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Over the past few years, Westerners have been noticing that wildfire smoke seems to be more prevalent. A new analysis of satellite imagery reveals that they're right: smoky days have increased dramatically since 2016, and not just in the West. The change has impacted everyone in the country.
San Jose, California, saw the most dramatic increase in smoky days of 400%. The change in Los Angeles and San Diego was 230%, while eastern states like Philadelphia and Washington saw an increase of about 40% in the number of smoky days experienced. In Denver, the increase was about 70%. "The impacts of wildfire smoke could be one of the largest climate-related impacts across the [West]," said Marshall Burke, an associate professor of earth system science who led the project for Stanford University. "And as we're seeing increasingly, it's not just limited to the Western U.S."
Such startling findings are concerning due to the human health threats associated with breathing smoke. "Literally no amount of exposure is safe. There's no magic threshold under which we're OK and beyond which we're in trouble. The lesson is that any amount is bad. And the more you get the worse it is." New research shows wildfire smoke exposure negatively impacts the heart, lungs, and even brain while also posing pregnancy risks.
In order to address the issue of wildfire smoke, the United States will need to curb the risk of wildfire through forest management practices such as prescribed burns, as well as work to address the underlying driver of climate change.
Read more about the reality of living with smoke, changes in California and Colorado, or the process behind the research project in this series of connected articles from National Public Radio.
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Ultimately, we sort of have an ecologically illiterate society, and issues like climate change, it’s kind of dangerous that our average citizens don’t know how the world functions and how we connect to it. We’re more connected than we think. We need each other more than we think.”
