Bigger Wildfires Making Air Pollution Worse. Latest Victim: Sydney, Australia

In this image from CNN, the famed Sydney Opera House is barely
visible amid clouds of choking wildfire smoke in the city this week.

Today, here in Vermont, we will be treated to northwest breezes that will pump in chilly but very clean and fresh air from central Canada.

We're lucky, especially if you compare us to, say Sydney, Australia in recent days.

Destructive and very, very big wildfires continue to burn in Australia, and that will continue through their summer, as it appears now.

Some of the big fires are near Sydney, and smoke from those fires is choking this iconic Australian city in a thick, dangerous haze.  In some parts of the city, pollution levels were five times higher than the level considered hazardous, says the Sydney Morning Herald.

That newspaper also reported that there were 150 ambulance calls Monday for people with breathing problems, ferry service was shut down due to poor visibility, and outdoor venues such as swimming pools were closed because the city didn't want people exercising in the pollution.

Firefighters were responding to four times the usual number of false alarms because the smoke was so thick it was seeping into buildings and triggering smoke alarms, the Sydney Morning Herald reported. 

It's early in the summer fire season in Australia and already more than 720 homes have been lost. Officials are warning of exponentially greater losses as the fires chew their way into more populated areas later this summer.

And most of that time, this choking, dangerous smog from the fires will linger over some Australian cities, like Sydney.

This is not a problem limited to Australia. It's a world-wide issue

According to Outside, the bigger wildfires are starting to erase the big gains the United States has made since the 1970s.

There are all kinds of laws and improved emission systems for all kind of vehicles, homes, factories, buildings - what have you. Cities that were routinely smoggy in the 1960s and 1970s routinely have clean air.

However, the wildfires, now getting bigger, hotter, more long lasting and numerous in large part due to climate change, are spewing huge amounts of particulates and other pollution into the atmosphere.

During the worst of the wildfires, weather patterns and winds move the smoke and pollutants into big cities and small towns often hundreds of miles distant from the fires, leading to dangerous spikes in bad air quality.

San Francisco was shrouded in serious haze back in October. Other western North American cities, like Salt Lake City, Seattle and Vancouver, British Columbia, have had very serious smoke attacks from wildfires in recent years.

These outbreaks of thick haze are dangerous for everybody, causing lung damage and cardiovascular injury.  People who already have health issues could be hospitalized, or even die. And it's going to get worse.

Says Outside:

"While the U.S. has done a lot to limite particulate matter from burning fossil fuels, the country is still spewing a lot of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which is speeding climate change. That, in turn make wildfires more severe."

To be Captain Obvious here, more severe wildfires mean a lot more smoke pumping into the atmosphere and often traveling long distances.

Don't think for a minute we Vermonters are immune from this wildfire pollution.  You know those fresh, clean northwest breezes I referred to at the top of this post?

Those northwest breezes are not necessarily so fresh in the summer and early autumn. There's been an uptick in wildfires in the northern forests of Canada and even up in the Arctic.  Some of that smoke blows down into the Green Mountain State.

I'm not sure on the statistics, but my perception is certainly that we've had more smoky, hazy and icky summer and early autumn days due to those fires hundreds or even thousands of miles to our north and west.

Wildfire smoke is not just an immediate danger to Sydney, Australia, It appears it will be an increasing threat to all of us.

New Delhi, India, Choking In Toxic Smog

Thick smog in New Delhi this month. Photo by Altaf
Qadri/Associated Press

In 1952, a deadly smog enveloped London, England.   

In those days, coal and polluting fuels heated homes and businesses and basically powered the city.

During one of those famous London fogs, all those pollutants got trapped within the fog, causing a four-day dense cloud of smog that killed an estimated 4,000 people.

London has literally cleaned up its act, and pollution there rarely gets to dangerous levels.

Not so in other cities in the world.  Beijing, China is famous for its toxic pollution.

So is New Delhi, India, which is now enveloped in a smog so bad that it's being compared to that terrible London smog of 1952.

The smog cloud in New Delhi, like most pollution outbreaks is caused by an inversion, which is warm air over the top of cooler air that acts like a lid, preventing pollutants and smoke and such from rising and moving away. So it sits there.

Illegal crop burning at farms surrounding New Delhi, vehicle emissions and construction activity and dust are pouring into the New Delhi air, and the pollutants keep accumulating under this inversion.

The Straights Times says New Delhi is trying to deal with the immediate crisis by reducing the number of cars allowed to be driven on its streets each day, banning commercial trucks unless they're carrying essential commodities, new construction has been stopped and charges for parking cars has quadrupled to force people into public transportation. Schools are shut down.

But that's not really doing the trick. There has been a 20 percent spike in hospitalizations due to heart and lung problems. The amount of microscopic particles in the polluted air is 75 times what the World Health Organization considers safe. Breathing the air is the equivalent of smoking two packs of cigarettes per day. 

And this pollution attack isn't a one-off. It's happening with increasing frequency in New Delhi and other cities in India and elsewhere in Asia.

And remember how I said London and England's air is cleaner? That's true, but it's still too polluted even there. Of 51 British towns and cities in a WHO database, 44 have too much air pollution, the Independent said.

Meanwhile, in the United States, air quality has also improved since the 1960s and 1970s but still sometimes falls short.

Don't expect even cleaner U.S. air in the coming years. Robert Phalen is an appointee to a Trump White House environmental panel. Phalen has said that "Modern air is a little too clean for optimum health."

He claims that children should be exposed to some dirty air to teach their immunie systems to ward off irritants, or something like that.

Hope you love breathing microscopic, toxic particles, folks!

China Crisis: Imagine Having To Flee Your City Because The Smog Is So Bad

For some reason, these Chinese students were forced
to take exams outdoors in a thick, toxic smog.  

The only thing obscuring the skies over my house in relatively clean Vermont today is pure white snowflakes.

Which makes me doubly glad I don't live in northern and central China, where the smog has gotten so bad people are fleeing the pollution-choked cities.

According to the Guardian newspaper:

"Tens of thousands of 'smog refugees" have reportedly fled China's pollution-stricken morth after the country was hit by the latest 'airpocalyse, forcing almost half a billion people to live under a blanket of toxic fumes.

Hugh swaths of north and central China have been living under a pollution 'red alert' since last Friday when a dangerous cocktail of pollutants transformed the skies into a yellow and charcoal-tinted haze"

These winter time smog attacks in China have been creating health hazards for years now. In the winter, temperature inversions often form, with warm air overlying cold air near the surface.

That warm air forms a lid, trapping pollutants in the cold air instead of letting it escape. Sunshine often breaks up inversions, allowing the pollution to drift away. But the weak winter sun is often incapable of breaking inversions like the stronger spring and summer sun can.

The Guardian said Ctrip, China's leading online travel agent, said it expected 150,000 travelers from China to head to places like Australia, Indonesia, Japan and the Maldives to escape the killer smog.

More from the Guardian:

"Yang Xinglin, who also fled to Chongli (a mountain resort away from the pollution) said she requested time off from her job at a state-owned real estate firm so she did not have to inhale the smog.

'You ask me why I left Beijing? It's because I want to live,' Yang, 27, told the Guardian."

Some who wanted to flee the smog couldn't because the poor visibility associated with the pollution was grounding hundreds of flights.

One particular source of outcry over the pollution came when a school headmaster in Henan province forced eighth grade students to take exams outdoors all day in the thick smog, despite the obvious health risks.

As you can see by the photo in this post, you can barely make out the students in the smog.

Chinese government authorities had ordered schools closed because of the smog, but the principal of the school decided to go ahead with the exams anyway since they'd already been organized, said the Straights Times. 

It's unclear why the school made the students take exams outside in the heavily polluted air instead of indoors, where it might have been a little safer.

The principal of the school has since been suspended.

The air is even worse than usual in China this winter because the government is pumping stimulus into polluting industries to prop up the economy. Greenpeace said poorly regulated steel producers are adding to the smog even more than in past winters.

Greenpeace says there is hope in China that things could get better in future winters because use of coal is expected to decrease and the government is investing in cleaner industry and environmental regulations.

Smoke, Haze From Canada Fires Obscuring U.S. Summer

Smoke and haze from Canadian wildfires makes
for an eerie sunset over Lake Champlain
in St. Albans, Vermont Wednesday. 

Wednesday around my home in St. Albans, Vermont should have been one of those absolutely classic Green Mountain summer days.

A cold front had swept down from Canada early in the morning, whisking away stifling humidity that had settled over the state the day before, and that night.

Usually these cold fronts yield what I call "Blue/Green days, something the Vermont Department of Travel and Tourism regularly prays for.

In the fresh, dry Canadian airmass, Blue/Green days feature a brilliant, haze-free blue sky. The lush green of the hills, mountains and hayfields gleams royally in the sun.

The air is refreshing, the view for hikers from the mountaintops lasts forever, and you can almost hear the Trapp family singing "The Hills Are Alive....."

Not Wednesday. The cold front certainly cleared out the humidity. The sun came out, sort of. But the sky was a faint slate blue. The few clouds in the sky looked pinkish brown, not billowy white like usual. If you could see the mountains at all through the haze, they were just grayish blue, faint outlines.

What the hell happened to our glorious summer?

Wildfires.

Specifically, it's been hot and dry in the western half of Canada, much of Alaska and parts of the western United States. What is normally those clean, bright airmasses that occasionally drift down from Canada picked up a lot of this smoke and blew it across the border into New England.

Actually, much of the country is getting these smoke attacks. A big ridge of high pressure is contributing to the western heat and encouraging those fires. Downstream from the ridge, the airflow heads southeast into the United States, bringing the smoke from the fires with it.

A wildfire in Saskatchewan, Canada this month
Photo by Scott Knudsen, Northscope Photography via CBC.  n

Yes, it is a First World Problem on my end, complaining about hazy skies when I want a blue sky.

But the smoke and haze is just not a disappointment. It is pollution after all. Fine particles in the haze and smoke can cause lung trouble.

As the Washington Post noted, the 350 fires burning in Canada, some of them quite large, are sending enough smoke into the United States to occasionally prompt air pollution alerts.

People with pre-existing lung conditions in particular can really be hurt by all this smoke.

It looks like the entire rest of the summer will be smoky, at least occasionally. The number of fires, already huge, are expected to grow.

Enormous fires are burning in Saskatchewan, Canada. They're so huge that 1 percent of Saskatchewan's population has been forced to flee the fires. That's 13,000 people kicked out of their homes because of the fires.

Some experts think the Saskatchewan fires won't be completely extinguished until the snow flies, says the CBC  

This is anecdotal, but it seems to me we are seeing increasingly smoky summers due to Canadian, Alaskan and western fires in recent years.

The increase in these fires is consisten with what climate experts say is resulting from global warming. If that's the case, smoke and haze might end up becoming a permanent part of our once pristine New England summers.

Huge Forest Fires Are Bad In More Ways Than You Think

Friday afternoon and Saturday, the sky over my house in northwestern Vermont took on a brassy pallor.

A massive fire in Northwest Territories, Canada last week.  

The deep blue sky had turned milky, the sunshine had sort of an orange-ish color, and a bit of haze made some of the Green Mountains seem bluish and blurry.

Blame the big forest fires in Washington State and western Canada for that.

Smoke from the huge fires, hoised aloft, blew thousands of miles in high upper atmospheric winds and went clear across the country to New England.

That the smoke slightly dulled a bright Vermont summer day is the smallest negative effect that these huge fires have around the world.

Yes, the fires destroy forests and the homes of people who live there. That's the most obvious reason out of control wildfires are bad things.  The fire in Washington, for instance, has destroyed more than 100 homes as of Sunday. 

But the fires are also a health hazard for people with breathing problems, probably worsen global warming, and cause huge problems when the droughts that helped start the fires end and the rains begin.

A big forest fire in Oregon last week. 

Many observers see the many of these fires, like the one in Washington State, the big blazes underway in Canada's Northwest Territories, and epic conflagrations in recent years in Siberia, as signs of global warming. 

The far north in particular, northern Canada, Alaska, and Siberia, have warmed up a LOT in recent decades, more than the rest of the world.

That means there's snow on the ground for a shorter time of year and the boreal forests up that way have a bigger chance to dry out in the warm season.

Then they catch fire.

Even worse, these fires set the stage for even more global warming. Soot from the fires can travel thousands of miles, and settle on ice in the Arctic Ocean, and on the great ice sheets of Greenland.

Normally, this ice is pretty white and reflects the summer sun away, so melting is minimized to an extent, even when the Arctic is warmer than normal.

But these tiny particles of soot settling on the ice collect the sun's heat, and hasten melting. That might be partly why the polar ice cap has gotten so much smaller in recent decades (though a warmer Arctic climate still takes most of the blame)

In Greenland, the soot has helped melt the ice sheet faster, and that's even worse than the ice on the Arctic Ocean melting.  That ice melt runs off into the oceans, contributing to worldwide rises in sea levels.

Ultimately, those fires in northwestern Canada, then, are helping to drown cities like Miami and Norfolk Va.

The fires are also very bad for those of us who like to breathe. This is true even for people who live far away from the blazes.

In 2002, fires in northern Quebec blew smoke southward to where I live in Vermont.  The same thing happened in 2010 and 2013. There were air pollution warnings galore during these episodes, because the tiny particulates in the air could cause lung damage.

With the fires burning in Washington this week, air pollution alerts extended into Idaho and Montana, two places you normally don't think of as having dangerous air pollution. But there you go.

After the fires are out and the rains come, the blazes still cause huge problems. There's no vegetation left to soak up the rain.  The downpours cause runoff, which leads to flash floods, mudslides and debris flows.

That is a constant problem in California after the seasonal fires when the winter rains return. (At least we hope they do this year.

Last year, after fires in the Waldo Canyon area of Colorado, heavy thunderstorms hit later in the summer. So you get scenes like this:

Why You Need To Get Some Sun

Here in Vermont, the sun will peek in and out of the clouds over the next several days, so get outside when you can.

That's not just a polite plea to have fun. Your life might depend on it.

Lately, there's been concern that too many people don't get outside enough and that can cause a lot of health problems, including bone problems and depression.

Here's a fun little video that I hope will get you take at least a sunny walk at lunchtime today.