To anyone who is experiencing this for the first time, some tips I've found useful:
1) Even if it seems counterintuitive, try not to move air. Don't run fans or open windows. Do run filtration systems, but preferably interior ones. Even exhausting outside will draw new air (and particles) inside. Keep doors and windows closed as much as possible.
2) Run humidifiers if you have them. If you don't, and you just desperately need relief, close the bathroom door and run the shower hot for 10-15 minutes (i.e. make a steam room). That usually helps my sinuses and eyes quite a bit. You can also try breathing through a warm damp rag, although that gets pretty old pretty quickly.
3) No science behind it that I'm aware of, but I find that carrot juice really helps my throat when it's sore.
4) Be sure to try and enjoy at least one sunset. They will be glorious.
You can do the same with regular air filters for your HVAC. Buy 4 that are square, the size of the box fan. Put the 4 filters on end into a box. Put it on the floor or cardboard bottom. Place the fan on top blowing into the box. Obviously, duct tape the filters where they meet to keep the box from collapsing.
The only catch there might be is actually being able to find a furnace filter on store shelves during these AQI disasters. They have a tendency to quickly vanish much like toilet paper during the beginning of covid or A/C units during heatwaves.
Ait is bad enough, skipping indoor exercise is probably best unless running a quality air filter.
My learning of that was after taking days and once weeks to recover from smoke exposure. I don't think the gravity of how bad it is really sinks in until the super long recovery is observed
I tried this once but the fan didn't seem like it was capable of pushing sufficient air through the filter to do anything. I remember I looked up a bunch of articles on this to make sure I was getting the right kind of filter, and it still didn't work well.
Most box fans will struggle with a single filter right up against them. The blade design on a typical box fan is designed for velocity, not pressure. Also, I don't know the physics as to why, but you want to be pulling air through the filter rather than pushing. It's why car radiators have the fan on the engine side.
The best setup is to use multiple filters arranged in a box shape, since more filter surface area = less restriction on air flow.
The primitive "filter taped to box fan" model worked fine for me in Portland during the massive fires of 2020. Maybe not the greatest thing for the fan, but my indoor AQI sensor would go from reading like 250+ to under 100 pretty quickly. And of course, the filters basically turned black in a short period of time.
You can get woodworking Masks for outside if it gets bad. Humidity is a tricky one - because we sealed our house for over a week last year it actually got way too humid.
I picked up a whole mess of them when everyone in my deep blue area stopped masking. They were deeply marked down. I can’t be the only one looking ahead like this. They’re great for home improvement projects, risky environments, and days like this.
If you really need air, which I found was basically necessary on hot smoky days without AC, I put a MERV 13 20x20x4" HVAC filter in my window and drew air through it with a box fan. This took out most of the small particles (verified with air quality monitors) and cooled off the inside of the house.
Fun and related project. The GOES satellites broadcast a signal at around 1.6GHZ that you can pick up and decode, giving you live images (albeit slightly less resolution than the pro-level GRB broadcast), without using the Internet!
It's a great beginner hobby project requiring ~100-200 dollars of hardware. There's also a large community of enthusiasts and it also opens up a gateway into RF hobby, other RTL-SDR things, ham radio, and other fun engineering time sinks that really helped pass the time during the Pandemic years.
1.6GHz huh. Isnt half the entire Secret of Skinwalker Ranch show based on that exact frequency "mysterious signals at 1.6GHz" and everytime they see that spike a UAP appears? That's be pretty funny if its GOES bc the government hired travis to lead their secret UAP investigation program after he asked the pentagon if there were any known programs using this range.
I've had conversations with people blitz'd out their mind that where more coherent, intellectual, and factual than what's on History channel these days.
Technically it's closer to 1.7GHz, but most Geostationary birds transmitting on L band are slightly below that. GOES is at 1.68GHz (roughly) while Polar orbiting satellites (think NOAA 15-19) are just above 1.7GHz.
thinking on this a bit more I suspect they would have been seeing iridium flares. that network operates from 1610-1626.5MHz and iridium flares are quite visually spectacular.
We really have to get back on track with controlled burns after the environmentalist 'save all trees' experiment that started in the 1960's has put us in the position we are in now.
Canada used to have many controlled burns throughout last century until the last quarter - Nova Scotia is a typical example (1979 paper):
California is dangerously behind on forestry and therefore fire management compared to earlier decades. Fuel has to be removed or fire and smoke will cause massive damage and have a very serious psychological and economic impact.
Native Americans conducted controlled burns for thousands of years until they started getting shot by forestry rangers a hundred years ago.
There are no saw mills left in Northern California and strict rules about not cutting trees down. Wood is imported from Canada at massive expense, driving up the cost of housing. we seem to have lost the plot a bit here.
The problem is that Canada is covered in peatlands. Once they dry out, controlled burns can ignite peat several meters deep and release one of the biggest carbon stores on the planet.
See what happened with the Russian wildfires in 2010 [1] - this is a consequence of climate change and unfortunately many of the old fire prevention strategies won't work with Canadian peatland drying out.
Yes but the point of controlled burns in California (for example) is that they eliminate fuel as the ecosystem gets drier. In peatlands, controlled burns instead make more fuel available by drying out the peat, causing a death spiral.
> Native Americans conducted controlled burns for thousands of years until they started getting shot by forestry rangers a hundred years ago.
I've been thinking about this lately. My wife and I were reading about a study of an old growth oak - hickory forest in the eastern US which without human intervention is slowly transitioning to maple - beach forests. Presumably this is because it is no longer experiencing the burns it would have historically.
This transition is generally considered problematic since oak hickory forests supposedly support more biodiversity (and conveniently more profitable timber harvests).
But this all raises the question for me - how did this all work before any human intervention?
What's the natural rate of forest fires? We have species (such as giant sequoia) that seem to require fires, so they must have happened, but they must have been quite rare. Would there have been a truely horrible fire caused by lightning every 1000 years? Or perhaps would the megafauna that went extinct around the time native Americans arrived have played a similar role in clearing out underbrush while foraging?
In the arid American West, at least, lightning caused fires are extremely common. Historically these forests were significantly less dense than they are after 100 years of human fire suppression, which meant less available fuel, and slower burning, “cooler” fires typically.
I'm on my cell so im not going to be a good help with info on this, but lighting induced fires are actually very common. So you're not talking every 1000 years, but closer to 10 or so. This leads to a much more patchwork design in the forests that leads to natural fire breaks.
How could that explain places where lightening never or rarely occurs (coastal California)? I can’t think of any lightning sparked fires until a year or two ago. (Inland areas and the sierras obviously do get more lightening.)
In the northeast / midwest / great lakes basin, mastodons definitely helped clear underbrush, from what I've read. Not sure how common they were through the eastern woodlands, but they were definitely here (and likely hunted to extinction). You can see plants that have historical adaptation to their form of browsing; black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) has spikes along its younger, more tender branches that don't effectively deter deer but would be nasty on a trunk, for example.
First nations here also did controlled burns to open cultivation for maize agriculture and to encourage open grazing areas for deer.
Regardless, the forests that are burning in this case causing smoke in the northeast are quite far north, in Northern Quebec mostly, in what is boreal forest; pine & spruce mainly, on thin granite soils (Canadian shield).
I know that human expansion has decreased the number of large predators, which has increased the number of dear, who eat more young trees. If they have a preference for one type of tree over another that will certainly change the composition of the forest.
Certain areas burn with differing frequencies (naturally).
Eg, coast range burns every few centuries while cascades and sierras it is more like every other year.
Sorry for no references, so please have a large grain of salt with those stated frequencies. IIRC those are the tight order of magnitude. Though, we are also talking much smaller fires compared to the mega blades we see today that kills everything rather than rejuvenates. These fires today burn everything and down to 4 feet under the soil. It's a different beast.
I think population growth is the main factor for why prescribed burns of forests have dwindled. We have cities and towns that have expanded into forests and high-risk fire areas. Maybe we shouldn't have ever allowed this, but it happened, and now we're stuck with it (good luck getting people to move out).
> Maybe we shouldn't have ever allowed this, but it happened, and now we're stuck with it (good luck getting people to move out).
They will move out when they can’t insure their properties anymore. [1] Note the refusal to cover properties isn’t a blanket withdrawal; I got a call from State Farm just last week - but I live in a major metro.
I mean that's only happening because California made it illegal to charge the real risk adjusted price for insurance. The companies weren't going to start losing money on every home in CA so they are leaving.
I think there was another HN thread the other day saying this is how CA can depopulate the risk-prone regions - CA refuses real risk pricing yet carriers refuse uncovered risk, so high risk areas become depopulated as they can't be insured, and thus, not in compliance with loan requirements.
Once this is accomplished (as ugly as it might be for the residents) then you can possibly do some forest management and fire control.
This same thing is playing out in FL, but over there the insurance commission isn't as stringent so insurers are just flat out not paying claims.
How does that actually get people to stop living there?
Suppose you can't get insurance and you can't get a mortgage without insurance. The house still exists. Its value will crash. But having crashed, now someone can afford to buy it without a loan. Meanwhile there is still a massive housing shortage, so somebody will.
And that's the thing that caused this, and the only way out of it. You have to build enough housing in the areas that aren't in the direct path of wildfires that nobody is being forced by those high prices into the housing that is.
A house without any neighbors, in a bankrupt city or unincorporated area that's also a food desert sounds like a non-starter to 99% of the people on the plant.
Meanwhile CA also recently revamped how local regulators are allowed to regulate things like more duplexes and multiplexes in all residential areas.
Environmental fashion became obsessed with trees as 'the lungs of the planet' despite ocean phytoplankton processing most of the air we breath.
We have been conditioned to believe humans are destroying the fragile planet but ironically the reality is that we are increasingly irresponsible stewards of it, flying in the face of thousands of years of evidence.
> ocean phytoplankton processing most of the air we breath.
This is not true.
Ocean photosynthesis produces about 50% of the oxygen in the atmosphere, but ocean respiration also consumes about the same amount. The oceans are about oxygen neutral. Same goes for the other 50%, but in land ecosystems.
'Phytoplankton are responsible for most of the transfer of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to the ocean. Carbon dioxide is consumed during photosynthesis, and the carbon is incorporated in the phytoplankton, just as carbon is stored in the wood and leaves of a tree'.
It's not really population pressure causing that though, at least not exclusively. It's a relatively small number of people that think they want a particular sort of lifestyle. Net migration patterns more or less have people moving out of low population counties and into high population counties.
My understanding is that this isn't due to a lack of controlled burns but actually due to an unseasonally warm winter not killing bugs that attack and kill trees, leaving an excessive amount of dead wood to burn this year. No amount of controlled burning of the years before would prevent a lot of dead trees this year making for kindling.
It's everything. Natives used to practice controlled burns to sustain habitability. Observe parallels to three sisters agriculture. Then as their populations were eradicated these methods were lost.
Indeed. Though modern fire suppression is a huge factor. AFAIK fire suppression became industrialized following world war II (bomber type planes able to deploy large amounts of water, better radios and respirators). Even today, the mandate for fire suppression (in at least WA state) is all fires are to be put out within 24 hours. There are a few "let it burn" examples I'm aware of in CA
Surprised this point wasn't higher up. I'm starting to see this everywhere, dry grass, yellow leaves, dead trees. Growing up in Ireland I never saw anything but green but it's become visibly more lifeless year on year since around 2017.
I know that's an issue along the continental divide, where the Pine Bark beetle is wrecking the forests (and the absence of sustained temperatures below -20F that kill off the beetle). Is that an issue in California?
There’s actually stuff being done about preventing Wildfires in the US, controlled burns being of these things, creating “fuel breaks” (gaps that prevent fire from progressing) is another, and there’s a LOT more. But a lot of time that’s not enough and the reason for that is like with every other government effort - bureaucracy and endless paperwork. It can take months before a project can even start because the forest management has to compile all the necessary paperwork. But they are really passionate about doing this to prevent as many wildfires as possible.
Source: I currently work for a startup that makes software that shortens the time necessary to prepare this paperwork which potentially could cut the time it takes in half or more.
You have to gather a lot of information and answer dozens of questions before you start a project. In the planning phase you have to do scoping, make a public notice, consult the local communities, take wildlife, insects, wetlands, native tribes and many more things into account (which require gathering all sorts of data from national databases). There are multiple people inside a National Forest’s office that are working on all this.
Then the other hard part is gathering all this data from all the people in one place and writing documents that will be published or submitted to various government agencies. This process is at the moment manual and extremely time consuming (because it’s basically an email back and forth that can take weeks or months). And that’s only the planning phase.
The app I’m working on tries to automate as much as possible both the data gathering part and the document preparation part, letting multiple people collaborate together to create necessary paperwork. This drastically cuts on the time needed to complete the planning phase and thus lets them do more projects in the same amount of time.
This is hearsay, but folks in Colorado tend to complain about federal air quality guidelines prohibiting controlled burns during the times of the year that it makes sense to do a controlled burn. During the winter, air quality guidelines dictate you can't exceed a certain amount of wood smoke in an area for example. NEPA studies might be another.
Yeah, and there are lots of smaller ones. Some in Santa Cruz (Big Creek) and Sonoma (Cazadero). It's nice be able to get local lumber and the pricing is often better.
Part of the problem is that people built next to the logging areas since they're so quiet and pretty with relatively good roads. That really makes it hard to do controlled burns. And people moved there for the trees so they don't want you to cut them down.
I don't know what that poster was talking about either. Even if CA were to outlaw lumber milling in the north of the state, the rest of the PNW produces enough for the continent already. There's plenty of wood in the deep blue queer tree-hugging west coast. The USA is a huge exporter of the crop, actually.
That's true about Oregon and Washington but NOT California. It's also why you don't see wildfires to nearly the same extent in the Northeast or South - we cut our trees.
All three have different topography and climates from the NE or the South. I don't understand why people think what works in one type of forest will just work in another. The trees are different, the climate is different, the weather is different.
There have been big fires in Oregon and Washington in recent years as well, not just in California. And the Tillamook Burn was big, but that was a long time ago.
I'd be interested to see the data re: "processing imported lumber mostly". Statewide back in 2016, California timber harvest was 1,572 MMBF; wood processing facilities received 1,483 MMBF; 11.5 MMBF flowed into California from other states; 99.7 MMBF flowed out of California for processing out of state or export according to https://www.bber.umt.edu/pubs/forest/fidacs/CA2016%20Fact%20...
It's amazing the things people believe with no evidence (and then get massive amounts of upvotes for!).
Look at a map of northern California and you see that the landscape is dominated by a checkerboard pattern of logging/no-logging (the most efficient way to maintain a forest and create firebreaks, even if that wasn't the original intent and people are trying their damndest to break the system).
This is almost exactly backwards. "Controlled burns" are the workaround, not the solution. Timber land naturally burns regularly, but we started fighting those fires in the last century to protect the lumber industry. The problem then becomes, a few decades later, that you have a forest filled with dead branches and snags that would have burned, piecewise, over decades, but didn't. Now eventually something gets out of control and you have a fire anyway, except that now it's much (much) larger than it would have been naturally.
So the workaround becomes creating corridors of excess-fuel-free forest via "controlled burns". But that's not the fix! The problem was preexisting.
I know people in the Sierra foothills who used to work in the logging industry until the bureaucrats made it impossible. I also know people in the same area who are fire fighters. When loggers used to find diseased trees they would isolate them by felling all the surrounding trees so they wouldn't infect them and spread. This practice was outlawed by the academic bureaucrats and is one of the reasons for the subsequent severe spread of dying trees that are the large scale fire fuel we see today.
At this point in history there is illegal logging going on to create fire breaks around properties, such are the state restrictions on trees. We have lost sight of the forestry management practices that worked with nature, not against it.
OP did not say that climate change was not a factor. Both of these are contributing factors.
I will second the point about lack of controlled burns and logging absolutely being a problem. Look at photos of western forests from the late 1800s and you'll see that we have far more trees now than a century ago. Here's an example of Yosemite valley: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/29/opinion/sunda.... A century of fire suppression and climate change have proved to be a dangerous combination. One of these is easier to correct though if we could get past the idea that every tree must be saved at all costs.
From the core assumption that there would be more dry days doesn’t change the fact that you will encounter more ferocious wildfires (actually if we had less dry days we would encounter even more ferocious wildfires because of less burns in general when you think about it).
The effects of climate change are different in different regions. And the types of weather patterns that deliver more precipitation to some regions could be quite different from what the local wildlife has adapted to.
California already has a pretty good prescribed burn program, but it needs to be expanded, in part because the climate is significantly different today than it was a hundred years ago. There are some obstacles to prescribed burns: smoke inhalation is a public health hazard, firefighters need to be paid, private landowners are worried about liability, etc. Perhaps the biggest issue is that most of California is federal land, and the U.S. Forest Service does not have funding to perform prescribed burns.
The private sector hasn't solved the problem either, in part because a lot of the fuel isn't desirable timber. Californians who are serious about this issue should lobby their federal and state representatives.
> Our results show that California and Oregon are the only severe-risk US states to conduct prescribed fire programs that are impactful at reducing wildfire risks, while other southeastern states such as Florida maintain fire-healthy ecosystems with very extensive prescribed fire programs. Our study suggests that states that have impactful prescribed fire programs (like California) should increase their scale of operation, while states that burn prescribed fires with no impact (like Nevada) should change the way prescribed burning is planned and conducted.
> California has historically resisted prescribed burning to control their already big smoke problem
> There are various reasons preventing California from conducting more Rx [prescribed burns], including lack of enough firefighters and 57% of land being owned by the Federal Government which lacks the funds to conduct Rx, especially after recent budget cuts to the U.S. Forest Service
> Academics warned that the financial incentives offered by mechanical thinning may be elusive, given the high ratio of thinning to merchantable timber in many locations. Legislative staff and analysts criticized the traditional forestry model of removing large-diameter, valuable trees and leaving smaller, less valuable and more flammable biomass.
There's one consideration missing from your list though, which is the fact that controlled burning is way more risky now than ever before, due to the immense fuel build up. The reduced frequency of controlled burns has contributed to making them much harder to implement. Hard to put the cat back in the bag at this point.
Total fire suppression dates to the early 20th century, not the 1960s. It was driven largely by the forest / wood products industry, not environmentalists. Formal adoption of "the 10 am rule" (all fires must be suppressed by 10 am the following morning) was in 1935. Formal adoption of prescribed burns by the USFS was in 1978.
California has had numerous controlled-burn projects for decades. They are limited in scope, and opposed, usually by local residents and businesses, for ... somewhat understandable reasons, though in the long run more-frequent controlled burns are better than the megafires of the past few decades.
Genocide of the indigenous North American population, especially in California, was transacted first by Spanish and Mexican missionaries, then by Americans, both private citizens and government agents (mostly military), and was largely completed by 1873.
The US Forest Service was not organised until 1905. Its antecedents date only as far back as 1875, after the dates given above for the California genocide.
Yes, controlled burns would help with some of California's wildfire issues, but evidence from elsewhere, including Canada and Siberia in which total fire suppression was never policy or effectively achieve, recent history suggests that megafires are not strictly dependent on overgrowth and fuel accumulation. Regions of California such as Santa Barbara experience recurring fires over the same terrain at intervals of a decade or two, suggesting that even short-term fuel-load accumulation is sufficient to give rise to huge and uncontrollable fires which intrude well into the urban region, and are not limited to remote bush or the urban-wildland interface. See particularly the 2017 Tubbs Fire which obliterated a Santa Rosa neighbourhood, and Thomas Fire, also 2017, which reached downtown Ventura.
It is pretty scary to see how people are in denial in this thread. I would also prefer if there was an easy solution like controlled fires to this, but physics doesn't care what I prefer. We need to get global warming under control. There is simply no way around it.
There is no contradiction between the statements “global warming is a serious problem” and “preventing wildfires completely has some disadvantages vs. controlled burns”.
After two centuries of decline, the area of US forestland stabilized in about 1920 and has since increased slightly. The forest area of the US is about two-thirds what it was in 1600.
The area consumed by wildfire each year has fallen 90 percent; it was between eight and twenty million hectares (20-50 million acres) in the early 1900s and is between one and two million hectares (2-5 million acres) today.
Forest growth nationally has exceeded harvest since the 1940s. By 1997 forest growth exceeded harvest by 42 percent and the volume of forest growth was 380 percent greater than it had been in 1920.
Living in Australia through the 2019 bushfires (finished by 2 weeks of rain just as Covid19 incubated), I love the sweet sweet smell of a controlled burn that is reducing the load for that next dry summer.
The law of unintended consequences is called a law for a reason.
Opting to finger point and use misdirection to avoid the inescapable fact this is primarily the fault of the environmentalists paradoxically harms environmental causes even more.
Nobody wants to live in a toxic environment or leave one for their children. There might be disagreement about how to solve these problems and what those problems are, but you're conflating several things.
Whining and complaining like a petulant child because people disagree with your approach isn't going to help the environment at all. It does raise questions about the underlying motives and the legitimacy of solutions that can't stand up to the slightest bit of scrutiny.
But there is a lot wrong with blaming "preventing wildfires" on "those environmentalists" and making that the sole root cause of this problem, which it isn't too much at all. Contributing, but far from root cause.
Controlled burns btw also easier quickly said then done...
Yes and they cut the rapid attack helicopter crews in BC and Alberta. Also, the fires there started in a short window when vegetation hadn't started growing yet and there was old dry winter grass everywhere.
Wasn't the environmentalists of the 60s but the environmentalists of the early 1900s (John Muir and ilk) who thought they knew better than the native peoples how to preserve the dignity and beauty of natural spaces. We're just now coming back around to acknowledging indigenous land practices that have been the standard on this continent for millenia.
Both environmentalists and early American naturalists have one common weak spot in their world view; they view humans as fundamentally distinct from nature. Nature is somehow both profane and awe inspiring compared to the "rational" human world. In that view, we need to preserve the wilderness (somewhere "out there") for aesthetic/spiritual/resource management reasons.
From the indigenous viewpoint, there is little distinction; humans are part of the physical/natural world, same as a mountain lion or a worm, albeit a very powerful part capable of wielding great power and thus responsibility. There is no concept of wilderness.
It's worth over-emphasizing that the indigenous viewpoint in North America was sustainable (and was actually sustained) for thousands of years. The modern industrial culture of bipolar consumption/reverence of wilderness is showing severe signs of overshoot after a couple hundred years. That's not to say that indigenous land practices are more ethical or wise... merely that they've been proven more effective by the test of time.
I guess also worth mentioning, modern forestry uses tree farms and has been for a while. Those tree farms burn differently than natural forest and are super dense. Getting more logging into the mix, or more wood mills is not necessarily a solution due to second order effects (more tree farms)
That sounds like wishful thinking that there is an easy solution for this. Controlled burns can help, but the real issue is that global warming makes areas dryer and the vegetation there is not adapted for the dryer/warmer conditions. We have to tackle more seriously the elephant in the room.
”Native Americans conducted controlled burns for thousands of years"
Not to be snarky, but I think that they were uncontrolled burns... Once they started there was no Native American Fire Department to put them out, they just burned until they wefe done.
Come on...multiple posts claim that here, but I really miss the environmentalist campaigns who drove that fire policies?! References? Please look it up, we didn't know better, and it was wrong but quite natural for the peak of the civilization that we are (/s) to fight and prevent fires. The subtone here that "it was the environmentalists" is really hilarious and shocking at the same time.. lol.
Blame everything bad on the environmentalists, ignore the rest we all did and still do, and just let nature rule! Hehe..
Especially, as while totally agree and true that it is right that this was the wrong approach, the denial that this is currently maybe only 10% of the problem is also funny. We lost nature, just wait it out and let it go its natural way here now until most is burned down and then desertificated, which will inevitably come. No more fire problems, just some others then..
sure, but it’s hard to ignore that wildfires in many places dropped when everyone was staying hone during the pandemic, it’s very much a multifaceted issue (and usually it’s underbrush catching fire and burning, not trees)
Are you seriously suggesting that the indigenous were practising controlled burns over millions of hectares of boreal forest?
I find this 'sweep your floors' meme a bit of an oddity:
1. It involves conservatives casting native americans in a good light. Who's going to argue with that?
2. It contains a false epiphany which just feels right (the solution to forest fires is...fires)
3. It contains a grain of truth. Native americans did perform controlled burns, and in the NW they did take care of salmon streams etc, but not on a scale that would prevent today's wildfires.
It's a classic diversion from climate change, and our terrible 'foresty' practices of cutting down forests and planting monocrops of high resin species all packed together and calling it reforestation and finally, spraying entire valleys with roundup (often where indigenous people live of course)
We've effectively stopped this with modern fire suppression techniques and have fewer managed burns...Parks Canada only had 12 last year. And here's a story where they ran out of funding and had to defer burns:
Most of the "environmentalists" I know are deeply in favor of controlled burns. At a national level, the Forest Service is largely behind the dangerous build up in tree density in our national forests, due to the their total and complete ban on prescribed burns (although to be fair, they've slowly come around to realizing the importance of controlled burns).
And the timber companies are definitely not involved in any prescribed burning efforts (don't want to lose out on all that inventory).
>Forest Service is largely behind the dangerous build up in tree density in our national forests, due to the their total and complete ban on prescribed burns (although to be fair, they've slowly come around to realizing the importance of controlled burns).
This is comically false. The USFS absolutely engages in controlled burns.
The USFS does a lot of controlled burns, and has done them for a long time. Not sure where you heard otherwise: it's a significant part of what they do.
They briefly paused doing them last year after a controlled burn got out of control in New Mexico, resulting in a high-profile wildfire. But that's only evidence that they were already doing them. Anyway, after updating their policies, they resumed prescribed burns later that year.
This is environmental crime. And when there is a crime, there is a benefit for criminals. Saying that if we burn some, here and there, the criminals will stop, is like saying that if we paint the banks in a nice pastel tone and put a banner asking politely not to rob, the bank robbers will agree to stop and go away.
Europe tried that in the past repeatedly. It didn't worked. Even worse, the trend is increasing among farmers manipulated by extreme European political currents that overlap extensively the Putin and Trump speeches. Places of Europe that never had a problem with wildfires started to burn since a couple of years. We hear political parties trow the first stone and claim that environmental laws are unfair. Just one week later, the place burns down magically. Is environmental boycott, and will not stop until we stop them or remove the benefits.
Either we wake up and strike back, or we accept that the extinction whirl will be much closer than we expected, and much faster than we can adapt.
Here on Long Island, everything is sepiatone, and it smells like a smokehouse.
But I also know that folks in California and Australia have been dealing with exactly this, for a long time. It's news, because it's happening to the Northeast US.
I was watching AppleTV+ Extrapolations[0], which is actually damn depressing. The first episode has wildfires everywhere, and air quality around the globe sucks.
I'm in Brooklyn and sometime mid-afternoon I walked out into my living room to it being completely dark inside and orange out my windows. Local AQI has said 330-350 all afternoon.
And somehow this is a lot better than when I was in Delhi one winter. Some nights I'd see 500+, and there wasn't much escape from it in our airbnb in hauz khas, I'd just sleep with a keffiyeh around my face. People are living like this almost daily in cities around the world, to the point where the locals are sort of just used to it. Pretty depressing, but hopefully we'll start doing something about it.
In general the Northeast is pretty liberal and would happily go along with plans to prevent climate catastrophe.
Wall Street will is a tool, it does whatever makes the most money, and it seems to act pretty greedily (in the greedy algorithm sense). If you want to fix the environment, convince the rest of the country to pass some better laws. Wall Street is part of the engine, not the steering wheel.
Wall Street plays golf with everyone else, and the purpose of liberalism's economic policy is to delay and water down. The major newspapers that could stop both-sidesing everything are predominantly on the East Coast and policy decision-making is centralized around Washington, DC. Voting is also nearly useless and performative.
Start getting acquainted with purpleair checks too before going out. We used to review and hunt out the green air locations for the day and take a trip out to the ocean or wherever we could find respite to get some outdoor time. You go stir crazy stuck in a house for days on end.
It is damn depressing because solving the climate crisis costs so little:
It is estimated to cost between 2-6% of global GDP each year until 2050 to prevent exceeding 1.5 C mostly by building out renewables.
I could imagine that many people will start investing in air quality filtering solutions for their private home on a scale that matches what we should be spending on climate efforts per person per year.
2-6% global GDP probably means 20% of all western country’s GDP paying for the rest of the world while China paints their rocks green to fool their own gov inspectors.
The site you are pointing to does not use accumulated past emissions to judge countries so is highly dubious from a developing country perspective.
But again, I think pointing to others is a straw man in the debate. Each country need to go ahead and shoulder their share. For a country such as Germany the estimates point to 2.5% of GDP per year to be spend over the next 27 years to achieve a net zero economy. This is an effort that is so miniscule that it is embarrassing. And it is mostly domestically spend money to build wind mills and install PVs. The component cost is becoming less and less of a share.
I think China is well aware that their country is one that is very negatively affected by climate change. The continental climate will turn China into a desert if climate change isn't reduced.
The cost trajectories are so much in favor of renewables that spending money to build them is starting to make even financial sense.
(P.s.: My low effort google was an answer to a bullshit Youtube channel)
If you go outside in NYC you should definitely be wearing an N95 or better. Avoid going out if you can. Current AQI here is 400+ aka "Hazardous". It's currently sunny at the park near me: https://imgur.com/a/DLhxEWL
What is the “hazard” though? Is going outside really that much worse than hanging within a few feet of a campfire for hours? Obviously PM 2.5 is bad, but the actual amount of hazard from acute exposure hasn’t been contextualized, for me at least.
I've never found myself coughing next to campfires or BBQ's.
Today (NYC) I went outside briefly and started coughing within a couple of minutes, and then my eyes started watering.
It's nothing like being by a campfire. It's way worse. Campfire smoke goes straight up, or if it's windy nobody stands with the smoke blowing directly in their face for minutes/hours.
What are you asking though? Are you asking how a blast of heavy smoke compares to a constant cover of fine smoke? A lot all at once or a little over a long period of time are both bad.
With a campfire, you can always scoot your chair back if you are getting too much smoke, but you are probably getting much more smoke all at once. With a wildfire, you can't escape it and normal activities like going for a jog or walking to your office become a problem.
> hanging within a few feet of a campfire for hours
is actually bad though. You may not feel it, but as an asthmatic, I can tell you quite certainly that this is dosing you with PM2.5 unless you have a really clean burning convective fire or smokeless pit.
But that's why people want to know. Obviously it sucks for you as an asthmatic, but if the new risk is only as bad as some old risk they're OK with, then they don't need to worry about the new risk.
I know nothing about this subject but if these fires uncontrollably burn through land, they're not going to show mercy for anything in their path. A controlled campfire has wood and leaves. A large scale fire could burn up really bad material like rubber and other things that emit chemicals.
yes, you'll find out first hand if you buy a PM2.5 meter and measure locally in your environment. We have a battery powered one we'd take on trips with us and in the car. Buy a Bosch HEPA cabin filter for your car too, it makes a measurable difference.
I bought smartmi PM 2.5 meter 6 months ago. It is very simple just power button, brightness and display. I watched YouTube video where it was positively reviewed.
yah it's hard to verify whether or not the thing has true absolute accuracy. However once I started experimenting in real world scenarios where I was able to corroborate my own subjective interpretation of my senses the numbers did correlate and scale proportionally as hoped. When it was noticeably smoky outside the numbers registered high, the higher the smoke smell the numbers reflected proportionally so. I would do experiments like vacuuming and seeing what showed up. Cooking with smoke being generated, the numbers would grow.
Mine has some VOC mode too, when I took the thing to the gas station that number went way up which was pretty illuminating how much VOCs we breathe in at the pump.
Another angle to the experimentation was with and without the HEPA filter being ran. When smoke would infiltrate the indoor numbers would be like 10 or 12. Run the HEPA for say 20 min the numbers get down to 2 or 3. To me that thing was doing what I expected and served us well in the wildfires.
Some AQI measures are not realtime. You were probably looking at a 24-hour average like airnow.gov or something (as opposed to something like PurpleAir which is realtime)
Well, it's probably an outlier on the general trend on a ten-year timescale, most climate stories on a regional basis seem to fall into that category. Of course, ten years from now we'll have something worse... But that's not something we can really control, any action we take on climate even the most drastic won't have any real effect for about 30-70 years at least.
Sci-fi interpretation: Humans are a highly aggressive species derived from predatory apes, given to unpredictable violence, not very capable of long-term planning. Quarantined by alien civilizations for that reason.
> But that's not something we can really control, any action we take on climate even the most drastic won't have any real effect for about 30-70 years at least.
That is the wrong way to think about it. Any action we take now is affecting all future years. Replacing fossil fuels with renewables not only reduces carbon emissions this year but also over all the next years. Additionally, taking action now tips the economies of scales further. Renewables come cheaper, fossil investment unattractive.
Thus I think the best way to face the looming catastrophy is to act more decisively and invest much more heavily now.
This is the thickest, longest lasting, and furthest traveling wild fire smoke I've ever experienced. I Left the windows open to sleep and I woke up with a voice two octaves lower.
To my research, SF AQI has never topped 249. New York just topped out at 342 today with no sign of letting up. I won't dispute that SF wildfire season being so frequent and long lasting, there's been nasty periods, but no it's factually incorrect that SF has ever been at one time worse than what's happening in NYC right now.
I'll admit - looked at the New York ones for today after making this comment and it looked higher than I had seen in SF. I was basing on what I had seen on purpleair yesterday.
e: Although I do remember a few days where I believe it might have broke 300 on purpleair
Here's the data for the Bay Area from 2020 - which was considered a particularly bad year for wildfire smoke, and is also the most recent year it's caused particular problems here. Peak levels were only around 200, although it was admittedly somewhat prolonged: https://www.baaqmd.gov/about-air-quality/current-air-quality...
I think this is maybe not directly comparable with purple air, was able to find old chat messages I had sent showing that the AQI in my neighborhood in SF was upwards of 300 on September 11th, 2020
I believe we started suffering a long streak back in 2017 where it was back to back years of suffering. Last year we got off easy because we got hit by some lucky rains that put an end to things. Still gotta get through this summer and see how things go.
You can also see the haze on Zoom Earth [1] with a hourly timelapse. There seems to be an especially large cloud of it hovering off of the East Coast of the US and Canada
With this wider perspective you can see the very wide range of fires producing smoke. A lot is getting funneled to the Northeast US but it looks like some of it is even getting funneled into the midwest on the other side of the weather system.
It's pretty wild here in CT. Thick, acrid air. I suppose Californians have been dealing with this for a while, but I haven't experienced it in my life up here.
Not just California, the entire west coast. Seattle's season breakdown has "smoke" slotted neatly between two chunks of "summer", typically lasting from late June/early July to late August/early September.
And the northern Rockies, including parts of Alberta and Saskatchewan. While there are occasionally local fires, they are never as bad as the smoke from California.
God, 2020 was absolutely horrendous for smoke. Also, it was definitely noticeably smoky during the "heat dome" in 2021, which just made the whole situation that much worse.
I was just on a call with someone in NY and they had to end the call early because their eyes were burning and they were having trouble breathing. It looked really bad.
I was curious and just checked the NYC AQI. It's 324 right now, which is classified as "hazardous". Wow.
That would definitely suck. Here on the other side of the country, in the Puget Sound area, we get some bad days of wildfire smoke every year, but I don't think I've ever seen it that high. The highest I recall is around 250.
A good HEPA filter can really help. I use an older version of this [1]. It can generally keep my living room AQI below 10ish. I read that the Whirlpool brand name was sold off to some generic oversees appliance maker several years ago, so I don't know if that one on Amazon is as effective as my 20+ year old one.
Back in 2020, the AQI at my house in the SF Bay Area hit 800. (I was directly downwind from the CZU Lightning Complex fire.) To say that was bad was an understatement.
I had to seal up every door and window to my house with plastic, then put three 1200 sq. ft. rated HEPA filters in a single bedroom to get the air quality in that one room down to livable.
That's also when I discovered the real difference between an N95 mask and a N100 respirator.
Holy crap. Today I watched it go from 200 to 400 in the space of an hour and the difference was so much more than I ever would have expected just from doubling, 200 was an inconvenience but 400 was a real yikes. I can't even imagine what 800 must have been like.
It's an odd shade of yellow outside and it smells like you are inside a wood smoker. I have my air filters running almost full blast and it only helps a little bit; still way above "normal". I'm coughing a little bit as well. Overall, less than ideal! I will not be going for a walk this evening.
I don't have one personally but I did some research into their hardware when making a DIY clone a few years ago: https://github.com/shanet/clearair
The EPA published a paper calibrating the sensors PurpleAir uses with their much more expensive sensors and found it was fairly close after applying a correction factor (which I also used in my implementation). https://github.com/shanet/ClearAir/blob/master/docs/PurpleAi...
I don't see why not as long as the Adafruit libraries I used still work on it (or you swap them out with something else). Overall it's a pretty simple project that just reads values from sensors and prints their values over a TCP socket so I'd imagine getting it to run on a different platform than I used would be fairly straightforward.
Yes, I keep mine indoors so I made a small wooden box with a cutout on top covered with a piece of window screen material to allow for airflow inside. I figured I'd leave the enclosure as an exercise for the reader since you'd likely have a different preference for it than I did.
Yes! I was going to post PurpleAir for all you east coast wildfire newbies. It has been an essential resource in CA for the last few years.
I recommend limiting time outside as much as possible when the levels are high, like over 100. You might not notice it at first, but over time it can start to make you feel pretty bad--coughing, itchy eyes, fatigue, etc. Especially avoid doing any kind of vigorous exercise like running or cycling that makes you breathe hard. I learned that the hard way.
Also, if it's anything like smoke season in CA, air filters are probably back-ordered and sold out at stores, but I recommend getting at least one so you have it for next time. They are so worth the cost. We have one for each room in our home, but we have a young child so we go a bit overboard.
We maintain an open source, open hardware air quality monitor project that is quite popular. We also sell these monitors as easy to assemble kits.
One of the monitors is an outdoor monitor similar to the Purple Air that uses dual PM sensors for enhanced accuracy. You can find more information of the kits here [1] and the built instructions including files for schematics, enclosure here [2].
when this stuff hit hard in seattle 2 years ago I had a bunch of air particulate sensors and arduinos for covid research projects.
Other than telling you not to cook inside and not to open the windows they didn't say much. AQI inside didn't change much with ac on or off... or when I quickly went outside.
The purples were usually good but also not way off in a few cases. I drove to one that had crazy high readings and it was actually the lowest reading I found on 2 different devices.
Basically all the monitor is going to have you do is fret. Like watching pandemic case load statuses. Take a bunch of anti-histamines, don't go outside, drink water, wear a respirator. Run in house hepas if you have em. Hope/cross fingers/pray for rain.
Spend your money on a real respirator or filter. Work from the office, they yusuallly have good filters.
Oh, just relax, it'll eventually blow away as winter sets in. And in about 5-10 years, another episode like this, maybe on top of a severe drought, will occur. It'll be a bit worse than this one. And so on.
Humans are just a step up from chimpanzees, and long-term planning doesn't seem to be what evolution has selected for.
The largest fire in the history of the province (since colonization) is still actively burning in Nova Scotia, despite six consecutive days of rain. June 1st was also the 26th hottest day since 1871.
When it dipped down into Minnesota, I went out for a walk. The smoke was so thick. I could’ve swore there had to have been a house fire, a block or two away.
On some streets, I couldn’t see the end of the street it was so smoky.
I would like someone to explain to a dummy like me how Canada has better air quality than the NYC metropolitan area as measured by numerous ground stations considering that the wildfires are supposed to originate in Canada. Why aren't we seeing hazardous air quality at the US-Canadian border? NYC is hit way harder than upstate NY.
Just the wind patterns. And where the bulk of the fires are. They're mostly in Northern Quebec, so fairly far east, and the smoke seems to be pushing south from there down over Ottawa and then the eastern half of New York and kind of pooling further south.
Just got home to southern Ontario from a work trip (in South Dakota, where there was no smoke at all) and I was expecting it to be pretty bad, but it really isn't (though I won't be exerting myself outside or anything). It's sitting mostly east of here, so far.
Rain coming next week, that should relieve things.
I own forest land in the PNW, and my wife and I have placed around 15 acres of oak woodland into conservation over the past 5 years, which involved a lot of restoration work which was funded both by ourselves and with grant money through NRCS.
One of the reasons we decided to buy land in the first place was because of Climate Change, and a desire to get hands on in doing something – even if at a small scale. We've learned a lot in the process – there's no substitute for 'doing'.
I'm chiming in because I feel like this experience has given me a fairly deep perspective on the matter. Fire prevention is on the minds of everyone. Even the most conservative farmers I know are in their own way environmentalists. That's the interesting thing about getting out into the country and off the internet is that you meet a lot of people, and you find common interests – even if you disagree on a lot of stuff.
The issue is, this stuff is expensive. You can mow, do manual limbing of trees to prevent 'ladder fires', you can get goats, you can try converting over to ecosystems that are more fire resilient, create smarter development plans and keep structures 100' away from dry woodland, etc.
But all of that costs time and money. There are grants, yes, but even that isn't available to everyone, and even that takes time.
Because the Climate is become more chaotic, you end up with intense rain fall in the cooler months, leading to explosive growth of brush that is dry fuel/tinder by the end of the long hot summers. And because of the way communities are being planned and developed – closer and deeper into the wild/urban interface – fires become more 'destructive' in terms of property and loss of life.
Climate change is a systemic problem. There's no one thing you can point to and say, change this and it will fix the problem. Except maybe drastically reducing the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.
Lastly, I'm a huge fan of controlled burns. But they're not without risk, and the liability of conducting them is largely than the people seem to realize. We had an agricultural burn set of a tree 30' away during a rainstorm, in the deepest part of burn season, during extremely high humidity. Why? Because the summer had been freakishly hot. According to the fire department, it was a happening a lot. It's getting harder and harder to safely use fire as a preventative measure in a lot of areas.
Anyway, just some perspective from someone who's actually been living this.
controlled burns are fascinating, especially considering how rooted (hehe) in indigenous culture they are. do you have any formulas for deciding when and how to do so?
There's designated months of the year when burns are allowed, but something like a forestry controlled burn is the kind of thing that would be done in collaboration with local forest service / fire departments / etc. Smaller burns are more at the discretion of the landowner, and things like agricultural burns are pretty common during the wet months in the Pacific Northwest. People build piles, let them dry out, and wait until a designated burn day. We haven't done anything on the scale of letting a whole field or forest floor burn deliberately – far too much liability and overhead. If you could get it to a state where it could be done regularly, I think it'd be ideal. But, as things are now, there's just too much that can go wrong, and so that's a big part of the situation we're all in now.
I'm in NYC. The sky was a deep orange in the afternoon and you could easily look directly at the midday sun without discomfort. There is a visible haze indoors looking down a long hallway.
It’s hazy here in Virginia as well, but nothing like NY. Every few years, the Great Dismal Swamp catches on fire (a bit south of here) and the peat moss smoldering creates the most acrid, thick smoke in the area.
It's currently nighttime over the US, but the image is showing it's very clear. If I rewind time to yesterday afternoon it shows the haze. What's different about night?
I'm in CT. I did not mask much during COVID, but I am masking now. It is absolutely awful outdoors. Visible smoke and a smell. AQI is currently a very unhealthy 250.
Makes sense. I'm significantly west of Boston (all the way west in CT) and the smoke stream seems to be coming straight down and then moving easterly, just missing Boston to the south. https://ibb.co/Y80z0jf On Google maps you can click on map details and choose to view air quality overlaid.
Of course it's not the biggest loss here but it's striking that there's talk of canceling the a Canadian Formula 1 Grands Prix in Montreal due to the fires. This would be the second race since the beginning of the season canceled due to climate emergencies.
This is the Nullschool Earth Weather Visualiser showing fire activity and PM2.5 particulates (smoke) about 24 hours ago, showing the plume approaching NYC from the north.
> How come all these fires started at the same time
Waves of wildfires starting in the same day can happen by natural causes like a dry storm, but are also a typical signature in wildfires linked to criminal activity. Example: 121 provoked wildfires in the same night and council in North Spain March 2023, a few days after the police stopped a narco operation.
There are some suspicious trends, there is a wave of fires aiming to overpower the firefigthers capability to react. Often at night or weekends. The first spots burnt are often delimited by administrative frontiers, the string of fires follow a road, and fires extinguished reactivate often in the next nights.
The fire starts first on internet. Wildfires are also typically coupled with cyberwarfare mocking environmentalism and scientific facts on social webs and journals.
The criminal thinks that is a hero or adopts a role of victim. There is a lot of self-justifying and blame deflection towards other targetted groups.
At least in Southern Europe this is a reaally common pattern. Your mileage may vary.
Something interesting I noticed when we had extremely dry days in my area (fairly warm, too, but the really noteworthy part was the utter lack of humidity) was that fires sprang up seeming randomly all around the area. Started seeing conspiracy theories of arsonists going around lighting things on fire. I gather that there are many triggers for fires which normally don't get enough traction to take off.
Yep, almost certainly this. The same thing has been happening every year out west. It sometimes takes a day or more for lightning-caused fires to grow to a size that they can be detected via satellite.
I don't see how one could reasonably say a thing that has happened before and a thing that hasn't happened before are equally plausible explanations for a thing that is currently happening.
I don't know about in the US, but in Canada in recent weeks there have been conspiracy theories floating around that the wildfires in Alberta were started by The Libs™ in order to make the provincial Conservative government look bad in the lead-up to an election.
So, uh, keep in mind that some commenters might be Just Asking Questions.
I don't wanna be too cynical but I did look at the accounts of the two people in this thread who seem to find the idea plausible and found...pretty much exactly what I expected to find. So, yeah, I agree with you, lotta JAQing off.
The kids throwing soup at paintings already committed crimes attacking oil infrastructure and shutting down certain oil infrastructures (pipelines etc) that got them precisely no attention. You only know them from the soup can shit, which proves their whole point.
After sunrise PIG[1] as temperature raises and humidity falls goes up. If there are conditions for fire PIG will nicely synchronize it so it will go up almost instantly.
I'm asking this honestly and in good faith: When do we start demanding SO2 injection? How much more of this are we going to try to brush off before we decide it's unacceptable?
2) While imperfect, there is some historical record of how this process plays out via volcanic eruptions
3) SAI is never going to perfectly solve all problems associated with carbon pollution. But it doesn't need to be perfect-- just better than the alternative.
I don't really doubt the technical side, but what do you think will happen when a country proposes SO2 injection? It's a global solution to a set of localized issues that not all countries face, there will certainly be objection from countries who think their atmosphere, climate, agriculture will be negatively affected. You can point to North American forests and say "look! we must solve this!" and other nations would rightly point out that poor forestry practices contributed to the issue, and that historically much of that forest land would have burned with regularity without humanity's help.
I don't see how you could form consensus behind this approach. The alternative is world war.
I'm not sure I subscribe to this argument given that countries are already polluting massive amounts of CO2 (and SO2, until about five years ago), and nobody seems to be going to war over it. There are massive issues of equity wrapped up in maintaining the status quo as well as trying something different.
I would also point out that megafires are not the only symptom. Drought, floods, heat waves, hurricanes, and sea level rise are all driven by a warming planet. Surely there is a break even point where it's worth taking on additional risk in order to mitigate some of these problems.
Getting back to my original question: Where is that break-even? Maybe there simply isn't one, and we'd rather collectively go down with the ship.
Never. SO2 is an environmental pollutant, is a major cause of acid rain, and is toxic for human, animal, and plant health. You don't mention the problems that this might solve (less incoming solar radiation, maybe?), but purposeful exposure to sulfur dioxide is much worse.
That's why the proposals are to put it in the stratosphere, and one of the big benefits of SO2 versus other chemicals is the planet naturally does the same thing during big eruptions; we thus have some significant experimental evidence on how it degrades and affects ecosystems.
The amounts of *stratospheric* SO₂ aerosols needed to alter the climate are a very small fraction of extant *tropospheric* SO₂ pollution. None of those effects would be significant.
Weighing all things, though, is it worse? Would an increase in acid raid outweigh the myriad health concerns over wildfire smoke?
I'd rather not pollute the atmosphere on purpose, but I find that there's a moral hazard in not considering all possible mitigation strategies. Keeping in mind that those of us posting on Hackernews are among the least affected and least vulnerable people on the planet.
Every single year we have severe wikdfire smoke in Montana (and much of the mountain west) from August to September and sometimes into October. Never mentioned in national media.
But when the same thing happens in NYC we have screaming headlines about how terrible the air quality is.
Maybe it’s because this being unheard of in NYC is literally what makes it happening newsworthy?
California has wildfires literally every year but they still make the news when they’re particularly damaging and record breaking. Fires have never impacted NYC to this extent in living memory - it’s deeply unusual for the region and inherently newsworthy.
It's also the media centre of the United States (and, again, arguably the world).
The Mid-Atlantic states (NY NJ PA DE MD DC VA WV) is home to 60 million people. Events there affect 20% of the population of the United States.
Montana is a beautiful state. But just 1.1 million people live there. The largest city, Billings, ranks 243 in the US (between Lakeland, FL, and Ann Arbor, MI and just ahead of Fairfield and Berkeley in California).
The smallest borough of New York City is Staten Island with a population of 495,747, or nearly 5 times that of Billings, MT. The total population of the City of New York is 8.8 million, and of the New York Metropolitan Statistical Area is 20.1 million. That's more the entire states of Wyoming, Alaska, North & South Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Nebraska, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah combined (19.6 million).
There are billions of people worldwide who are directly connected to New York City and New York State through personal links and association.
New York also dominates both state and city mentions in Hacker News stories reaching the front page, though much of that is by mentions of the New York Times. (I've been doing analysis of HN front page story characteristics.)
To anyone who is experiencing this for the first time, some tips I've found useful:
1) Even if it seems counterintuitive, try not to move air. Don't run fans or open windows. Do run filtration systems, but preferably interior ones. Even exhausting outside will draw new air (and particles) inside. Keep doors and windows closed as much as possible.
2) Run humidifiers if you have them. If you don't, and you just desperately need relief, close the bathroom door and run the shower hot for 10-15 minutes (i.e. make a steam room). That usually helps my sinuses and eyes quite a bit. You can also try breathing through a warm damp rag, although that gets pretty old pretty quickly.
3) No science behind it that I'm aware of, but I find that carrot juice really helps my throat when it's sore.
4) Be sure to try and enjoy at least one sunset. They will be glorious.
Yeah, #1 definitely, also just skip outdoor exercise this week.
You can build a cheap but effective filter with a box fan, duct tape and a furnace filter.
You can do the same with regular air filters for your HVAC. Buy 4 that are square, the size of the box fan. Put the 4 filters on end into a box. Put it on the floor or cardboard bottom. Place the fan on top blowing into the box. Obviously, duct tape the filters where they meet to keep the box from collapsing.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/home/how-to-make-a-box-fan-air...
The only catch there might be is actually being able to find a furnace filter on store shelves during these AQI disasters. They have a tendency to quickly vanish much like toilet paper during the beginning of covid or A/C units during heatwaves.
Ait is bad enough, skipping indoor exercise is probably best unless running a quality air filter.
My learning of that was after taking days and once weeks to recover from smoke exposure. I don't think the gravity of how bad it is really sinks in until the super long recovery is observed
I tried this once but the fan didn't seem like it was capable of pushing sufficient air through the filter to do anything. I remember I looked up a bunch of articles on this to make sure I was getting the right kind of filter, and it still didn't work well.
Most box fans will struggle with a single filter right up against them. The blade design on a typical box fan is designed for velocity, not pressure. Also, I don't know the physics as to why, but you want to be pulling air through the filter rather than pushing. It's why car radiators have the fan on the engine side.
The best setup is to use multiple filters arranged in a box shape, since more filter surface area = less restriction on air flow.
There's some great examples here:
https://cleanaircrew.org/box-fan-filters/
When you are pushing air, you are building a high pressure zone. When you are pulling, you make a low pressure zone.
As the pressure in front of the fan builds up, it starts to push back against the blades of the fan until it reaches an equilibrium.
> Also, I don't know the physics as to why, but you want to be pulling air through the filter rather than pushing
I guess pulling seals the gap between the fan and the filter and pushing only widens it.
The primitive "filter taped to box fan" model worked fine for me in Portland during the massive fires of 2020. Maybe not the greatest thing for the fan, but my indoor AQI sensor would go from reading like 250+ to under 100 pretty quickly. And of course, the filters basically turned black in a short period of time.
> pushing sufficient air through the filter to do anything
Sounds like you built it wrong, it's supposed to pull air through filters, not push it.
You can get woodworking Masks for outside if it gets bad. Humidity is a tricky one - because we sealed our house for over a week last year it actually got way too humid.
Some people may even still have a collection of N95 masks to wear from the last calmity.
Who bought a collection of N95 masks just for the Vision Pro launch?
I picked up a whole mess of them when everyone in my deep blue area stopped masking. They were deeply marked down. I can’t be the only one looking ahead like this. They’re great for home improvement projects, risky environments, and days like this.
buy a real respirator for next time. They're normally cheap and so so much more effective. bonus you can spray paint or resin print with them.
Be careful, for smoke you want a N99. A N95 will help, but don't be fooled that it is adequate protection.
If you really need air, which I found was basically necessary on hot smoky days without AC, I put a MERV 13 20x20x4" HVAC filter in my window and drew air through it with a box fan. This took out most of the small particles (verified with air quality monitors) and cooled off the inside of the house.
You can still seal your house and control humidity... humidifier dehumidifier pid.
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Carrot juice is a good idea. Antioxidants help. I’ve found NAC and vitamin c help. After a few days an anti-inflammatory will help.
And don’t exercise at all. If you’re head hurts and your heart starts racing just lay in bed and wait it out.
Fun and related project. The GOES satellites broadcast a signal at around 1.6GHZ that you can pick up and decode, giving you live images (albeit slightly less resolution than the pro-level GRB broadcast), without using the Internet!
It's a great beginner hobby project requiring ~100-200 dollars of hardware. There's also a large community of enthusiasts and it also opens up a gateway into RF hobby, other RTL-SDR things, ham radio, and other fun engineering time sinks that really helped pass the time during the Pandemic years.
I wrote a small writeup on how to get started a while ago: https://gist.github.com/lxe/c1756ca659c3b78414149a3ea723eae2
1.6GHz huh. Isnt half the entire Secret of Skinwalker Ranch show based on that exact frequency "mysterious signals at 1.6GHz" and everytime they see that spike a UAP appears? That's be pretty funny if its GOES bc the government hired travis to lead their secret UAP investigation program after he asked the pentagon if there were any known programs using this range.
I've had conversations with people blitz'd out their mind that where more coherent, intellectual, and factual than what's on History channel these days.
Technically it's closer to 1.7GHz, but most Geostationary birds transmitting on L band are slightly below that. GOES is at 1.68GHz (roughly) while Polar orbiting satellites (think NOAA 15-19) are just above 1.7GHz.
thinking on this a bit more I suspect they would have been seeing iridium flares. that network operates from 1610-1626.5MHz and iridium flares are quite visually spectacular.
We really have to get back on track with controlled burns after the environmentalist 'save all trees' experiment that started in the 1960's has put us in the position we are in now.
Canada used to have many controlled burns throughout last century until the last quarter - Nova Scotia is a typical example (1979 paper):
https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/abs/10.1139/x79-031
California is dangerously behind on forestry and therefore fire management compared to earlier decades. Fuel has to be removed or fire and smoke will cause massive damage and have a very serious psychological and economic impact.
Native Americans conducted controlled burns for thousands of years until they started getting shot by forestry rangers a hundred years ago.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/3/new-california-law-...
There are no saw mills left in Northern California and strict rules about not cutting trees down. Wood is imported from Canada at massive expense, driving up the cost of housing. we seem to have lost the plot a bit here.
The problem is that Canada is covered in peatlands. Once they dry out, controlled burns can ignite peat several meters deep and release one of the biggest carbon stores on the planet.
See what happened with the Russian wildfires in 2010 [1] - this is a consequence of climate change and unfortunately many of the old fire prevention strategies won't work with Canadian peatland drying out.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Russian_wildfires
Won't that happen whether or not these fires are controlled or uncontrolled, at this point?
Yes but the point of controlled burns in California (for example) is that they eliminate fuel as the ecosystem gets drier. In peatlands, controlled burns instead make more fuel available by drying out the peat, causing a death spiral.
So, what do you do?
In Canada?
Invest in indoor hockey rinks.
Fire breaks to stop fire before it gets too big?
Do nothing and push the problem to the next generation. I may be dead before I'll need to worry about it.
How much you want to spend?
Yep.
> Native Americans conducted controlled burns for thousands of years until they started getting shot by forestry rangers a hundred years ago.
I've been thinking about this lately. My wife and I were reading about a study of an old growth oak - hickory forest in the eastern US which without human intervention is slowly transitioning to maple - beach forests. Presumably this is because it is no longer experiencing the burns it would have historically.
This transition is generally considered problematic since oak hickory forests supposedly support more biodiversity (and conveniently more profitable timber harvests).
But this all raises the question for me - how did this all work before any human intervention?
What's the natural rate of forest fires? We have species (such as giant sequoia) that seem to require fires, so they must have happened, but they must have been quite rare. Would there have been a truely horrible fire caused by lightning every 1000 years? Or perhaps would the megafauna that went extinct around the time native Americans arrived have played a similar role in clearing out underbrush while foraging?
Does anyone know of studies on this?
In the arid American West, at least, lightning caused fires are extremely common. Historically these forests were significantly less dense than they are after 100 years of human fire suppression, which meant less available fuel, and slower burning, “cooler” fires typically.
Here’s an article that talks about a few papers and some research as this relates to Arizona forests: https://azdailysun.com/news/local/setting-the-record-of-ariz...
I'm on my cell so im not going to be a good help with info on this, but lighting induced fires are actually very common. So you're not talking every 1000 years, but closer to 10 or so. This leads to a much more patchwork design in the forests that leads to natural fire breaks.
How could that explain places where lightening never or rarely occurs (coastal California)? I can’t think of any lightning sparked fires until a year or two ago. (Inland areas and the sierras obviously do get more lightening.)
In the northeast / midwest / great lakes basin, mastodons definitely helped clear underbrush, from what I've read. Not sure how common they were through the eastern woodlands, but they were definitely here (and likely hunted to extinction). You can see plants that have historical adaptation to their form of browsing; black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) has spikes along its younger, more tender branches that don't effectively deter deer but would be nasty on a trunk, for example.
First nations here also did controlled burns to open cultivation for maize agriculture and to encourage open grazing areas for deer.
Regardless, the forests that are burning in this case causing smoke in the northeast are quite far north, in Northern Quebec mostly, in what is boreal forest; pine & spruce mainly, on thin granite soils (Canadian shield).
I know that human expansion has decreased the number of large predators, which has increased the number of dear, who eat more young trees. If they have a preference for one type of tree over another that will certainly change the composition of the forest.
Certain areas burn with differing frequencies (naturally).
Eg, coast range burns every few centuries while cascades and sierras it is more like every other year.
Sorry for no references, so please have a large grain of salt with those stated frequencies. IIRC those are the tight order of magnitude. Though, we are also talking much smaller fires compared to the mega blades we see today that kills everything rather than rejuvenates. These fires today burn everything and down to 4 feet under the soil. It's a different beast.
Isn't like 99% of old growth forest in the eastern USA pretty much chopped down? I wouldn't think the trees now are much more than 30-50 years old.
I think population growth is the main factor for why prescribed burns of forests have dwindled. We have cities and towns that have expanded into forests and high-risk fire areas. Maybe we shouldn't have ever allowed this, but it happened, and now we're stuck with it (good luck getting people to move out).
> Maybe we shouldn't have ever allowed this, but it happened, and now we're stuck with it (good luck getting people to move out).
They will move out when they can’t insure their properties anymore. [1] Note the refusal to cover properties isn’t a blanket withdrawal; I got a call from State Farm just last week - but I live in a major metro.
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/california-insurance-mar...
I mean that's only happening because California made it illegal to charge the real risk adjusted price for insurance. The companies weren't going to start losing money on every home in CA so they are leaving.
I think there was another HN thread the other day saying this is how CA can depopulate the risk-prone regions - CA refuses real risk pricing yet carriers refuse uncovered risk, so high risk areas become depopulated as they can't be insured, and thus, not in compliance with loan requirements.
Once this is accomplished (as ugly as it might be for the residents) then you can possibly do some forest management and fire control.
This same thing is playing out in FL, but over there the insurance commission isn't as stringent so insurers are just flat out not paying claims.
How does that actually get people to stop living there?
Suppose you can't get insurance and you can't get a mortgage without insurance. The house still exists. Its value will crash. But having crashed, now someone can afford to buy it without a loan. Meanwhile there is still a massive housing shortage, so somebody will.
And that's the thing that caused this, and the only way out of it. You have to build enough housing in the areas that aren't in the direct path of wildfires that nobody is being forced by those high prices into the housing that is.
A house without any neighbors, in a bankrupt city or unincorporated area that's also a food desert sounds like a non-starter to 99% of the people on the plant.
Meanwhile CA also recently revamped how local regulators are allowed to regulate things like more duplexes and multiplexes in all residential areas.
But the neighboring houses are still there too, and as long as people live there, so will there be grocery stores etc.
> California made it illegal to charge the real risk adjusted price for insurance
I'd like to know more about this. Do you have a reference?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_California_Proposition_...
California is a great example of direct democracy being a terrible idea in most cases.
No, it’s a great example of demographics is destiny. It’s filled with old rich people who struck gold (prop 13, tech, show biz etc..).
But also the most beautiful state, if you get off on that sort of thing.
California is a great example of being terrible in most cases.
That may be true in California. In northern Canada there are very few populated places, I believe these are mostly in complete wilderness
Environmental fashion became obsessed with trees as 'the lungs of the planet' despite ocean phytoplankton processing most of the air we breath.
We have been conditioned to believe humans are destroying the fragile planet but ironically the reality is that we are increasingly irresponsible stewards of it, flying in the face of thousands of years of evidence.
> ocean phytoplankton processing most of the air we breath.
This is not true.
Ocean photosynthesis produces about 50% of the oxygen in the atmosphere, but ocean respiration also consumes about the same amount. The oceans are about oxygen neutral. Same goes for the other 50%, but in land ecosystems.
https://theconversation.com/humans-will-always-have-oxygen-t...
https://www.nationalgeographic.org/activity/save-the-plankto...
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/ocean-oxygen.html
'Phytoplankton are responsible for most of the transfer of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to the ocean. Carbon dioxide is consumed during photosynthesis, and the carbon is incorporated in the phytoplankton, just as carbon is stored in the wood and leaves of a tree'.
The air we breathe is processed by Phytoplankton
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Phytoplankton#:~:....
We're killing the phytoplankton too.
https://medium.com/climate-conscious/how-the-loss-of-phytopl...
Well, that plancton will die off, when the oceans get accidic.. so it will be the trees only in the long run.
A higher percentage of the global population lives in urban areas than pretty much any time before. Population growth isn't causing sprawl.
It is in the US, where the "urban" label is applied to suburban and exurban places.
It's not really population pressure causing that though, at least not exclusively. It's a relatively small number of people that think they want a particular sort of lifestyle. Net migration patterns more or less have people moving out of low population counties and into high population counties.
My understanding is that this isn't due to a lack of controlled burns but actually due to an unseasonally warm winter not killing bugs that attack and kill trees, leaving an excessive amount of dead wood to burn this year. No amount of controlled burning of the years before would prevent a lot of dead trees this year making for kindling.
It's everything. Natives used to practice controlled burns to sustain habitability. Observe parallels to three sisters agriculture. Then as their populations were eradicated these methods were lost.
Indeed. Though modern fire suppression is a huge factor. AFAIK fire suppression became industrialized following world war II (bomber type planes able to deploy large amounts of water, better radios and respirators). Even today, the mandate for fire suppression (in at least WA state) is all fires are to be put out within 24 hours. There are a few "let it burn" examples I'm aware of in CA
burning woodland has happened all over the world for centuries. It’s not a mystical skill or anything
Surprised this point wasn't higher up. I'm starting to see this everywhere, dry grass, yellow leaves, dead trees. Growing up in Ireland I never saw anything but green but it's become visibly more lifeless year on year since around 2017.
You’ve had warm winters every year since 2017 in Ireland? What about El Nina and the usual trends?
Yes, every year since 2016 has been above average and the average temperature has increased with every decade since the 1850s.
Specific to Atlantic Canada, there is a lot of felled trees turning to kindling after Hurricane Fiona last September.
I know that's an issue along the continental divide, where the Pine Bark beetle is wrecking the forests (and the absence of sustained temperatures below -20F that kill off the beetle). Is that an issue in California?
What's the shelf life on DDT? Half joking.
There’s actually stuff being done about preventing Wildfires in the US, controlled burns being of these things, creating “fuel breaks” (gaps that prevent fire from progressing) is another, and there’s a LOT more. But a lot of time that’s not enough and the reason for that is like with every other government effort - bureaucracy and endless paperwork. It can take months before a project can even start because the forest management has to compile all the necessary paperwork. But they are really passionate about doing this to prevent as many wildfires as possible.
Source: I currently work for a startup that makes software that shortens the time necessary to prepare this paperwork which potentially could cut the time it takes in half or more.
fascinating. what about the paperwork makes it take so long? is it the coordination between all the relevant agencies and landowners?
You have to gather a lot of information and answer dozens of questions before you start a project. In the planning phase you have to do scoping, make a public notice, consult the local communities, take wildlife, insects, wetlands, native tribes and many more things into account (which require gathering all sorts of data from national databases). There are multiple people inside a National Forest’s office that are working on all this.
Then the other hard part is gathering all this data from all the people in one place and writing documents that will be published or submitted to various government agencies. This process is at the moment manual and extremely time consuming (because it’s basically an email back and forth that can take weeks or months). And that’s only the planning phase.
The app I’m working on tries to automate as much as possible both the data gathering part and the document preparation part, letting multiple people collaborate together to create necessary paperwork. This drastically cuts on the time needed to complete the planning phase and thus lets them do more projects in the same amount of time.
This is hearsay, but folks in Colorado tend to complain about federal air quality guidelines prohibiting controlled burns during the times of the year that it makes sense to do a controlled burn. During the winter, air quality guidelines dictate you can't exceed a certain amount of wood smoke in an area for example. NEPA studies might be another.
the fact that if you do a controlled burn badly, it's a forest fire that kills people and does 10s of millions in property damage
that doesn't explain why the paperwork takes so long at all.
"no saw mills left in Northern California" - eh? This is just one company's sawmills (they are hiring): https://www.spi-ind.com/Operations/SawmillOperations
Yeah, and there are lots of smaller ones. Some in Santa Cruz (Big Creek) and Sonoma (Cazadero). It's nice be able to get local lumber and the pricing is often better.
Part of the problem is that people built next to the logging areas since they're so quiet and pretty with relatively good roads. That really makes it hard to do controlled burns. And people moved there for the trees so they don't want you to cut them down.
I don't know what that poster was talking about either. Even if CA were to outlaw lumber milling in the north of the state, the rest of the PNW produces enough for the continent already. There's plenty of wood in the deep blue queer tree-hugging west coast. The USA is a huge exporter of the crop, actually.
> the deep blue queer tree-hugging west coast.
I take it you haven't spent much time out in the sticks of Oregon or Washington.
That's true about Oregon and Washington but NOT California. It's also why you don't see wildfires to nearly the same extent in the Northeast or South - we cut our trees.
All three have different topography and climates from the NE or the South. I don't understand why people think what works in one type of forest will just work in another. The trees are different, the climate is different, the weather is different.
There have been big fires in Oregon and Washington in recent years as well, not just in California. And the Tillamook Burn was big, but that was a long time ago.
The reason you don't see wildfires is because its like 1000% times wetter east of the Mississippi.
THE IMPACT OF CALIFORNIA’S CHANGING
ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATIONS ON
TIMBER HARVEST PLANNING COSTS
(2005)
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
Sierra is processing imported lumber mostly
https://www.spi-ind.com/OurForests/ForestManagement#:~:text=....
I'd be interested to see the data re: "processing imported lumber mostly". Statewide back in 2016, California timber harvest was 1,572 MMBF; wood processing facilities received 1,483 MMBF; 11.5 MMBF flowed into California from other states; 99.7 MMBF flowed out of California for processing out of state or export according to https://www.bber.umt.edu/pubs/forest/fidacs/CA2016%20Fact%20...
It's amazing the things people believe with no evidence (and then get massive amounts of upvotes for!).
Look at a map of northern California and you see that the landscape is dominated by a checkerboard pattern of logging/no-logging (the most efficient way to maintain a forest and create firebreaks, even if that wasn't the original intent and people are trying their damndest to break the system).
https://eros.usgs.gov/media-gallery/earthshot/checkerboard-p...
https://www.truckeedonnerlandtrust.org/sierra-nevada-checker...
This is almost exactly backwards. "Controlled burns" are the workaround, not the solution. Timber land naturally burns regularly, but we started fighting those fires in the last century to protect the lumber industry. The problem then becomes, a few decades later, that you have a forest filled with dead branches and snags that would have burned, piecewise, over decades, but didn't. Now eventually something gets out of control and you have a fire anyway, except that now it's much (much) larger than it would have been naturally.
So the workaround becomes creating corridors of excess-fuel-free forest via "controlled burns". But that's not the fix! The problem was preexisting.
I know people in the Sierra foothills who used to work in the logging industry until the bureaucrats made it impossible. I also know people in the same area who are fire fighters. When loggers used to find diseased trees they would isolate them by felling all the surrounding trees so they wouldn't infect them and spread. This practice was outlawed by the academic bureaucrats and is one of the reasons for the subsequent severe spread of dying trees that are the large scale fire fuel we see today.
At this point in history there is illegal logging going on to create fire breaks around properties, such are the state restrictions on trees. We have lost sight of the forestry management practices that worked with nature, not against it.
Climate change has also caused the spread of bark beetles, killing forests in BC and Alberta.
And their provincial governments both cut the helicopter rapid attack crews in the last few years
Surely the much dryer/warmer weather due to climate change has something to do with it, no?
OP did not say that climate change was not a factor. Both of these are contributing factors.
I will second the point about lack of controlled burns and logging absolutely being a problem. Look at photos of western forests from the late 1800s and you'll see that we have far more trees now than a century ago. Here's an example of Yosemite valley: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/29/opinion/sunda.... A century of fire suppression and climate change have proved to be a dangerous combination. One of these is easier to correct though if we could get past the idea that every tree must be saved at all costs.
OP didn't even mention climate change in the post, and previously has explicitly denied that climate change is a problem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36166197
OP was just shifting the focus while blaming "environmentalists".
From the core assumption that there would be more dry days doesn’t change the fact that you will encounter more ferocious wildfires (actually if we had less dry days we would encounter even more ferocious wildfires because of less burns in general when you think about it).
Hotter climate is supposed to create more rain is it not?
The effects of climate change are different in different regions. And the types of weather patterns that deliver more precipitation to some regions could be quite different from what the local wildlife has adapted to.
California already has a pretty good prescribed burn program, but it needs to be expanded, in part because the climate is significantly different today than it was a hundred years ago. There are some obstacles to prescribed burns: smoke inhalation is a public health hazard, firefighters need to be paid, private landowners are worried about liability, etc. Perhaps the biggest issue is that most of California is federal land, and the U.S. Forest Service does not have funding to perform prescribed burns.
The private sector hasn't solved the problem either, in part because a lot of the fuel isn't desirable timber. Californians who are serious about this issue should lobby their federal and state representatives.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-023-05997-w
> Our results show that California and Oregon are the only severe-risk US states to conduct prescribed fire programs that are impactful at reducing wildfire risks, while other southeastern states such as Florida maintain fire-healthy ecosystems with very extensive prescribed fire programs. Our study suggests that states that have impactful prescribed fire programs (like California) should increase their scale of operation, while states that burn prescribed fires with no impact (like Nevada) should change the way prescribed burning is planned and conducted.
> California has historically resisted prescribed burning to control their already big smoke problem
> There are various reasons preventing California from conducting more Rx [prescribed burns], including lack of enough firefighters and 57% of land being owned by the Federal Government which lacks the funds to conduct Rx, especially after recent budget cuts to the U.S. Forest Service
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0451-7
> Academics warned that the financial incentives offered by mechanical thinning may be elusive, given the high ratio of thinning to merchantable timber in many locations. Legislative staff and analysts criticized the traditional forestry model of removing large-diameter, valuable trees and leaving smaller, less valuable and more flammable biomass.
There's one consideration missing from your list though, which is the fact that controlled burning is way more risky now than ever before, due to the immense fuel build up. The reduced frequency of controlled burns has contributed to making them much harder to implement. Hard to put the cat back in the bag at this point.
Almost all of California wildfire fuel is dense brush, not trees.
That dense brush, to people in forest management, is referred to as "fuel loading". It's like the tinder that you would use to start a larger bonfire.
The brush ends up being the thing that starts massive forest fires.
This is a seriously misinformed comment.
Total fire suppression dates to the early 20th century, not the 1960s. It was driven largely by the forest / wood products industry, not environmentalists. Formal adoption of "the 10 am rule" (all fires must be suppressed by 10 am the following morning) was in 1935. Formal adoption of prescribed burns by the USFS was in 1978.
<https://web.archive.org/web/20070810191055/http://www.nifc.g...>
California has had numerous controlled-burn projects for decades. They are limited in scope, and opposed, usually by local residents and businesses, for ... somewhat understandable reasons, though in the long run more-frequent controlled burns are better than the megafires of the past few decades.
Genocide of the indigenous North American population, especially in California, was transacted first by Spanish and Mexican missionaries, then by Americans, both private citizens and government agents (mostly military), and was largely completed by 1873.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_genocide>
The US Forest Service was not organised until 1905. Its antecedents date only as far back as 1875, after the dates given above for the California genocide.
Yes, controlled burns would help with some of California's wildfire issues, but evidence from elsewhere, including Canada and Siberia in which total fire suppression was never policy or effectively achieve, recent history suggests that megafires are not strictly dependent on overgrowth and fuel accumulation. Regions of California such as Santa Barbara experience recurring fires over the same terrain at intervals of a decade or two, suggesting that even short-term fuel-load accumulation is sufficient to give rise to huge and uncontrollable fires which intrude well into the urban region, and are not limited to remote bush or the urban-wildland interface. See particularly the 2017 Tubbs Fire which obliterated a Santa Rosa neighbourhood, and Thomas Fire, also 2017, which reached downtown Ventura.
This is literally not being able to see the wood for the tress.
Controlled burns won't fix the fact that the Sea Surface Temperature anomalies are in the region of 2C in some areas.
Or that the 2m Temp Anomalies are of the order of 6-10C across most of the US and large parts of Russia.
Neither of those is going to make future fires less likely, controlled or otherwise.
https://climatereanalyzer.org/wx/todays-weather/?var_id=ssta...
It is pretty scary to see how people are in denial in this thread. I would also prefer if there was an easy solution like controlled fires to this, but physics doesn't care what I prefer. We need to get global warming under control. There is simply no way around it.
It's environmentalists fault! (ignore how much we're overheating the planet)
There is no contradiction between the statements “global warming is a serious problem” and “preventing wildfires completely has some disadvantages vs. controlled burns”.
When people start talking about how much smarter "indigenous practices" were I can smell the own-the-libs bullshit even above the burning forests.
Prescribed burns aren't going to stop these forests from dying out over the next 50 years.
They aren't going to die out. Forested land is increasing and has since the 50's.
Source: https://www.fao.org/3/X4995e/X4995e.htm A snapshot of current conditions is as follows:
After two centuries of decline, the area of US forestland stabilized in about 1920 and has since increased slightly. The forest area of the US is about two-thirds what it was in 1600. The area consumed by wildfire each year has fallen 90 percent; it was between eight and twenty million hectares (20-50 million acres) in the early 1900s and is between one and two million hectares (2-5 million acres) today. Forest growth nationally has exceeded harvest since the 1940s. By 1997 forest growth exceeded harvest by 42 percent and the volume of forest growth was 380 percent greater than it had been in 1920.
It's not lumber farms that are dying
I've had four species in my bags on a lot of blocks.
Living in Australia through the 2019 bushfires (finished by 2 weeks of rain just as Covid19 incubated), I love the sweet sweet smell of a controlled burn that is reducing the load for that next dry summer.
The law of unintended consequences is called a law for a reason.
Opting to finger point and use misdirection to avoid the inescapable fact this is primarily the fault of the environmentalists paradoxically harms environmental causes even more.
> this is primarily the fault of the environmentalists
Congrats, you got your story that makes you feel good about your ideological beliefs
These are matters of fact.
Nobody wants to live in a toxic environment or leave one for their children. There might be disagreement about how to solve these problems and what those problems are, but you're conflating several things.
Whining and complaining like a petulant child because people disagree with your approach isn't going to help the environment at all. It does raise questions about the underlying motives and the legitimacy of solutions that can't stand up to the slightest bit of scrutiny.
[flagged]
But there is a lot wrong with blaming "preventing wildfires" on "those environmentalists" and making that the sole root cause of this problem, which it isn't too much at all. Contributing, but far from root cause.
Controlled burns btw also easier quickly said then done...
@ixgr Exactly. Thank you.
I mean it literally is their fault; kind of funny in a ironic way but mostly just sad.
Canada does lots of controlled burns.
The forests are on fire because it has barely rained in most parts of the country since April.
Yes and they cut the rapid attack helicopter crews in BC and Alberta. Also, the fires there started in a short window when vegetation hadn't started growing yet and there was old dry winter grass everywhere.
Agree with your points, though your premise is incorrect. Fire suppression started in the 30s [1] and became industrialized following WWII
[1] https://foresthistory.org/research-explore/us-forest-service...
Wasn't the environmentalists of the 60s but the environmentalists of the early 1900s (John Muir and ilk) who thought they knew better than the native peoples how to preserve the dignity and beauty of natural spaces. We're just now coming back around to acknowledging indigenous land practices that have been the standard on this continent for millenia.
Both environmentalists and early American naturalists have one common weak spot in their world view; they view humans as fundamentally distinct from nature. Nature is somehow both profane and awe inspiring compared to the "rational" human world. In that view, we need to preserve the wilderness (somewhere "out there") for aesthetic/spiritual/resource management reasons.
From the indigenous viewpoint, there is little distinction; humans are part of the physical/natural world, same as a mountain lion or a worm, albeit a very powerful part capable of wielding great power and thus responsibility. There is no concept of wilderness.
It's worth over-emphasizing that the indigenous viewpoint in North America was sustainable (and was actually sustained) for thousands of years. The modern industrial culture of bipolar consumption/reverence of wilderness is showing severe signs of overshoot after a couple hundred years. That's not to say that indigenous land practices are more ethical or wise... merely that they've been proven more effective by the test of time.
I guess also worth mentioning, modern forestry uses tree farms and has been for a while. Those tree farms burn differently than natural forest and are super dense. Getting more logging into the mix, or more wood mills is not necessarily a solution due to second order effects (more tree farms)
That sounds like wishful thinking that there is an easy solution for this. Controlled burns can help, but the real issue is that global warming makes areas dryer and the vegetation there is not adapted for the dryer/warmer conditions. We have to tackle more seriously the elephant in the room.
”Native Americans conducted controlled burns for thousands of years"
Not to be snarky, but I think that they were uncontrolled burns... Once they started there was no Native American Fire Department to put them out, they just burned until they wefe done.
Yeah, the real problem we need to solve here is too much environmentalism.
The silver lining, I guess, is that it won’t be a profoundly unfortunate tragedy. As a species, we’ll have really earned the ultimate Darwin award.
Come on...multiple posts claim that here, but I really miss the environmentalist campaigns who drove that fire policies?! References? Please look it up, we didn't know better, and it was wrong but quite natural for the peak of the civilization that we are (/s) to fight and prevent fires. The subtone here that "it was the environmentalists" is really hilarious and shocking at the same time.. lol.
Blame everything bad on the environmentalists, ignore the rest we all did and still do, and just let nature rule! Hehe..
Especially, as while totally agree and true that it is right that this was the wrong approach, the denial that this is currently maybe only 10% of the problem is also funny. We lost nature, just wait it out and let it go its natural way here now until most is burned down and then desertificated, which will inevitably come. No more fire problems, just some others then..
sure, but it’s hard to ignore that wildfires in many places dropped when everyone was staying hone during the pandemic, it’s very much a multifaceted issue (and usually it’s underbrush catching fire and burning, not trees)
Are you seriously suggesting that the indigenous were practising controlled burns over millions of hectares of boreal forest?
I find this 'sweep your floors' meme a bit of an oddity:
1. It involves conservatives casting native americans in a good light. Who's going to argue with that?
2. It contains a false epiphany which just feels right (the solution to forest fires is...fires)
3. It contains a grain of truth. Native americans did perform controlled burns, and in the NW they did take care of salmon streams etc, but not on a scale that would prevent today's wildfires.
It's a classic diversion from climate change, and our terrible 'foresty' practices of cutting down forests and planting monocrops of high resin species all packed together and calling it reforestation and finally, spraying entire valleys with roundup (often where indigenous people live of course)
There was something like 10 times more hectares being burned as far back as 1850. https://www.publish.csiro.au/WF/WF22090
We've effectively stopped this with modern fire suppression techniques and have fewer managed burns...Parks Canada only had 12 last year. And here's a story where they ran out of funding and had to defer burns:
https://www.rmoutlook.com/local-news/parks-canada-prescribed...
Not good. I think you can focus on climate change while at the same time have a conservationist approach.
Most of the "environmentalists" I know are deeply in favor of controlled burns. At a national level, the Forest Service is largely behind the dangerous build up in tree density in our national forests, due to the their total and complete ban on prescribed burns (although to be fair, they've slowly come around to realizing the importance of controlled burns).
And the timber companies are definitely not involved in any prescribed burning efforts (don't want to lose out on all that inventory).
>Forest Service is largely behind the dangerous build up in tree density in our national forests, due to the their total and complete ban on prescribed burns (although to be fair, they've slowly come around to realizing the importance of controlled burns).
This is comically false. The USFS absolutely engages in controlled burns.
No, this is incorrect.
The USFS does a lot of controlled burns, and has done them for a long time. Not sure where you heard otherwise: it's a significant part of what they do.
They briefly paused doing them last year after a controlled burn got out of control in New Mexico, resulting in a high-profile wildfire. But that's only evidence that they were already doing them. Anyway, after updating their policies, they resumed prescribed burns later that year.
You are lying. Don't deliberately spread disinformation. https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/prescribed-fire
USFS adopted prescribed burns in 1978.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36236104>
Again, it does not matter. Open your eyes
This is environmental crime. And when there is a crime, there is a benefit for criminals. Saying that if we burn some, here and there, the criminals will stop, is like saying that if we paint the banks in a nice pastel tone and put a banner asking politely not to rob, the bank robbers will agree to stop and go away.
Europe tried that in the past repeatedly. It didn't worked. Even worse, the trend is increasing among farmers manipulated by extreme European political currents that overlap extensively the Putin and Trump speeches. Places of Europe that never had a problem with wildfires started to burn since a couple of years. We hear political parties trow the first stone and claim that environmental laws are unfair. Just one week later, the place burns down magically. Is environmental boycott, and will not stop until we stop them or remove the benefits.
Either we wake up and strike back, or we accept that the extinction whirl will be much closer than we expected, and much faster than we can adapt.
Here on Long Island, everything is sepiatone, and it smells like a smokehouse.
But I also know that folks in California and Australia have been dealing with exactly this, for a long time. It's news, because it's happening to the Northeast US.
I was watching AppleTV+ Extrapolations[0], which is actually damn depressing. The first episode has wildfires everywhere, and air quality around the globe sucks.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrapolations_(TV_series)
I'm in Brooklyn and sometime mid-afternoon I walked out into my living room to it being completely dark inside and orange out my windows. Local AQI has said 330-350 all afternoon.
And somehow this is a lot better than when I was in Delhi one winter. Some nights I'd see 500+, and there wasn't much escape from it in our airbnb in hauz khas, I'd just sleep with a keffiyeh around my face. People are living like this almost daily in cities around the world, to the point where the locals are sort of just used to it. Pretty depressing, but hopefully we'll start doing something about it.
Keep in mind that the trend is still increasing --- NYC and the USNE could very likely see much worse in days to come.
The current forecast calls for smoke in NYC through end-of-day Thursday:
<https://archive.is/3PAtG> (NY Times)
> It's news, because it's happening to the Northeast US.
Wall Street, meet Climate Change.
Probably too optimistic of me to hope this might change some attitudes.
(Also fuck East Coast media bias and sports reporting -- Sincerely, Seattle)
In general the Northeast is pretty liberal and would happily go along with plans to prevent climate catastrophe.
Wall Street will is a tool, it does whatever makes the most money, and it seems to act pretty greedily (in the greedy algorithm sense). If you want to fix the environment, convince the rest of the country to pass some better laws. Wall Street is part of the engine, not the steering wheel.
Wall Street plays golf with everyone else, and the purpose of liberalism's economic policy is to delay and water down. The major newspapers that could stop both-sidesing everything are predominantly on the East Coast and policy decision-making is centralized around Washington, DC. Voting is also nearly useless and performative.
Start getting acquainted with purpleair checks too before going out. We used to review and hunt out the green air locations for the day and take a trip out to the ocean or wherever we could find respite to get some outdoor time. You go stir crazy stuck in a house for days on end.
https://map.purpleair.com/1/m/i/mAQI/a10/p604800/cC0#4.46/36...
> Here on Long Island, everything is sepiatone, and it smells like a smokehouse.
I'm in Rhode Island this week. Same deal, although not as bad I suspect, based on a photo of NYC I saw.
Def not as bad here, AQI was only maxed at like 100 today
It is damn depressing because solving the climate crisis costs so little:
It is estimated to cost between 2-6% of global GDP each year until 2050 to prevent exceeding 1.5 C mostly by building out renewables.
I could imagine that many people will start investing in air quality filtering solutions for their private home on a scale that matches what we should be spending on climate efforts per person per year.
2-6% global GDP probably means 20% of all western country’s GDP paying for the rest of the world while China paints their rocks green to fool their own gov inspectors.
https://youtu.be/AynNsPs9i80
Nonsense. The western world needs to solve their own emissions first and foremost.
China is reducing its import of fossils by building renewables on a massive scale.
GP provided a link, you’ve just made empty claims.
Fighting climate change is a losing battle until China and India change their ways. To deny this is quite foolish.
This is just a stray man and a lose/lose attitude. The developed nations need to pave the way by driving down the economies of scale further.
What India is doing despite more than 1 billion people mustn't be used to stop our own (developed country) focus on reducing our emissions.
As for the link:
https://www.google.com/search?q=china+renewable+share
China is investing at an unprecedented scale into renewables because it is cheaper for them than buying fossil fuels abroad in many cases.
I'll raise your low-effort google search result link with something useful:
https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china/
BLUF: China saving money is their objective, it is a happy accident that it may possibly help a little bit in reducing emissions.
They don't care.
The site you are pointing to does not use accumulated past emissions to judge countries so is highly dubious from a developing country perspective.
But again, I think pointing to others is a straw man in the debate. Each country need to go ahead and shoulder their share. For a country such as Germany the estimates point to 2.5% of GDP per year to be spend over the next 27 years to achieve a net zero economy. This is an effort that is so miniscule that it is embarrassing. And it is mostly domestically spend money to build wind mills and install PVs. The component cost is becoming less and less of a share.
I think China is well aware that their country is one that is very negatively affected by climate change. The continental climate will turn China into a desert if climate change isn't reduced.
The cost trajectories are so much in favor of renewables that spending money to build them is starting to make even financial sense.
(P.s.: My low effort google was an answer to a bullshit Youtube channel)
In NYC and was just outside. Large percentage of people wearing masks. Smells like a fire pit. Looks like blade runner. Interesting times.
If you go outside in NYC you should definitely be wearing an N95 or better. Avoid going out if you can. Current AQI here is 400+ aka "Hazardous". It's currently sunny at the park near me: https://imgur.com/a/DLhxEWL
What is the “hazard” though? Is going outside really that much worse than hanging within a few feet of a campfire for hours? Obviously PM 2.5 is bad, but the actual amount of hazard from acute exposure hasn’t been contextualized, for me at least.
>Is going outside really that much worse than hanging within a few feet of a campfire for hours?
It's more like you're surrounded by campfires except there are no fires, only smoke, and no way of turning away or escaping from it.
Ok sure, but that’s not really answering the question of whether or not acute exposure to campfires is worse than acute exposure to wildfire smoke.
I've never found myself coughing next to campfires or BBQ's.
Today (NYC) I went outside briefly and started coughing within a couple of minutes, and then my eyes started watering.
It's nothing like being by a campfire. It's way worse. Campfire smoke goes straight up, or if it's windy nobody stands with the smoke blowing directly in their face for minutes/hours.
What are you asking though? Are you asking how a blast of heavy smoke compares to a constant cover of fine smoke? A lot all at once or a little over a long period of time are both bad.
With a campfire, you can always scoot your chair back if you are getting too much smoke, but you are probably getting much more smoke all at once. With a wildfire, you can't escape it and normal activities like going for a jog or walking to your office become a problem.
Acute exposure is generally a concern for individuals with respiratory conditions e.g. asthma.
> hanging within a few feet of a campfire for hours
is actually bad though. You may not feel it, but as an asthmatic, I can tell you quite certainly that this is dosing you with PM2.5 unless you have a really clean burning convective fire or smokeless pit.
But that's why people want to know. Obviously it sucks for you as an asthmatic, but if the new risk is only as bad as some old risk they're OK with, then they don't need to worry about the new risk.
I know nothing about this subject but if these fires uncontrollably burn through land, they're not going to show mercy for anything in their path. A controlled campfire has wood and leaves. A large scale fire could burn up really bad material like rubber and other things that emit chemicals.
Is there a significant difference between going outside and staying indoors in a home without any filtration?
yes, you'll find out first hand if you buy a PM2.5 meter and measure locally in your environment. We have a battery powered one we'd take on trips with us and in the car. Buy a Bosch HEPA cabin filter for your car too, it makes a measurable difference.
Seems like a good meter? I can't find any reliable indicator of which might be worth the trouble.
I bought smartmi PM 2.5 meter 6 months ago. It is very simple just power button, brightness and display. I watched YouTube video where it was positively reviewed.
https://a.aliexpress.com/_EIjHR2h
yah it's hard to verify whether or not the thing has true absolute accuracy. However once I started experimenting in real world scenarios where I was able to corroborate my own subjective interpretation of my senses the numbers did correlate and scale proportionally as hoped. When it was noticeably smoky outside the numbers registered high, the higher the smoke smell the numbers reflected proportionally so. I would do experiments like vacuuming and seeing what showed up. Cooking with smoke being generated, the numbers would grow.
Mine has some VOC mode too, when I took the thing to the gas station that number went way up which was pretty illuminating how much VOCs we breathe in at the pump.
Another angle to the experimentation was with and without the HEPA filter being ran. When smoke would infiltrate the indoor numbers would be like 10 or 12. Run the HEPA for say 20 min the numbers get down to 2 or 3. To me that thing was doing what I expected and served us well in the wildfires.
I'm pretty sure I was smelling the smoke when the AQI here was ~30 yesterday.
Some AQI measures are not realtime. You were probably looking at a 24-hour average like airnow.gov or something (as opposed to something like PurpleAir which is realtime)
Well, it's probably an outlier on the general trend on a ten-year timescale, most climate stories on a regional basis seem to fall into that category. Of course, ten years from now we'll have something worse... But that's not something we can really control, any action we take on climate even the most drastic won't have any real effect for about 30-70 years at least.
Sci-fi interpretation: Humans are a highly aggressive species derived from predatory apes, given to unpredictable violence, not very capable of long-term planning. Quarantined by alien civilizations for that reason.
> But that's not something we can really control, any action we take on climate even the most drastic won't have any real effect for about 30-70 years at least.
That is the wrong way to think about it. Any action we take now is affecting all future years. Replacing fossil fuels with renewables not only reduces carbon emissions this year but also over all the next years. Additionally, taking action now tips the economies of scales further. Renewables come cheaper, fossil investment unattractive.
Thus I think the best way to face the looming catastrophy is to act more decisively and invest much more heavily now.
Looks like Night of the Comet:
https://imgur.com/a/MYpreX5
Source images:
http://www.ap-tyler.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Night-O...
https://www.earthcam.com/share/temp_images/1686190731284.jpg
Is it unusual? My first year here
It's pretty much unprecedented.
Unprecedented for the east coast. It's a reality we've been living with on the west coast for the last few years already.
This is the thickest, longest lasting, and furthest traveling wild fire smoke I've ever experienced. I Left the windows open to sleep and I woke up with a voice two octaves lower.
Was worse in SF a few years ago
To my research, SF AQI has never topped 249. New York just topped out at 342 today with no sign of letting up. I won't dispute that SF wildfire season being so frequent and long lasting, there's been nasty periods, but no it's factually incorrect that SF has ever been at one time worse than what's happening in NYC right now.
I'll admit - looked at the New York ones for today after making this comment and it looked higher than I had seen in SF. I was basing on what I had seen on purpleair yesterday.
e: Although I do remember a few days where I believe it might have broke 300 on purpleair
I double checked my chat messages from when this was happening in SF and it was definitely above 300 on purple air during the 2020 SF fires.
Checking my logs from the CZU Fire Complex back in 2020, the AQI at my house in the SF Peninsula topped out at 766. It was pretty bad.
one of the sensors in SF right now
""" On June 7th, 2023, 4:12:06 PM PDT 10 Minute Average US EPA PM2.5 AQI is now 320 Sensor: Bill Nye the AQI """ https://map.purpleair.com/1/m/i/mAQI/a10/p604800/cC0?select=...
Uh, that's clearly an outlier. None of the other dozens of sensors around it are registering anything higher than 42.
Here's the data for the Bay Area from 2020 - which was considered a particularly bad year for wildfire smoke, and is also the most recent year it's caused particular problems here. Peak levels were only around 200, although it was admittedly somewhat prolonged: https://www.baaqmd.gov/about-air-quality/current-air-quality...
I think this is maybe not directly comparable with purple air, was able to find old chat messages I had sent showing that the AQI in my neighborhood in SF was upwards of 300 on September 11th, 2020
Portland hit well over 500 in 2020, and I believe I remember some peak readings of around 800, but I can't find them now.
https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2020/09/portlands-air-qualit...
[flagged]
Currently 480 in the area of Philly my parents live.
I believe we started suffering a long streak back in 2017 where it was back to back years of suffering. Last year we got off easy because we got hit by some lucky rains that put an end to things. Still gotta get through this summer and see how things go.
Pretty normal for California the past few years...
It has broken a 1981 record. Never been this bad. No that’s not normal.
Yes, quite unusual.
You can also see the haze on Zoom Earth [1] with a hourly timelapse. There seems to be an especially large cloud of it hovering off of the East Coast of the US and Canada
[1] https://zoom.earth/
With this wider perspective you can see the very wide range of fires producing smoke. A lot is getting funneled to the Northeast US but it looks like some of it is even getting funneled into the midwest on the other side of the weather system.
You can also easily track the smoke using this website: https://firesmoke.ca/forecasts/current/
It's pretty wild here in CT. Thick, acrid air. I suppose Californians have been dealing with this for a while, but I haven't experienced it in my life up here.
Not just California, the entire west coast. Seattle's season breakdown has "smoke" slotted neatly between two chunks of "summer", typically lasting from late June/early July to late August/early September.
> Seattle's season breakdown has "smoke" slotted neatly
We called the season "Smogust" when we lived there.
And the northern Rockies, including parts of Alberta and Saskatchewan. While there are occasionally local fires, they are never as bad as the smoke from California.
BC can get pretty bad, especially east of the mountains but even sometimes in the west side.
Didn’t Alberta have that one big town burn down a few years ago?
Was there smoke last year (2022)? I don’t recall any. I remember 2020 being bad, and a few days in 2021, but nothing in 2022.
There was, but it was "many weeks of sporadic AQI 80" as opposed to "a week or two of continuous AQI 200" like 2020 was.
God, 2020 was absolutely horrendous for smoke. Also, it was definitely noticeably smoky during the "heat dome" in 2021, which just made the whole situation that much worse.
I was just on a call with someone in NY and they had to end the call early because their eyes were burning and they were having trouble breathing. It looked really bad.
I was curious and just checked the NYC AQI. It's 324 right now, which is classified as "hazardous". Wow.
That would definitely suck. Here on the other side of the country, in the Puget Sound area, we get some bad days of wildfire smoke every year, but I don't think I've ever seen it that high. The highest I recall is around 250.
A good HEPA filter can really help. I use an older version of this [1]. It can generally keep my living room AQI below 10ish. I read that the Whirlpool brand name was sold off to some generic oversees appliance maker several years ago, so I don't know if that one on Amazon is as effective as my 20+ year old one.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Whirlpool-Whispure-Purifier-Cleaner-A...
Back in 2020, the AQI at my house in the SF Bay Area hit 800. (I was directly downwind from the CZU Lightning Complex fire.) To say that was bad was an understatement.
I had to seal up every door and window to my house with plastic, then put three 1200 sq. ft. rated HEPA filters in a single bedroom to get the air quality in that one room down to livable.
That's also when I discovered the real difference between an N95 mask and a N100 respirator.
Holy crap. Today I watched it go from 200 to 400 in the space of an hour and the difference was so much more than I ever would have expected just from doubling, 200 was an inconvenience but 400 was a real yikes. I can't even imagine what 800 must have been like.
It's an odd shade of yellow outside and it smells like you are inside a wood smoker. I have my air filters running almost full blast and it only helps a little bit; still way above "normal". I'm coughing a little bit as well. Overall, less than ideal! I will not be going for a walk this evening.
Were they taking the call outside?
I'm in my apt in NYC right now with windows closed and you can smell/feel it still. It's surprisingly intense.
Inside.
I've been looking at picking up an outdoor air quality monitor from PurpleAir. Can anyone vouch for them?
I've found their air quality map the most helpful: https://map.purpleair.com/1/mAQI/a10/p604800/cC0#5.16/41.047...
I don't have one personally but I did some research into their hardware when making a DIY clone a few years ago: https://github.com/shanet/clearair
The EPA published a paper calibrating the sensors PurpleAir uses with their much more expensive sensors and found it was fairly close after applying a correction factor (which I also used in my implementation). https://github.com/shanet/ClearAir/blob/master/docs/PurpleAi...
Question about your project: can I swap out the Feather M0 for an ESP32 based board like HUZZAH32?
* https://www.adafruit.com/product/3405
I don't see why not as long as the Adafruit libraries I used still work on it (or you swap them out with something else). Overall it's a pretty simple project that just reads values from sensors and prints their values over a TCP socket so I'd imagine getting it to run on a different platform than I used would be fairly straightforward.
Very cool project. Do you run your clone device in any kind of enclosure?
Yes, I keep mine indoors so I made a small wooden box with a cutout on top covered with a piece of window screen material to allow for airflow inside. I figured I'd leave the enclosure as an exercise for the reader since you'd likely have a different preference for it than I did.
Yes! I was going to post PurpleAir for all you east coast wildfire newbies. It has been an essential resource in CA for the last few years.
I recommend limiting time outside as much as possible when the levels are high, like over 100. You might not notice it at first, but over time it can start to make you feel pretty bad--coughing, itchy eyes, fatigue, etc. Especially avoid doing any kind of vigorous exercise like running or cycling that makes you breathe hard. I learned that the hard way.
Also, if it's anything like smoke season in CA, air filters are probably back-ordered and sold out at stores, but I recommend getting at least one so you have it for next time. They are so worth the cost. We have one for each room in our home, but we have a young child so we go a bit overboard.
We maintain an open source, open hardware air quality monitor project that is quite popular. We also sell these monitors as easy to assemble kits.
One of the monitors is an outdoor monitor similar to the Purple Air that uses dual PM sensors for enhanced accuracy. You can find more information of the kits here [1] and the built instructions including files for schematics, enclosure here [2].
[1] https://www.airgradient.com/open-airgradient/kits/
[2] https://www.airgradient.com/open-airgradient/instructions/di...
when this stuff hit hard in seattle 2 years ago I had a bunch of air particulate sensors and arduinos for covid research projects.
Other than telling you not to cook inside and not to open the windows they didn't say much. AQI inside didn't change much with ac on or off... or when I quickly went outside.
The purples were usually good but also not way off in a few cases. I drove to one that had crazy high readings and it was actually the lowest reading I found on 2 different devices.
Basically all the monitor is going to have you do is fret. Like watching pandemic case load statuses. Take a bunch of anti-histamines, don't go outside, drink water, wear a respirator. Run in house hepas if you have em. Hope/cross fingers/pray for rain.
Spend your money on a real respirator or filter. Work from the office, they yusuallly have good filters.
I can vouch. Have one at home and use their map as my go to for understanding air quality.
I haven’t had time to play with it yet, but they have an API for the Home Assistant types out there.
Californian here. PurpleAir is awesome.
Ground sensor air quality map of the burn area https://waqi.info/#/c/40.887/-77.448/7z
https://firesmoke.ca/forecasts/current/
Oh, just relax, it'll eventually blow away as winter sets in. And in about 5-10 years, another episode like this, maybe on top of a severe drought, will occur. It'll be a bit worse than this one. And so on.
Humans are just a step up from chimpanzees, and long-term planning doesn't seem to be what evolution has selected for.
This wildfire smoke has already crossed the Atlantic Ocean and is being detected in Norway.
Source: https://www.nrk.no/sorlandet/vg_-roykpartikler-fra-canada-ha...
Experienced this in CA, so bad we really couldn't spend more than a few minutes outdoors. A good room air purifier and closed windows was a big help.
I am in eastern PA; the smoky haze smells awful and the orange tinged sky looks like dusk in the mid afternoon. It's pretty serious.
I remember when we had that in the SF area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Skies_Day
Wow! It's not quite that orange here, but i figure this would be a fairly common occurrence in CA.
I'm on Long Island and it feels like it's getting closer and closer to that.
Is this the wildfire smoke from Northern Canada?
Here's the view from Fort McMurray, Alberta -- a drone video I took last week. Check out the swarm of birds at 2:30 or so in the video.
Fort McMurray had Canada's largest wildfire in 2016, and we don't have much more left to burn, but nearby smoke makes this place surreal.
https://youtu.be/GevKM4L8Nl8
Also, this is such a regular occurrence these days that we have websites that predict the smoke, like https://firesmoke.ca
This particular nastiness is actually coming from Northern Quebec, mostly.
That's some "yummy" drone footage. I remember one summer in the mid 90s when it got like that in Edmonton for a bit. Good times.
Yes. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36236229>
Other provinces are having wildfires too like Quebec and Ontario IIRC.
Yeah, a big one in Nova Scotia recently too.
The largest fire in the history of the province (since colonization) is still actively burning in Nova Scotia, despite six consecutive days of rain. June 1st was also the 26th hottest day since 1871.
When it dipped down into Minnesota, I went out for a walk. The smoke was so thick. I could’ve swore there had to have been a house fire, a block or two away.
On some streets, I couldn’t see the end of the street it was so smoky.
That's not exactly a surprise, is it? The GOES images from California and elsewhere on the west coast have been apocalyptic in recent years.
It's hard to watch a whole new cohort of people have to confront this for the first time. It brings back a lot of the feelings I had back in 2020...
I would like someone to explain to a dummy like me how Canada has better air quality than the NYC metropolitan area as measured by numerous ground stations considering that the wildfires are supposed to originate in Canada. Why aren't we seeing hazardous air quality at the US-Canadian border? NYC is hit way harder than upstate NY.
Cold front pushed the smoke southwest over lake Ontario yesterday and towards NYC/NJ today. Also it's been raining in eastern Canada today.
Just the wind patterns. And where the bulk of the fires are. They're mostly in Northern Quebec, so fairly far east, and the smoke seems to be pushing south from there down over Ottawa and then the eastern half of New York and kind of pooling further south.
Just got home to southern Ontario from a work trip (in South Dakota, where there was no smoke at all) and I was expecting it to be pretty bad, but it really isn't (though I won't be exerting myself outside or anything). It's sitting mostly east of here, so far.
Rain coming next week, that should relieve things.
I imagine the jet stream is pushing it all south.
jet streams: https://esteininger.medium.com/the-broken-jet-stream-behind-...
I own forest land in the PNW, and my wife and I have placed around 15 acres of oak woodland into conservation over the past 5 years, which involved a lot of restoration work which was funded both by ourselves and with grant money through NRCS.
One of the reasons we decided to buy land in the first place was because of Climate Change, and a desire to get hands on in doing something – even if at a small scale. We've learned a lot in the process – there's no substitute for 'doing'.
I'm chiming in because I feel like this experience has given me a fairly deep perspective on the matter. Fire prevention is on the minds of everyone. Even the most conservative farmers I know are in their own way environmentalists. That's the interesting thing about getting out into the country and off the internet is that you meet a lot of people, and you find common interests – even if you disagree on a lot of stuff.
The issue is, this stuff is expensive. You can mow, do manual limbing of trees to prevent 'ladder fires', you can get goats, you can try converting over to ecosystems that are more fire resilient, create smarter development plans and keep structures 100' away from dry woodland, etc.
But all of that costs time and money. There are grants, yes, but even that isn't available to everyone, and even that takes time.
Because the Climate is become more chaotic, you end up with intense rain fall in the cooler months, leading to explosive growth of brush that is dry fuel/tinder by the end of the long hot summers. And because of the way communities are being planned and developed – closer and deeper into the wild/urban interface – fires become more 'destructive' in terms of property and loss of life.
Climate change is a systemic problem. There's no one thing you can point to and say, change this and it will fix the problem. Except maybe drastically reducing the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.
Lastly, I'm a huge fan of controlled burns. But they're not without risk, and the liability of conducting them is largely than the people seem to realize. We had an agricultural burn set of a tree 30' away during a rainstorm, in the deepest part of burn season, during extremely high humidity. Why? Because the summer had been freakishly hot. According to the fire department, it was a happening a lot. It's getting harder and harder to safely use fire as a preventative measure in a lot of areas.
Anyway, just some perspective from someone who's actually been living this.
controlled burns are fascinating, especially considering how rooted (hehe) in indigenous culture they are. do you have any formulas for deciding when and how to do so?
There's designated months of the year when burns are allowed, but something like a forestry controlled burn is the kind of thing that would be done in collaboration with local forest service / fire departments / etc. Smaller burns are more at the discretion of the landowner, and things like agricultural burns are pretty common during the wet months in the Pacific Northwest. People build piles, let them dry out, and wait until a designated burn day. We haven't done anything on the scale of letting a whole field or forest floor burn deliberately – far too much liability and overhead. If you could get it to a state where it could be done regularly, I think it'd be ideal. But, as things are now, there's just too much that can go wrong, and so that's a big part of the situation we're all in now.
Related: a historical instance of fire smoke so dense it darkened the skies (1780)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England%27s_Dark_Day
I'm in NYC. The sky was a deep orange in the afternoon and you could easily look directly at the midday sun without discomfort. There is a visible haze indoors looking down a long hallway.
It's cleared up a bit now but still quite bad.
A post on DIYing an air filter: https://mastodon.social/@burritojustice/110500850889913947
Looks like Mars has finally come to us.
I’ve said a lot on here about the climate. If we don’t stop or slow new consumption we will lose our planet.
Thinking of it as our planet to lose has a lot to do with how we got to where we are. That's not a safe habit for humans to have.
Are there AQI forecasts? I'm trying to figure out when the air quality is supposed to improve. Is that information available?
whenever it rains really, the jet stream will migrate air eastbound.
https://www.sevarg.net/2021/08/28/temtop-air-quality-sensors... has some details on air quality sensors and at the bottom, some homemade air filters you can make; they work well.
I think the WTC webcam is pretty neat:
https://www.earthcam.com/usa/newyork/worldtradecenter/?cam=s...
It looks like a rust-only paint swathes.
The sun has been giving me sunset colors when it is not even close to the horizon
It’s hazy here in Virginia as well, but nothing like NY. Every few years, the Great Dismal Swamp catches on fire (a bit south of here) and the peat moss smoldering creates the most acrid, thick smoke in the area.
Lol for once smoke in the news that I'm not (yet) breathing. (FarNorCal)
It's currently nighttime over the US, but the image is showing it's very clear. If I rewind time to yesterday afternoon it shows the haze. What's different about night?
I'm in CT. I did not mask much during COVID, but I am masking now. It is absolutely awful outdoors. Visible smoke and a smell. AQI is currently a very unhealthy 250.
Huh... Am in Boston, the air looks and feels... normal.
Makes sense. I'm significantly west of Boston (all the way west in CT) and the smoke stream seems to be coming straight down and then moving easterly, just missing Boston to the south. https://ibb.co/Y80z0jf On Google maps you can click on map details and choose to view air quality overlaid.
Which images should we check out?
Check out the GeoColor images. The area over PA and neighbors has a smoky haze, just south and southwest of the New England cloud cover.
https://cdn.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES16/ABI/SECTOR/ne/GEOCOL...
Of course it's not the biggest loss here but it's striking that there's talk of canceling the a Canadian Formula 1 Grands Prix in Montreal due to the fires. This would be the second race since the beginning of the season canceled due to climate emergencies.
I thought most of that smoke was coming from Canada, am I correct?
Yes.
This is the Nullschool Earth Weather Visualiser showing fire activity and PM2.5 particulates (smoke) about 24 hours ago, showing the plume approaching NYC from the north.
<https://earth.nullschool.net/#2023/06/06/1700Z/particulates/...>
How come all these fires started at the same time, on the same day across Quebec? https://is2.4chan.org/pol/1686160767790674.webm
Your video shows June 2, with fires starting to be visible from space around noon Eastern on that day.
On the evening of June 1, a large lightning storm passed through the area. (You can even see the storm's clouds continuing on towards Maine in your video.) https://imgur.com/a/LcM8sMe https://www.blitzortung.org/en/historical_maps.php?map=30
There are fire and lighting satellite animations, go back 24 hours and you can see the fires flare across Canada...example...https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/sector_band.php?sat=G1...
> How come all these fires started at the same time
Waves of wildfires starting in the same day can happen by natural causes like a dry storm, but are also a typical signature in wildfires linked to criminal activity. Example: 121 provoked wildfires in the same night and council in North Spain March 2023, a few days after the police stopped a narco operation.
There are some suspicious trends, there is a wave of fires aiming to overpower the firefigthers capability to react. Often at night or weekends. The first spots burnt are often delimited by administrative frontiers, the string of fires follow a road, and fires extinguished reactivate often in the next nights.
The fire starts first on internet. Wildfires are also typically coupled with cyberwarfare mocking environmentalism and scientific facts on social webs and journals.
The criminal thinks that is a hero or adopts a role of victim. There is a lot of self-justifying and blame deflection towards other targetted groups.
At least in Southern Europe this is a reaally common pattern. Your mileage may vary.
Something interesting I noticed when we had extremely dry days in my area (fairly warm, too, but the really noteworthy part was the utter lack of humidity) was that fires sprang up seeming randomly all around the area. Started seeing conspiracy theories of arsonists going around lighting things on fire. I gather that there are many triggers for fires which normally don't get enough traction to take off.
presumably lightning.
Yep, almost certainly this. The same thing has been happening every year out west. It sometimes takes a day or more for lightning-caused fires to grow to a size that they can be detected via satellite.
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> ”…without proof, it's just as plausible as…”
You may be interested to know that people whose job requires them to be epistemologically rigorous do not think in this way:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_epistemology#Fundamen...
Historical lightning map: https://www.blitzortung.org/en/historical_maps.php?map=30
Go back to June 1 for a good example of lots of lightning in the right area. https://imgur.com/a/LcM8sMe
June 6 also has some in the same rough area of Quebec
I don't see how one could reasonably say a thing that has happened before and a thing that hasn't happened before are equally plausible explanations for a thing that is currently happening.
I don't know about in the US, but in Canada in recent weeks there have been conspiracy theories floating around that the wildfires in Alberta were started by The Libs™ in order to make the provincial Conservative government look bad in the lead-up to an election.
So, uh, keep in mind that some commenters might be Just Asking Questions.
I don't wanna be too cynical but I did look at the accounts of the two people in this thread who seem to find the idea plausible and found...pretty much exactly what I expected to find. So, yeah, I agree with you, lotta JAQing off.
Satellites will pick it up if it's lightning. It's very common (see giant fires on the West Coast in the past few years).
Coordinated arson of that massive a scale would be incredibly difficult, and what would be the motivation to do that?
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The kids throwing soup at paintings already committed crimes attacking oil infrastructure and shutting down certain oil infrastructures (pipelines etc) that got them precisely no attention. You only know them from the soup can shit, which proves their whole point.
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After sunrise PIG[1] as temperature raises and humidity falls goes up. If there are conditions for fire PIG will nicely synchronize it so it will go up almost instantly.
[1]https://www.nwcg.gov/publications/pms437/fuel-moisture/proba...
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Now that everyone has N95s from COVID, just wear one of those, problem solved.
Bitches be like “I have my whole life ahead of me”. No you don’t, the fog is coming. The fog is coming. The fog is coming.
I'm asking this honestly and in good faith: When do we start demanding SO2 injection? How much more of this are we going to try to brush off before we decide it's unacceptable?
What makes you think geoengineering is going to solve more problems than it introduces?
1) It's been known since at least 2018 that the sudden reduction in SO2 pollutants has been contributing to a spike in surface warming https://esd.copernicus.org/preprints/esd-2018-83/esd-2018-83...
2) While imperfect, there is some historical record of how this process plays out via volcanic eruptions
3) SAI is never going to perfectly solve all problems associated with carbon pollution. But it doesn't need to be perfect-- just better than the alternative.
I don't really doubt the technical side, but what do you think will happen when a country proposes SO2 injection? It's a global solution to a set of localized issues that not all countries face, there will certainly be objection from countries who think their atmosphere, climate, agriculture will be negatively affected. You can point to North American forests and say "look! we must solve this!" and other nations would rightly point out that poor forestry practices contributed to the issue, and that historically much of that forest land would have burned with regularity without humanity's help.
I don't see how you could form consensus behind this approach. The alternative is world war.
I'm not sure I subscribe to this argument given that countries are already polluting massive amounts of CO2 (and SO2, until about five years ago), and nobody seems to be going to war over it. There are massive issues of equity wrapped up in maintaining the status quo as well as trying something different.
I would also point out that megafires are not the only symptom. Drought, floods, heat waves, hurricanes, and sea level rise are all driven by a warming planet. Surely there is a break even point where it's worth taking on additional risk in order to mitigate some of these problems.
Getting back to my original question: Where is that break-even? Maybe there simply isn't one, and we'd rather collectively go down with the ship.
Never. SO2 is an environmental pollutant, is a major cause of acid rain, and is toxic for human, animal, and plant health. You don't mention the problems that this might solve (less incoming solar radiation, maybe?), but purposeful exposure to sulfur dioxide is much worse.
That's why the proposals are to put it in the stratosphere, and one of the big benefits of SO2 versus other chemicals is the planet naturally does the same thing during big eruptions; we thus have some significant experimental evidence on how it degrades and affects ecosystems.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab94eb posits that moving off coal as an energy source drops SO4 in the atmosphere so precipitously that geoengineering would largely just keep it at the current baseline (Figure 1).
Do you like having an ozone layer?
Again, Figure 1 claims levels would remain at current levels, due to the reduction in coal use. We'd have the same ozone layer we have today.
Then how would we get any temperature reduction?
Ok I got it the comparison is to ozone stability at current sulfur inputs from shipping emissions etc.
The amounts of *stratospheric* SO₂ aerosols needed to alter the climate are a very small fraction of extant *tropospheric* SO₂ pollution. None of those effects would be significant.
Weighing all things, though, is it worse? Would an increase in acid raid outweigh the myriad health concerns over wildfire smoke?
I'd rather not pollute the atmosphere on purpose, but I find that there's a moral hazard in not considering all possible mitigation strategies. Keeping in mind that those of us posting on Hackernews are among the least affected and least vulnerable people on the planet.
Every single year we have severe wikdfire smoke in Montana (and much of the mountain west) from August to September and sometimes into October. Never mentioned in national media.
But when the same thing happens in NYC we have screaming headlines about how terrible the air quality is.
Maybe it’s because this being unheard of in NYC is literally what makes it happening newsworthy?
California has wildfires literally every year but they still make the news when they’re particularly damaging and record breaking. Fires have never impacted NYC to this extent in living memory - it’s deeply unusual for the region and inherently newsworthy.
California wildfires being common is a pretty new thing.
Probably because the entire population of Montana makes up just one neighborhood of NYC
I thought you were joking and then I got curious.
Montana has a million people and NYC has almost 9 million people.
There are 4 NYC neighborhoods with over 200,000 people [1].
So we can say Montana makes up five NYC neighborhoods (out of 55 neighborhoods total).
Close enough!
[1] https://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/cancer/registry/appendi...
News is driven by newsworthiness:
<https://www.axiapr.com/blog/elements-of-news>
NYC is the largest city and metro region in the US, and quite arguably one of the two most prominent cities in the world (with London, per GaWC: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalization_and_World_Cities...>).
It's also the media centre of the United States (and, again, arguably the world).
The Mid-Atlantic states (NY NJ PA DE MD DC VA WV) is home to 60 million people. Events there affect 20% of the population of the United States.
Montana is a beautiful state. But just 1.1 million people live there. The largest city, Billings, ranks 243 in the US (between Lakeland, FL, and Ann Arbor, MI and just ahead of Fairfield and Berkeley in California).
The smallest borough of New York City is Staten Island with a population of 495,747, or nearly 5 times that of Billings, MT. The total population of the City of New York is 8.8 million, and of the New York Metropolitan Statistical Area is 20.1 million. That's more the entire states of Wyoming, Alaska, North & South Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Nebraska, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah combined (19.6 million).
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...>
There are billions of people worldwide who are directly connected to New York City and New York State through personal links and association.
New York also dominates both state and city mentions in Hacker News stories reaching the front page, though much of that is by mentions of the New York Times. (I've been doing analysis of HN front page story characteristics.)
Of course the population is different but mostly news reports talk about things that are unusual. If there are fires every year it isn't really news.
Yep, fully agree.
I live in Washington State, and I refer to that time of year as "headache season."