a delightful turn of phrase!
  - pengaru 4y ago
    Hah! The sad thing is that wasn't even autocorrect, just being half asleep.
newaccount2021 4y ago
Plenty of CA money available to fund pissing-match billboards in FL and TX though, go figure Apparently the people have spoken...teacher pay, water management, brush clearing? These are less important than the "war" with Rick DeSantis over....what exactly?
- azinman2 4y ago
  Most of what burns is federal land.
DiffEq 4y ago
This is a wild idea…but perhaps people can spend a few less hours watching the tv and surfing the social web and volunteer to clean up the dead underbrush that allows such fires to spread so violently and frequently.
- dbrueck 4y ago
  Hehe, you are woefully underestimating the size of the Big Blue Room.
- hindsightbias 4y ago
  They never talk about who did all that brush clearing and controlled burns back in the day. Something something native Americans did 200 years ago, do they expect them to return?
- bombcar 4y ago
  This basically occurs in other parts of the country where much of the existing forest is maintained timber land. The problem is the absolute scale of the size of the western "unmaintained forest land" which includes national parks, state parks, BLM land, etc.
x86_64Ubuntu 4y ago
I remember reading an article about the wildfires which was super eye-opening. Basically they said they could burn 100K acres a year, and still have an unacceptable fuel load for about 40 years. While controlled burns are the prescription, the political risk is too high in the sense that if a controlled burn breaks containment heads will roll. It doesn't help that even during controlled burns that don't escape, localities will complain about the smoke to their local reps who put the kibash on controlled burns.
- jerlam 4y ago
  100K burned acres a year though isn't a lot though. The past five years, California has averaged well over 1 million acres burned a year. Even in the decade before that, 250K burned acres would be considered a light year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_wildfires#Area_burned_per_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_wildfires#A...
  - x86_64Ubuntu 4y ago
    Goodness, the amount of area burned in the past two years is enormous compared to the years prior.
dahart 4y ago
> are only going to get worse I’m so thankful this year was mostly smoke free, but last year was a dystopian nightmare for like 3 or 4 months, it ended all outdoor activity for most of the summer and fall. Out of desperation, I resorted to riding my bike a few times wearing a ventilator mask, but wow was that uncomfortable. I’m really not looking forward to worse, but of course I know you’re probably right. With the size & scale of these fires I keep wondering how everything flammable hasn’t burned already in the last five or six years?
- bombcar 4y ago
  Which mask were you using? The quite expensive "all day" ones for painters can be relatively comfortable, and the ones that look like beekeeper hats even more so.
  - dahart 4y ago
    I was using a cheap disposable N95 ventilator from Home Depot. Yeah if it gets bad again I will take your advice and invest in a professional mask. Sweating into the mask was probably the worst part, I was having to remove it often to wipe everything down, and the mask was kind of starting to disintegrate after a couple hours. It was, in a weird way, nice to get shocked with the taste & smell of smoke every time I took off the mask, I could tell it was working and helping keep my air much cleaner.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Yeah, the slightly more expensive N95s are nice (I use https://www.homedepot.com/p/Milwaukee-N95-Professional-Multi-Purpose-Valved-Respirator-10-Pack-48-73-4014/310392944 https://www.homedepot.com/p/Milwaukee-N95-Professional-Multi... for example) but the big ones are really more comfortable. Sweat is always the main problem after you tighten the bands enough that you're not leaking air on the sides. And if you're getting irritants in your eyes, you may want to go to a full face mask; zee goggles don't do much except against falling nails, dirt, etc.
      - 4y ago
FollowingTheDao 4y ago
> brush clearing and controlled burns If you think you can combat climate change with "brush clearing and controlled burns" you are mistaken.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  that brush clearing and controlled burns is specific to drought-stricken forests
  - FollowingTheDao 4y ago
    So maybe just burn the whole forest down? That'll solve it.
    - MomoXenosaga 4y ago
      This happend in France last summer a few times. Control fires got completely out of hand and turned into full apocalypse wild fires. Turns out that fire is hard to manage...
      - mistrial9 4y ago
        yeah - here also with the Hermit's Peak fire due to a prescribed burn, Las Dispensas, Sante Fe New Mexico National Forest, May 2022. They had to evacuate the Los Alamos National Labs ! iir.. catastrophic wildfire
ortusdux 4y ago
https://crosscut.com/environment/2022/02/billions-federal-dollars-headed-western-forests-manage-fires https://crosscut.com/environment/2022/02/billions-federal-do... https://crosscut.com/politics/2021/04/inside-washingtons-328m-push-prevent-disastrous-wildfires https://crosscut.com/politics/2021/04/inside-washingtons-328... Unfortunately, it seems that forest management funding is a political issue, so there is a good chance these funds will dry up depending on the outcome of the midterms.

JoeAltmaier 4y ago

It's not good of course, and will have health repercussions. But I remember that sitting around a campfire or in a hut with a fire going all your life is the way people lived for the first million years. And I hope we have some resilience to smoke.

Spooky23 4y ago
True, but the problems with soot and smoke in densely populated areas were a well known downside of urban life. Rich kids with asthma spent summers at the country manor.
dymk 4y ago
Most of us died before the age of 30 during that period of time
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  Low life expectancy at birth due to humans dying during infant/child years due to disease and other causes is not indicative of effects of living in huts around campfires.
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    My ancestors lived in thatched roof cottages with open fires and livestock. Soot and smoke was one of many hazards.
- FiberBundle 4y ago
  Average life expectancy for hunter gatherers was low due to infant mortality. If people didn't die as an infant their life expectancy was actually fairly high (~70 years).
  - gruez 4y ago
    While you're right in principle, the life expectancy after childhood is nowhere as high as you claim. From wikipedia >Based on the data from modern hunter-gatherer populations, it is estimated that at 15, life expectancy was an additional 39 years (total 54), with a 60% probability of reaching 15.

linuxftw 4y ago

ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
Everyone knows climate change is a hoax perpetrated by Big Science. Get this misinformation off of HN!
- Tagbert 4y ago
  Hey, we're all getting rich off of the hoax. Don't kill that sooty goose. /s
elil17 4y ago
Hmmm, perhaps this "climate change" causes things to happen?
giraffe_lady 4y ago
Fun that you think this is a "trend" on hackernews rather than growing awareness of an issue that already does and certainly will effect nearly every facet of life for every living person.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Madmallard 4y ago

belval 4y ago
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. HN is not a single-minded hyperfocused community nor should it be. It covers most topics under the sun. If you are interested mostly in tech topics I highly recommend browsing "best" which tends to be mostly tech related: https://news.ycombinator.com/best https://news.ycombinator.com/best
- Madmallard 4y ago
  We don't need it becoming another Reddit that gets overrun by mainstream media agendas compounded by astroturfing.

cagenut 4y ago

This reminds me, and is as good a place to ask as any. Does anyone know how to get custom cardboard boxes made? Are there particular tools or vendors (or even just keywords to search on upwork/fiver) where you can design custom-cut cardboard that will fold in specific ways to build a cube?

Syonyk 4y ago

Yeah... living in the Treasure Valley area (Boise metro region), it's been getting pretty bad out here. And they don't have 2021 data listed, which, IMO, was worse than 2020. It just settled in early and never left all summer long. Quite vile, and makes being outside a challenge. I did a lot of outdoor work in 2020 and I'm pretty sure I've not been quite the same since, and I seem far more sensitive to smoke than I was. > ...“which means an increasing portion of the particulate matter that people are exposed to is unregulated.” Forests, annoyingly, don't respond to regulations on if they're allowed to burn or not. And while it's certainly popular and at least somewhat reasonable to blame a lot of it on climate change, the reality is that this has been inevitable for quite a few decades - the question was just, "When?" Starting in the late 1930s, the US Forest Service had their 10AM Policy of basically putting forest fires out as soon as possible. Starting in the late 1940s, after WWII, they actually had the mechanized equipment and airplanes to start doing that effectively - with a corresponding reduction in acres burned. Unfortunately, "things that can't go on forever won't," and that approach to forest management can't go on forever. The forest ecosystems, especially in the west, need to burn. Lots of species of pine only seed after fire, and it goes through clearing the underbrush, killing weak trees, etc. But the "standard forest fires" of the western pine forests aren't the catastrophic crowning events that have been more and more standard for the past decade or two - because there's so much fire load from 70 years of not burning, when they do catch fire, they go off like a bomb. And that's before you find things like the pine beetle killed swaths of forest down in New Mexico, which means thousands of acres of wind-dried, long dead pine, waiting to catch fire. One doesn't fight that, one gets out of the way. So, unfortunately, climate change or not, this sort of thing was inevitable, eventually. And there's really no chance to do much until the forests "reset" back to a more sustainable fire load. And, yes, I'll agree with "extreme" pollution levels. I've measured PM2.5 into the 150s, and PM10 north of 250 out here before. It's... disgusting? Vile? Human-toxic? Just being outside is painful. I've been dealing with it indoors with air filters - I have one of the "build a box of filters around a fan" style filters that does a fine job of keeping indoor air quality acceptable, at least on a fairly tight house. The furnace filter does a good job too, though I'm pretty sure I need to get the ducts cleaned. For outdoor work, I've given up and gone to wearing a 3M painter's half mask with P100 filters. They do a fine job of it, and the newer-style P100s (white with pink grids, not the solid pink ones) breathe freely enough for just about anything with two of them on the mask. One could run with them, though I'm not sure that sounds a great idea. I'm seriously considering a winter project of building something positive pressure, though. A filtered feed into a face mask would be very nice for outdoor work on the "really bad" years. It's not just breathing the air that's vile, it's the air in my eyes. Running down the road on a motorcycle in bad air is just... not enjoyable. And we don't have the surplus vehicles to all take cars when there's vehicle conflict. I'm seriously debating rigging the positive air pressure filtration setup to a motorcycle helmet as well. Just... get me something less-vile when riding. All this to say, "Yeah, it's gotten really bad out west." I just don't see a path for it to change any time soon, so I'm trying to adapt to it as best I can. Some writings of mine on non-internet-connected air quality sensors and details on the filters I've built: https://www.sevarg.net/2021/08/28/temtop-air-quality-sensors/ https://www.sevarg.net/2021/08/28/temtop-air-quality-sensors...

mistrial9 4y ago

fantastic hindsight math here from Stanford University. It was five years ago that the San Francisco Bay Area, rivaling Beijing in yet another way, had the worst PM2.5 air quality in the entire world for a few days. (insert dramatic pictures here) It was more than ten years ago that the Jerry Brown appointed head of the California Air Resources Board Mary D. Nichols, was named a national public enemy by privately funded experts and their political area commanders. The situation at hand in the forests of California, with >100 million dead trees standing, is a direct result of 100 years of belligerent, unyielding control of fire fighting by the USDA-USFS, with their alliances among what is now known as 30x30 program. Their cozy allies want to make monarchical statements of Science to accompany the massive budgets being thrown at this problem. They have "AI" which clearly makes them authoritative and worthy of leadership? Combine this with an invite session at Stanford Woods Institute for maybe fifty leaders, to address "inequity" .. also apparently worth billions in budget. Maybe there is merit to their math, but the agenda here is running huge, huge budgets .. to whom? for what?

FollowingTheDao 4y ago

Since I know many people here struggle with mood issues, just know that higher PM2.5 leads to greater mood instability. https://ps.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ps.201800565 https://ps.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ps.20180056... https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(22)00017-1/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...

guitarbill 4y ago

A comparison would be nice. The smoke can be awful, no doubt - but is it worse for a person's health than living near a busy road or highway? That is 24x7, and cumulative over many years.

wonder_er 4y ago
I am curious to know this comparison as well. I moved across town two years ago, into an expensive house (it's not a nice house, just an expensive house) that's directly adjacent to a road with lots of traffic, and I think every day about air quality now. I also started riding a motor scooter around Denver (and across the country to British Columbia, then to Seattle, and back) and I wonder about protecting myself from road pollution while riding, especially in rush hour in cities. I wonder if an n95 would improve things for me, and I wonder how much damage I'm doing to myself by breathing vehicle pollution (emissions, brake dust, tire rubber micro-plastics), eg: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/03/car-tyres-produce-more-particle-pollution-than-exhausts-tests-show https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/03/car-tyre... I'm 33, I'm already resigned to not-great long-term health outcomes based on environmental contaminants in food and the air. I avoid most meat (that gets me out of the factory farmed meat harm universe) and avoid most processed food, and am generally "healthy and active", but I despair of the world, for many reasons. Ugggghhhhhhhh.
- landemva 4y ago
  Denver geography traps bad air into the occasional brown cloud. Get higher.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Get some N95s and wear them for a few days, then look at how dirty they are. Unscientific, but it'll tell you a bit. Much of emissions may not be caught, but those are relatively "clean" now, brake dust and tire rubber falls to the ground relatively quickly (unless it's being kicked back up by the vehicles). You can get various air quality meters, too.
- thegjp210 4y ago

wintermutestwin 4y ago

If you want to get an indoor air filter to clean up the toxic air that enters your home, I recommend an industrial solution. Go down to your local indoor growing shop and check out the carbon filters that the pot growers use to scrub the weed smell. Get a filter like this: https://indoorgrowing.com/collections/vortex/products/profilter-70s-non-reversible-carbon-filter-6-with-flange https://indoorgrowing.com/collections/vortex/products/profil... And pair it with an inline fan to match like this: https://indoorgrowing.com/collections/vortex/products/vortex-vtx-series-powerfan-6-497-cfm https://indoorgrowing.com/collections/vortex/products/vortex... That gets you 400CFM of air cleaning power for ~$500. (you can get this stuff for much cheaper used as the margin on indoor pot growing has tanked) Compare to a "designed for the home" air purifier like this: https://oransi.com/products/mod-hepa-air-purifier https://oransi.com/products/mod-hepa-air-purifier Compared to my proposed industrial solution, the air purifier costs $100 more and is about 1/4 the CFM. The only pluses are that it looks pretty and is roughly 2/3 the DBA when running.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
keneda7 4y ago
I recently switched from a carbon filter with a canfan to a medifyair MA-40. I think the medifyair is far superior to the straight carbon filter. It also is significantly quitter than my old set up and still pushed ~220 CPM. They are a little pricey but well worth it in my opinion.
hnuser123456 4y ago
The home unit claims it goes up to 350 CFM
- wintermutestwin 4y ago
  That's just the fan speed rating - not the filter's rating. It's specs say it covers 1,312 sq ft (2 air changes per hour) Assuming 10foot ceilings, that comes out to 109CFM
4y ago

jjcon 4y ago

Would having a few days of bad air a year due to forest fires be worse than camping a few days a year sitting next to a big campfire? Depends on if the fires are burning things other than trees?

sbdncuvh 4y ago
Syonyk 4y ago
The problem is that it's not "a few days." It varies from "Several weeks of absolutely toxic outside air" to "several months." Typical campfire exposure is "A few hours, and if you're not downwind of it constantly, not inhaling that much smoke off it." Jokes about how 360 degrees of campfire are "downwind" ignored... But a good hot campfire shouldn't be smoking that much, either.
marricks 4y ago
It's not just a few days though. I can only speak anecdotally for the pacific north west but... We used to be known for clean air, rating were typically below 20 AQI for almost all of the year. Now, come fall we have weeks/months hovering around 50 AQI. How much smoke does it take to move places like Seattle and Portland from clean air paradises to "LA of the 00's" where just living there gives you the lungs of a light smoker?
bombcar 4y ago
Yes, by far, and you can even see it. When the entire air is foggy and orange with dust and ash and smoke, it's much different than when you are near a fire.
dylan604 4y ago
Just think of it as training for when the Yellowstone super volcano lets go and burns the entire American NW.

2devnull 4y ago

I wonder if this could help explain the sudden increase in excess mortality that has come about in the past year or two?

jonnycomputer 4y ago
help yes. but covid and drug overdose would be the other two.
ehnto 4y ago
Pandemic not-withstanding or are you accounting for that?
coding123 4y ago
Excess mortality is nearly 95% covid related.
- 2devnull 4y ago
  After controlling for that I meant. But smoke and wildfire could have exacerbated Covid in certain areas too.
boomchinolo78 4y ago
I'm not calling it settled science but I don't think anyone is looking for explanations. People live in pretty polluted places and surprisingly good lives. Beijing and Mexico City are like this if not worse, many many days of the year.

mensetmanusman 4y ago

Highly recommend room air purifiers for your kids at least. I like to tell new parents a trick that worked well for us: use a nice filter-based air purifier for white noise. It has deep bass, and it keeps the air near the child extremely clean. We have been doing this for our many kids for almost 10 years now since birth. A fun experiment for kids: if you have a laser pointer, shine it close to the ground indoors and kick up dust near the floor. If you see any light in the air, that is all stuff you are breathing in (works really well on carpet)… Air quality associated with: Alzheimers: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-new-alzheimers-air-pollution-link/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-new-alzheimer... Cancers, plural: https://www.aacr.org/patients-caregivers/progress-against-cancer/air-pollution-associated-cancer/ https://www.aacr.org/patients-caregivers/progress-against-ca... Sperm Quality: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4443398/#sec99552title https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4443398/#sec995... Female Fertility: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2207560-exposure-to-air-pollution-seems-to-negatively-affect-womens-fertility/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2207560-exposure-to-air... Autism: https://www.sciencealert.com/particulate-matter-in-air-pollution-raises-autism-risks-in-the-first-few-years https://www.sciencealert.com/particulate-matter-in-air-pollu... Bipolar/Depression: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/air-pollution-linked-to-bipolar-disorder-depression https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/air-p...

pesfandiar 4y ago
My understanding is the stuff you can see are not a huge problem. They get trapped in the nose, sinuses, or lungs and get pushed out eventually. The problem is much finer particulates (PM2.5) that enter your bloodstream.
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  This is true, the stuff you see with a laser is very small and would fit within the PM2.5 range. (That’s because green light will scatter from particles less than 100 nm in diameter, and our eyes are super sensitive to green).
MichaelCollins 4y ago

throwaway1777 4y ago

Lest you think you are safe outside of the west there were wildfires in Massachusetts this year…

jonnycomputer 4y ago

Fire suppression is not the answer, though. North American ecosystems depend on regular fire to function. The increase in out-of-control wild fires on the west coast is a function of the coincidence of two trends: drought and a century of fire suppression and accumulating fuels.

julienchastang 4y ago
Exactly. Fire suppression leads to even bigger fires down the road. Yet controlled burns are getting increasingly problematic. The New Mexico fires we had earlier this year were initially controlled burns that became dormant and spun out of control later. The yearly controlled burn time window is shrinking by one day a year because of climate change [0]. [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/forest-service-to-halt-prescribed-burns-after-destructive-new-mexico-wildfire-11653081275 https://www.wsj.com/articles/forest-service-to-halt-prescrib...
- jonnycomputer 4y ago
  It's very easy to forget how long a big log can burn
coding123 4y ago
So basically no data to back this up.
- jonnycomputer 4y ago
  No data to back what up.
- nomel 4y ago
  There’s massive amounts of data, which is what drove the recent legislation to help with some of the hurdles that were preventing controlled burns: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-10-07/newsom-signs-fire-law-paving-way-for-more-prescribed-burns https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-10-07/newsom-s... As evidence of the smoke filled past, some of our plants even require fire to germinate! https://www.fire.ca.gov/media/8657/live_w_fire.pdf https://www.fire.ca.gov/media/8657/live_w_fire.pdf

TurkishPoptart 4y ago

Is smoke inhalation really that deadly? Human beings for centuries gathered around bonfires and campfires. As far as I know, the lungs are designed to filter out (and you cough out) particulate matter.

bombcar 4y ago
Yes. There's a vast difference between "we're near a campfire" (where almost all the smoke and ash goes straight up and disperses over a very large area) and "the entire world is covered in smoke and ash". The first is like walking near a car idling, the second is like living in Mexico City or LA before anti-smog devices were added. Your lungs do work out some of it, but they will eventually get overloaded.

tzs 4y ago

I was surprised by how many people go out on very bad air days without taking precautions. We had a couple days or so here (Puget Sound area of Washington) with the AQI somewhere in the 150-200 range. I needed to go shopping on one of those days. I stepped outside and took a couple of breaths just to check how bad it was. It was terrible. I then put on a KN95 mask which made it a lot better and went to do my shopping. Almost no one else I saw was wearing a mask. When masks were still required for COVID around 98% of people I saw while shopping were wearing masks, so I'm pretty sure a majority here still have masks leftover from that. Does it just not occur to them that those masks also help with wildfire smoke?

puffoflogic 4y ago
Given that 99% of mask use was signaling, it might really not occur to most people that they actually have some effective use.
- zamfi 4y ago
  I assume yours is an off-the-cuff take here, but more than 1% of people wearing masks thought they were at least somewhat effective at reducing spread, and not just a shibboleth.
  - puffoflogic 4y ago
    Someone thinking that the masks were somewhat effective at reducing spread, but still only wearing them because signal, is entirely consistent.
    - zamfi 4y ago
      Sure, so I'll spell it out for you: More than 1% of people wore masks because they thought it would have an effect, not "only wearing them because signal".
boomchinolo78 4y ago
They certainly don't help with PM2.5 Also let's not forget some people come from places where the AQ is like that, constantly for a big fraction of the year. Ever been to China or Mexico City? Edit: Ok, if we're talking about KN95 then that's another story, I'm talking about the usual "face mask" which is little more than a fashion piece.

zamfi 4y ago

"Extreme" for the years since 2000, yes. But folks living in cities in the 1970s-1990s were exposed to this level of particulate pollution almost half the year, not just a couple of weeks here and there. For example, in 1980s Los Angeles, over 40% of the year had a modern AQI equivalent of 200+, "very unhealthy / hazardous air". [0] None of this is to diminish the negative effects -- we know air quality is very important, it's why we've been fighting for it for decades. [0] https://www.laalmanac.com/environment/ev01b.php https://www.laalmanac.com/environment/ev01b.php

arcticbull 4y ago
I mean yeah, but that's like saying 'extreme quantities of river fire? maybe for the 2000s! the cuyahoga used to catch fire every few months and thats the way we liked it.' [edit] Fun fact: the cuyahoga did used to catch fire regularly, so much so that the famous photo people think of in reference to the incident that led to the creation of the EPA was actually from a previous fire.
- gleenn 4y ago
  Wow that's an image: https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images/cleveland-oh-firemen-stand-on-a-bridge-over-the-cuyahoga-news-photo-515303088-1560971127.jpg?crop=1.00xw:0.771xh;0.00160xw,0.229xh&resize=1200 https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images...:*
  - nneonneo 4y ago
    Your link got a bit mangled; try this: https://hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images/cleveland-oh-firemen-stand-on-a-bridge-over-the-cuyahoga-news-photo-515303088-1560971127.jpg https://hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images/cleveland-oh-fireme...
    - arcticbull 4y ago
      It also caught fire briefly in 2020. [1] [1] https://all-geo.org/highlyallochthonous/2020/08/the-cuyahoga-river-burned-today-for-the-first-time-in-51-years-heres-what-we-can-learn-from-it/ https://all-geo.org/highlyallochthonous/2020/08/the-cuyahoga...

rpz 4y ago

What is the carbon footprint of a wildfire? Ban wildfires!