Yet fossil fuel infrastructure is dubbed “nation building projects” by the government.
The wildfires are happening for multiple reasons not just global warming. Our forests literally evolved to burn down and we have been stopping that for decades. Just building up deadfall and dead trees throw in drier weather and boom. We should have been doing controlled burns. And yes I know climate change is having an effect on the fires but it is not the only reason we are here.
Always have been. The difference is that more severe wildfires happen more frequently. The 6th IPCC report from 2021 (we are now on the 7th and the 8th is being prepared) had this nice figure (page 18) that showed this for extreme temperatures, floods and droughts:
If you don’t immediately understand what this means, ask your insurance broker.
I’m not arguing against you but it does scan that if years of deadfall have been accumulating there would be more severe fires more frequently than if shit was left alone.
Doesn’t mean climate change isn’t contributing.
Sure, but I would reverse the order. Things like accumulating deadfall, droughts, lumber monocultures can be related to the start and maintainance of fires. Without climate change these would happen at a certain rate. Climate change accelerates and intensifies the effects of all of it. Like, people get sick from all sorts of things, but if you’re also an overweight smoker that doesn’t exercise, each time you get sick is going to be more of a nail-biter than if you were in general good health. Like, yes, the street meat you just ate can’t be good for you, but if you were generally healthy it wouldn’t be as much of a danger of being catastrophic.
Well, we should probably stop having massive wildfires then.
Just like the Novia Scotia guy said, just stop going into the forest, it’s fine, gosh.
Better start raking those forests …
Canadian wildfires killed 82,000 people in 2023
I’m not surprised. I don’t live near the wildfires, but our air quality was often in the danger zone these past few years. Yet I saw people out walking, jogging, cycling… without any kind of mask or respirator, as if they were oblivious to the dangers.
I mean, FFS, even the photo in the article, of the guy spraying the ground. The SKY IS ORANGE, and he’s out without a mask or anything. Dude, WTF?
Any weather app would give you a notification about air quality pretty early in advance, so it’s not like most people would be caught-out unexpectedly.
And it’s not like we haven’t normalized “masking up” by now, since the pandemic. So it’s such a small inconvenience to save your lungs. Just do it.
The mask that you would wear to protect yourself from wildfire smoke is not some flimsy surgical mask. Those only minimized aerosols coming out of your mouth, it’s not a filter, it doesn’t make wildfire smoke air safer to breath.
Right, I didn’t try to imply the same masks, but there are so many options for cutting back on wildfire smoke particles.
N95, N99, P100… Any hardware store would carry these.
I thought it was implied because of the comment that we all know how to do this because of the pandemic.
I don’t agree that the average person learned anything about masks, half of people refused to wear them, another quarter of people wore them but thought the surgical mask was filtering air for them.
Some people did learn about masks, that’s going to be over represented on a place like this full of smart people.
I think the message that people should just wear masks like they learned to do during the pandemic doesn’t convey enough information to be helpful for most people.
I agree with the suggestions for specific mask types that you gave in this most recent comment.
I think most people learned that because of COVID, didn’t they? N95s (worn properly) block 95% of pm2.5, which takes a danger level of 400 μg/m³ (well into the hazardous range) down to 20 μg/m³ (about half the cutoff for “unhealthy”).
Yet only a handful of people locally were wearing N95s when the levels were that high, locally. People just don’t care about their health, I guess? Not sure how else to interpret it.
