[✔️] Dec 30, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | Henceforth we understand, Powerful storms. 7 Scientists speaking, 4 futurists speaking, Wildfire smoke, 2013 Daily Mail assailed

[Richard Pauli]

/*December *//*30, 2023*/

/[ Our understanding came from looking backwards in a rear-view mirror.  
“From this year onwards, we will understand..." the new record records ]/
*World will look back at 2023 as year humanity exposed its inability to 
tackle climate crisis, scientists say*
Disastrous events included flash flooding in Africa and wildfires in 
Europe and North America
Jonathan Watts Global environment editor
@jonathanwatts
Fri 29 Dec 2023
The hottest year in recorded history casts doubts on humanity’s ability 
to deal with a climate crisis of its own making, senior scientists have 
said.

As historically high temperatures continued to be registered in many 
parts of the world in late December, the former Nasa scientist James 
Hansen told the Guardian that 2023 would be remembered as the moment 
when failures became apparent.

“When our children and grandchildren look back at the history of 
human-made climate change, this year and next will be seen as the 
turning point at which the futility of governments in dealing with 
climate change was finally exposed,” he said.

“Not only did governments fail to stem global warming, the rate of 
global warming actually accelerated.”

After what was probably the hottest July in 120,000 years, Hansen, whose 
testimony to the US Senate in 1988 is widely seen as the first 
high-profile revelation of global heating, warned that the world was 
moving towards a “new climate frontier” with temperatures higher than at 
any point over the past million years.

Now director of the climate programme at Columbia University’s Earth 
Institute in New York, Hansen said the best hope was for a generational 
shift of leadership.

“The bright side of this clear dichotomy is that young people may 
realise that they must take charge of their future. The turbulent status 
of today’s politics may provide opportunity,” he said.

His comments are a reflection of the dismay among experts at the 
enormous gulf between scientific warnings and political action. It has 
taken almost 30 years for world leaders to acknowledge that fossil fuels 
are to blame for the climate crisis, yet this year’s United Nations 
Cop28 summit in Dubai ended with a limp and vague call for a “transition 
away” from them, even as evidence grows that the world is already 
heating to dangerous levels.

Scientists are still processing data from this blistering year. The 
latest to state it will be a record was the Japanese meteorological 
agency, which measured temperatures in 2023 at 0.53C above the global 
average between 1991 and 2020.

This was far above the previous record set in 2016, when temperatures 
were 0.35C above that average. Over the longer term, the world is about 
1.2C hotter than in preindustrial times.

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration previously 
calculated that there was a “greater than 99% chance” that 2023 would be 
the hottest year in its 174-year dataset. This followed six record warm 
months in a row, including the northern hemisphere’s warmest summer and 
autumn.

Driven by human-caused global heating and El Niño, the heat refused to 
relent. In November, there was an even greater anomaly, with two days 
warmer than 2C above the preindustrial average, according to Europe’s 
Copernicus Climate Change Service.

It too has already confirmed the annual record, as has the World 
Meteorological Organization. In December, many parts of the world 
sweltered through the hottest-ever Christmas. With the new year 
approaching, monthly temperature records were still being beaten in 
central Asia, South America, Europe and Australia.

Berkeley Earth has predicted that average temperatures in 2023 will 
almost certainly prove to have been 1.5C higher than preindustrial 
levels. Although climate trends are based on decadal rather than annual 
measurements, many scientists say it is probably only a matter of time 
before the world overshoots the most ambitious of the Paris agreement 
targets.

Veteran climate watchers have been horrified at the pace of change. “The 
climate year 2023 is nothing but shocking, in terms of the strength of 
climate occurrences, from heatwaves, droughts, floods and fires, to rate 
of ice melt and temperature anomalies particularly in the ocean,” Prof 
Johan Rockström, the joint director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate 
Impact Research in Germany, said.

He said these new developments indicated the Earth was in uncharted 
territory ​​and under siege. “What we mean by this is that we may be 
seeing a shift in Earth’s response to 250 years of escalated human 
pressures … to a situation of ‘payback’ where Earth starts sending 
invoices back to the thin layer on Earth where humans live, in the form 
of off the charts extremes.”

Rockstrom was among the authors of the 2018 “Hothouse Earth” paper, 
which warned of a domino-like cascade of melting ice, warming seas and 
dying forests could tilt the planet into a state beyond which human 
efforts to reduce emissions will be increasingly futile.

Five years on, he said that what disturbed him most in 2023 was the 
sharp increase in sea surface temperatures, which have been abrupt even 
for an El Niño year.

“We do not understand why the ocean heat increase is so dramatic, and we 
do not know what the consequences are in the future,” he said. “Are we 
seeing the first signs of a state shift? Or is it [a] freak outlier?”

In the Antarctic, scientists have also been perplexed and worried by the 
pace of change. The new Brazilian scientific module Criosfera 2, a solar 
and wind-powered laboratory that collects meteorological information, 
measured the lowest extent of sea ice in the region both for summer and 
winter.

“This environmental alert is a sign of ongoing global environmental 
changes and poses a daunting challenge for polar scientists to explain,” 
said Francisco Eliseu Aquino, a professor of climatology and 
oceanography at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and the 
deputy director of Brazil’s polar and climatic centre.

West Antarctica was affected by several winter heatwaves associated with 
the landfall of atmospheric rivers. In early July, a Chilean team on 
King George Island, at the northern tip of the Antarctic peninsula, 
registered an unprecedented event of rainfall in the middle of the 
austral winter when only snowfalls are expected.

In January, a massive iceberg, measuring about 1,500 sq km, broke off 
from the Brunt ice shelf in the Weddell Sea. It was the third colossal 
calving in the same region in three years.

Aquino said human influence – through the burning of fossil fuels – had 
also created “frightening” dynamics between the poles and the tropics. 
Cold wet fronts from the Antarctic had interacted with record heat and 
drought in the Amazon to create unprecedented storms in between. Floods 
in southern Brazil killed 51 people in early September and then returned 
with similarly devastating force in mid-November.

Aquino said this “record record” was a taste of what was to come as the 
world entered dangerous levels of warming. “From this year onwards, we 
will understand concretely what it means to flirt with 1.5C [of heating] 
in the global average temperature and new records for disasters,” he said.

This is already happening. This year’s deadliest climate disaster was 
the flood in Libya that killed more than 11,300 people in the coastal 
city of Derna. In a single day, Storm Daniel unleashed 200 times as much 
rain as usually falls on the city in the entire month of September. 
Human-induced climate change made this up to 50 times more likely.
Forest fires burned a record area in Canada and Europe, and killed about 
100 people in Lahaina on Maui island, the deadliest wildfire in US 
history, which happened in August. For those who prefer to calculate 
catastrophe in economic terms, the US broke its annual record of 
billion-dollar disasters by August, by which time there had already been 23.

Raul Cordero, a climate professor at the University of Groningen and the 
University of Santiago, said the effects of this year’s heat were being 
felt across South America in the form of unprecedented water stress in 
Uruguay, record-breaking fires in Chile, the most severe drought in the 
Amazon basin in 50 years, prolonged power shortages in Ecuador caused by 
the lack of hydropower, and increased shipping costs along the Panama 
canal due to low water levels.

Cordero said El Niño was forecast to weaken in the coming year, but 
above average or record temperatures were likely to persist for at least 
the next three months.

And, as science has proved beyond any doubt, global temperatures would 
continue to rise as long as humanity continues to burn fossil fuels and 
forests.

In the years ahead, the heat “anomaly” and catastrophes of 2023 would 
first become the new norm, and then be looked back on as one of the 
cooler, more stable years in people’s lives. As Hansen warned, unless 
there is radical and rapid change, failure will be built into the 
climate system.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/29/world-will-look-back-at-2023-as-year-humanity-exposed-its-inability-to-tackle-climate-crisis



/[ "Nothing to see here... move along,  everything's OK now..."]/
*Unusually large waves hit the coast of California amid powerful storms*
Guardian News
  Dec 29, 2023
The storms have left at least eight people needing hospital treatment. 
Waves more than 20ft high poured over seawalls and the tops of low 
cliffs along the Pacific coast, flooding nearby streets and leaving many 
injured. In a video taken on Thursday morning, people are seen fleeing 
Pierpont beach – just north of Los Angeles – as a rogue wave engulfs the 
area

Eight people taken to hospital as huge waves pound California coast
Extreme weather is changing California. These road trips show how
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My41Mcwx4jg



/[ "action now"  - "remain hopeful"  - "fix leaks" - "adapt"  - "collect 
data" ]/
*How 7 scientists feel after the hottest year on record*
What it’s like to study a world facing unprecedented changes.
By Umair Irfan  Dec 27, 2023,
Umair Irfan is a correspondent at Vox writing about climate change, 
Covid-19, and energy

2023 is the hottest year in at least 174 years and recent months have 
been the hottest in 125,000 years. All of that warming led to deadly 
heat waves, disease outbreaks, floods, droughts, and record low ice 
levels around Antarctica.
The extreme weather this year stems in part from natural variability, 
including a powerful El Niño warming pattern in the Pacific Ocean that 
reshaped weather around the world. But beneath these cycles, humanity’s 
ravenous appetite for coal, oil, and natural gas is driving up 
concentrations of heat-trapping gasses in the atmosphere to levels the 
Earth hasn’t witnessed for 3 million years.

This year may be the first time that annual temperatures have risen 1.5 
degrees Celsius, 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above the global average at the 
dawn of the industrial revolution. Under the 2015 Paris agreement, just 
about every country in the world agreed to keep the planet’s average 
temperature from rising more than 2°C, striving to stay below 1.5°C. A 
single year rising past this level doesn’t mean this target is toast, 
but if people keep heating up the planet, a year like 2023 will become 
one of the coolest we’ll experience in the rest of our lives.

Earlier this month, leaders from around the world wrapped the largest 
climate conference in history aimed at preventing this outcome. The 
COP28 meeting in the United Arab Emirates produced an agreement that 
explicitly called on countries to reduce fossil fuel use for the first 
time and provide more money to countries facing destruction worsened by 
warming. But the commitments made so far are still not enough to limit 
warming to 1.5°C, and greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.

Half a world away, scientists who study this warming and its 
consequences gathered at the American Geophysical Union conference in 
San Francisco. Climate change is not an abstraction for these 
researchers, and many are observing it in real time, often in areas that 
have personal stakes for them. Looking back on the hottest year on 
record and what little humanity has done about it, some are reckoning 
with how their own work fits in. From the retreat of Arctic ice to 
rising demand for air conditioning, scientists with their fingers on the 
pulse of the planet are experiencing a mix of optimism, dread, and 
urgency as they endeavor to make their research practical in the real world.

I spoke with seven researchers studying Earth’s changes from different 
angles. Their comments below have been lightly edited.

Daniel Schindler at the University of Washington researches how climate 
change affects aquatic ecosystems, including Alaska’s sockeye, chinook, 
and chum salmon. He was one of several scientists presenting the 
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Arctic Report Card for 
2023 at the conference. The Arctic has been warming four times faster 
than the rest of the planet, and this year, the region saw its warmest 
summer since 1900 (when record-keeping began), with knock-on effects 
like Canada’s worst wildfire season on record. As negotiators in the 
United Arab Emirates bickered over the future of the planet, Schindler 
noted that the effects of climate change are underway now, and it’s 
already reshaping ecosystems and human communities:

    I think the reality is, if you look at Western Alaska, climate
    change is not something that’s coming down the pipe somewhere in the
    future. It is happening now, it’s been happening for decades. And
    whether you’re talking about fish or people or birds, there are real
    impacts that we need to deal with right now.

    And when you hear about what’s going on at COP28, there may be a
    reason to be optimistic. But the reality is, we need action on the
    ground right now, not to necessarily turn around climate change
    immediately, but to deal with the fact that we’re going to be
    challenged by it, now and for decades to come, so we need action now
    at local scales.

Rick Thoman, who studies Alaska’s climate and weather at the University 
of Alaska Fairbanks, echoed the call for more immediate steps to deal 
with global warming, noting that the Arctic has been at the leading edge 
of climate change long before it reached the extremes seen this year. 
The communities there may have important lessons for the rest of the world:

    As Alaskans, as peoples in the Arctic, we are living this change
    every day. And we have no choice, no choice at all, other than to
    work with what’s happening. We need the big picture solutions, but
    everyone — Indigenous communities, all the people of the Arctic —
    are having to adapt right here, right now. It didn’t start today. It
    didn’t start yesterday. This has been ongoing for years. Listen to
    the elders. This change has been happening for decades,
    century-scale changes. And Arctic peoples are still here and we’re
    still going to be here.

Sarah Cooley, an assistant professor at the University of Oregon, is 
studying how climate change is altering ice in places like coastal 
Alaska and has found that when you zoom in, the way it affects people 
can be quite complicated. How ice melts and the impacts it has on 
communities can vary drastically, even in nearby regions. With COP28 
still falling short of global climate goals, Cooley is also looking into 
the way the success or failure of international negotiations will 
manifest on the ground:

    In this broader context of warming climate, loss of ice, thawing
    permafrost, threats of coastal erosion, and sea level rise, that’s
    kind of this giant signal that each person experiences differently
    depending on their interaction with their environment.

    I get really excited about being able to do research that is locally
    relevant. One of the things we did in this project is we’re thinking
    about how Paris climate agreement targets translate to local
    on-the-ground experiences. If you tell somebody that the Earth is
    going to warm by 1.5°C or 2°C, that’s an incredibly abstract concept
    because the difference to us of two degrees doesn’t mean anything.
    But if you can translate that experience of two degrees warming to
    an actual on-the-ground experience that’s highly localized — so
    let’s say a loss of 30 days of ice versus 50 days of ice, which is a
    huge deal for someone living in the community to lose a month of ice
    versus losing two months of ice — that to me is really exciting work
    that we can kind of take large-scale big numbers that are really
    abstract and bring them down to a local experience.

Robert Green, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is 
leading a project to track mineral dust using instruments on the 
International Space Station. This is an important mechanism that can 
change air quality, the flow of nutrients across the planet, and the 
amount of sunlight hitting the Earth, which can cool the planet. Green 
is also keeping an eye on methane, a greenhouse gas with about 30 times 
the warming potential of carbon dioxide. At COP28, countries made new 
pledges to curb methane, and Green said scientists can help them meet 
their targets:

    We can tell people where the point sources of methane are, where
    leaks are happening, and give people the information to address
    those leaks. And that’s something that is just so important to do.
    Nobody wants to waste money out of a leaking pipeline. Let’s go
    ahead and fix those leaks, and we also reduce the impact of methane
    for climate change.

    I’m excited to be making a difference. I’m an optimistic person, and
    we can work together to address this problem. It’s not an easy
    problem, but the pieces are coming together. So I’m going to remain
    hopeful.

Stepp Mayes, a doctoral student at the University of Southern 
California, studies how people use electricity and the ensuing 
consequences for the climate and for health. Lately he’s been examining 
the growing demand for air conditioning as temperatures rise and the 
stresses that imparts on the power grid. As temperatures go up, people 
install more cooling systems, run them longer, and crank them up during 
the hottest times of day. That’s often when the power grid is struggling 
the most to provide electricity. The extreme heat this year coupled with 
record-high energy demand signals that this work is only going to become 
more important:

    It makes me nervous. There’s a big intersection because we’re all
    about looking at the relationship between temperature and AC use and
    AC penetration. I think that people are directly responding to
    increasing temperature, and I think we are going to see that
    continue as temperatures continue to rise, where our reliance on AC
    — as a public health issue, and as a grid issue — becomes larger and
    larger.

Aliyah Griffith, a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina 
Chapel Hill, studies coral reef infrastructure around places like 
Barbados, from satellites and from the water. Griffith is also the 
founder and CEO of Mahogany Mermaids, a nonprofit that works to 
encourage women of color to pursue careers in science, particularly in 
aquatic fields. The extreme temperatures this year, including heat waves 
in the ocean, have renewed her determination:

    My family is from Barbados. Not only does that make me feel more
    driven to answer questions from a scientist’s perspective — how can
    we help the reefs? How can we understand what they need and what
    they’re facing? — but also: What do the communities need? How can we
    interact with their local governments, their local institutions, and
    understand where they can be elevated? You have to really respect a
    lot of the work and effort that they’ve already done to see what can
    change in the future.

Gordon Walker, a researcher at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, 
studies paleoclimate, particularly how past shifts in the climate and 
weather influenced historical events. For instance, changing climate 
conditions in Africa and the Caribbean were a factor in the slave trade 
and may have played a part in uprisings. For Walker, the role of the 
climate in historical periods of unrest is adding urgency for the need 
to fill in data gaps as the climate breaches records, particularly in 
regions experiencing the most acute impacts of warming today:

    For me — my focus being the Caribbean and Africa, and the
    transatlantic slave trade, and climate variability associated with
    those regions and the historical event of the trade — I think that
    it’s important for us to collect data on regions in the global South
    — the Caribbean, South America, Africa — because a lot of the
    science and research is focused on the global North.

    I think it’s imperative, especially in areas where we don’t have a
    lot of data, to start collecting data and applying the powers or the
    tools of analysis that we have for climate to the global South.
    Because a lot of countries in those regions are not necessarily
    resource-poor in terms of raw material but resource-poor in terms of
    economies and having the ability to respond to extreme climate. So I
    think the greater lead time we have with projections based on
    studying the past, the better for those countries to be able to
    respond, especially with limited economies, as compared to countries
    in the global North.

https://www.vox.com/24008047/2023-warmest-year-cop28-climate-change-science



/[ about future feelings and attitudes,  the facts of climate change are 
not considered here - we must be positive about what our future is 
available to our views ]/
*Debunking doomerism: 4 futurists on why we’re actually not f*cked | 
Kevin Kelly & more*
Big Think
  Dec 22, 2023
Four visionaries—Kevin Kelly,  Peter Schwartz, Ari Wallach, and Tyler 
Cowen—share their insights on the future, urging viewers to consider the 
impact of their actions on future generations.
- -
  / @bigthink
- -
Explore the future with visionaries Kevin Kelly,  Peter Schwartz, Ari 
Wallach, and Tyler Cowen.

While each is looking into the future through a different lens, they all 
share a belief in the power of optimism and proactive engagement as 
essential tools for overcoming today's challenges.

Wallach introduces "Longpath," urging long-term thinking, while Kelly 
advocates for "Protopia," emphasizing gradual progress. Schwartz 
highlights scenario planning's importance, emphasizing curiosity and 
collaboration. Cowen reflects on America's progress and calls for urgency.

Together, they stress empathy, transgenerational thinking, and diverse 
futures to collectively build a better tomorrow. The message: the future 
is a continuous creation requiring proactive, collective action.
Read the video transcript ► 
https://bigthink.com/series/the-big-think-interview/progress
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 

► About Kevin Kelly:
Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at WIRED magazine. He co-founded WIRED in 
1993, and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. His 
newest book is The Inevitable, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal 
bestseller. He is founder of the popular Cool Tools website, which has 
been reviewing tools daily for 20 years. From 1984-1990 Kelly was 
publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a subscriber-supported 
journal of unorthodox conceptual news. He co-founded the ongoing 
Hackers’ Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a 
pioneering online service started in 1985.

► About Peter Schwartz:
Peter Schwartz is an internationally renowned futurist and business 
strategist, specializing in scenario planning and working with 
corporations, governments, and institutions to create alternative 
perspectives of the future and develop robust strategies for a changing 
and uncertain world. As Senior Vice President of Strategic Planning for 
Salesforce, he manages the organization’s ongoing strategic conversation.

Peter was co-founder and chairman of Global Business Network. He is the 
author of several works. His first book, The Art of the Long View, is 
considered a seminal publication on scenario planning. Peter has also 
served as a script consultant on the films "The Minority Report," "Deep 
Impact," "Sneakers," and "War Games." He received a B.S. in aeronautical 
engineering and astronautics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 
New York.

► About Ari Wallach:
Ari Wallach is an applied futurist and Executive Director of Longpath 
Labs. He is the author of Longpath: Becoming the Great Ancestors Our 
Future Needs by HarperCollins and the creator and host of the 
forthcoming series on PBS A Brief History of the Future, which is being 
executive produced by Kathryn Murdoch and Drake.

He has been a strategy and foresight advisor to Fortune 100 companies, 
the US Department of State, the Ford Foundation, the UN Refugee Agency, 
the RacialEquity 2030 Challenge and Politico’s Long Game Forum.

As adjunct associate professor at Columbia University he lectured on 
innovation, AI, and the future of public policy. Wallach's TED talk on 
Longpath has been viewed 2.6 million times and translated into 21 
languages. Ari was the co-creator of 2008's pro-Obama The Great Schlep 
with Sarah Silverman.

► About Tyler Cowen:
Tyler is the Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason 
University and serves as chairman and general director of the Mercatus 
Center at George Mason University. He is co-author of the popular 
economics blog Marginal Revolution and co-founder of the online 
educational platform Marginal Revolution University.

He graduated from George Mason University with a bachelor's degree in 
economics and earned a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University. He 
also runs a podcast series called Conversations with Tyler. His latest 
book Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives and Winners Around 
the World is co-authored with venture capitalist Daniel Gross.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuAwied4x2Q



/[  text or listen to the audio - generally must pay attention to what 
we breathe ]/
*Wildfire smoke this year woke up places unaccustomed to its effects. 
Now what?*
DECEMBER 29, 20235:00 AM ET
HEARD ON ALL THINGS CONSIDERED
By Alejandra Borunda
This summer, millions of people across the eastern U.S. woke up one June 
morning to apocalyptic orange skies and thick, choking wildfire smoke.

Over the summer, massive Canadian wildfires blanketed central and 
eastern North America with smoke that lingered on and off for months, 
sending hundreds of people to the hospital. The unprecedented smoke, 
which showed up in parts of the country where it had never before been a 
problem, highlighted the growing and inescapable health risks from 
climate-related issues. And it showed how far many places have to go to 
help people protect themselves from the risks.
"The research coming out clearly shows that wildfire smoke is more toxic 
than air pollution from other sources," says Kristi Ebi, a climate and 
health expert at the University of Washington. This year, she says, 
underscored the importance of understanding those risks, but also 
exposed gaps in current understanding. For instance, it's still not 
clear how heavy exposure can affect health years down the line.
The year of orange skies
In March, wildfires started to burn across Canada, and within months 
burned through more than 45 million acres, the most ever recorded in the 
nation.

The fires were likely pushed to those new extremes by human-caused 
climate change. The hot, dry weather that settled in over the country, 
increasing the risk of wildfires, was twice as likely because of climate 
change, according to the World Weather Attribution group, researchers 
who quickly assess the relationship between climate change and extreme 
weather. In general, fossil fuel-driven climate change has made 
wildfires bigger, more intense, and by extension, smokier.

Smoke from the Canadian fires spread as far south as Florida and 
darkened skies in Iowa. In late June, the smoke's dregs floated as far 
as Europe. Waves of smoke passed over North America for weeks, exposing 
millions to a dangerous mix of tiny soot particles, ash, and noxious gasses.

"We all out here [in the West] have been keenly aware of wildfires for 
some time now," says Scott Fendorf, a geoscientist at Stanford 
University, who is based in California. But this year, he says, that 
awareness spread to people in the middle of the country and the East 
Coast. "They really understood what we're facing now–and that they're 
not spared from it either."

*How bad is smoke?*
In early June, the air quality index in New York City hit 460 for the 
whole-day average. Air quality indexes measure air pollution: the higher 
the number, the worse the pollution. That number shocked doctors and 
medical experts. The previous daily record, from 2003, was 86 – what the 
EPA considers moderately unhealthy. But during the smoke event, New 
York's air quality was nearly off the EPA's chart, well into the realm 
it considers an "emergency."

The smoke sent hundreds of people to emergency rooms in New York and 
beyond. Asthma-related visits across the state spiked by more than 80% 
on June 7, the worst day of smoke; in New York City, emergency 
departments took in 44% more respiratory patients than normal over the 
course of the smokiest week.

Tiny pollution particles in smoke can be ten times smaller than the 
width of a human hair, so small they can cross into people's bloodstream 
once inhaled. Then, the body's immune system reacts, driving an 
inflammatory response similar to that seen in cigarette smokers.

Smoke makes respiratory problems like asthma worse. But because the 
minute particles in the smoke penetrate beyond the lungs, they can also 
hurt other parts of the body. "The circulatory system can be affected. 
You can get headaches,'' says Sam Heft-Neal, a scientist at Stanford 
University who studies wildfire smoke effects. Heart attacks and strokes 
are more common on smoky days. "And it's not just people with 
preexisting conditions, although they're particularly vulnerable, as 
well as children and pregnant women."
"It's really a health crisis," says Kai Chen, a climate and health 
expert at Yale University, who led the New York emergency department 
study that found increased visits during the smoky week.
The long-term effects of smoke exposure, or how much worse heavy smoke 
is than mild conditions, are still open questions. But "we're slowly 
moving towards the recognition that wildfires and wildfire smoke are 
more hazardous to us than we had recognized," says Fendorf.

That toxicity is partly rooted in the changing composition of wildfire 
smoke. Wildfires no longer remain solely in wooded areas or grasslands, 
where they burn mostly vegetation. Now, as massive fires burn into human 
communities, they burn synthetic materials like housing insulation, 
plastics, or cars. Recent work from the EPA shows smoke containing those 
materials drove more inflammation, lung problems, and gene mutations in 
mice exposed to it.

Fendorf and his colleagues found traces of hexavalent chromium in 
wildfire ash in Northern California from fires in 2019 and 2020. The 
metal, known as the "Erin Brockovitch chemical," is a known carcinogen; 
Brockovitch became famous in the 1990s for fighting a California utility 
for polluting her town's groundwater with the cancer-causing metal. 
Chromium occurs naturally in some rocks and soil, but when heated to 
temperatures characteristic of intense wildfires, it converts to its 
toxic form. The researchers say it's likely it was present in smoke 
plumes breathed in by people across California during those fires.
Fendorf, an author of that December study, was alarmed by his own 
findings. Before, he'd taken smoke risk lightly. He went running outside 
when it was smoky, and didn't feel the need to put on a 
particle-filtering mask unless the smoke was heavy. "Now, having new 
knowledge of what's in that particulate matter, my calculus is totally 
different," he says. "I'm going to be wearing a N95 mask much, much, 
much earlier than I would have in the past."

The health risks of smoke are particularly high for children. They 
breathe in more damaging smoke with every breath compared to adults. But 
the long-term impacts on their growth and development are still unknown.
Given the developing science and the increased risks of wildfires and 
smoke, Fendorf says it's time to think seriously about how to protect 
people. In the short term, people can lower their personal risk by 
wearing particle-filtering N95 masks and filtering their indoor air. But 
longer term efforts to reduce the explosive, high-intensity 
wildfires–the ones that produce the most smoke– are also necessary, he says.

Controlled burns, Fendorf says, could help reduce the extra burnable 
material in forests, making explosive wildfires less likely. "If we're 
really controlling severity, fire severity by doing control burns, that 
could end up being a huge bonus in terms of our health ramifications," 
he says.

The other key strategy, he says, is stopping another intensifier of 
wildfires: human-caused climate change.
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/29/1220114166/wildfire-smoke-this-year-woke-up-places-unaccustomed-to-its-effects-now-what



/[The news archive - MediaMatters assails UK Daily Mail  ]/
/*December 30, 2013 */
December 30, 2013: MediaMatters names the UK Daily Mail the "Climate 
Change Misinformer of the Year."
http://mediamatters.org/mobile/research/2013/12/30/climate-change-misinformer-of-the-year-the-dail/197340



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