On Wednesday, New York City recorded the worst air pollution of any major city in the world. What once seemed unprecedented is becoming familiar, carolynkor writes:
When the smoke comes, you notice it in your body before you see it in the air. On Monday evening, I went for a run and then felt queasy and lethargic. Only on Tuesday did I notice the haze in Manhattan. By Tuesday night, the air smelled like barbecue. On the half-mile walk to my yoga studio, I saw a few people in N95 masks, and I wished I had worn mine. I started to get nauseated; my eyes felt itchy.
By Wednesday morning, ash was falling in northern New York. School trips and soccer games were cancelled. A friend texted, “Are you going to go outside and take a few drags off the sky?” I heard of a woman sitting on her front steps, struggling to breathe even with the help of oxygen. Friends of friends were reminded of places like, where daily exposure to severe air pollution can be deadly.
The smoke was coming from Canada, where more than four hundred wildfires are currently burning. We do not know what caused many of them—a dropped cigarette, lightning, a downed electrical wire—but they are raging through the boreal forests of British Columbia, Alberta, and now Quebec. Wildfires are nothing new in these woodlands, but these are much earlier and larger than usual. And, like so many recent fires, they are directly linked to weeks of anomalous extreme heat.
We keep experiencing things that are unprecedented, worse than anything anyone can remember, even as we’re told that they will become common. “You’re likely to see events like this more often, where you have prolonged heat that dries out forests and makes these fires more likely,” Marshall Burke, a professor at Stanford University, and a leading expert on wildfire-smoke exposure and impacts, told me. Burke has plotted the levels of fine particles, which scientists call PM2.5 because they are 2.
“There is no safe exposure to PM2.5,” Burke told me. In the past decade, research has shown that these particles can penetrate deep into the lungs, enter the bloodstream, and even reach the brain. They are associated with heart attacks and dementia. Even among healthy people, Burke and his team have found that, with higher levels of air pollution, cognitive performance decreases, and workers are less productive.
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