Don’t go outside.
That’s what public health officials and medical experts have been advising tens of millions of people in the U.S. over the last couple of days as smoke from raging wildfires in Canada has drifted into the U.S., triggering air alerts across the Northeast, as far south as South Carolina and as far west as Minnesota.
Canada experiences wildfires regularly, but fires this season have been unusually widespread and intense, with more than 1400% of the normal number of acres burned for this time of the year, according to ABC News. Tens of thousands of Canadians have been displaced from their homes. And Stanford researchers have found that the resulting smoke has already produced one of the worst wildfire pollution events in U.S. history.
Many people in the eastern U.S. are experiencing threats to their health that are typically associated with the wildfire-prone West Coast, and wondering whether the smoke they are seeing and smelling could become the new normal. I emailed Michael Mann, a professor of atmospheric science at Penn State and the author of “The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet,” to ask him for his analysis of the wildfire crisis, the dangers it poses and its links to climate change. Our correspondence, edited for length and clarity, follows.
Zeeshan Aleem: Could you give us some context on why the wildfires in Canada are so intense? What caused this situation?
Michael Mann: We have a very extreme, slow, wavy jet stream pattern right now over North America, leading to an extended period of unusually dry weather over parts of Ontario and Quebec, which has favored the development of these wildfires. The current pattern dips way north and south, meanders like a river as it crosses the U.S., with a huge dip from eastern Canada down into the eastern U.S. The stuck jet stream pattern is responsible for the dry conditions in eastern Canada and also the wind patterns that are transporting that wildfire smoke toward…
Read the full article here