#Bryan rust status full#
#Bryan rust status series#

In fact, we should probably-in our hearts if not our lungs-be grateful for a few days like this. Because this is what a huge percentage of the world’s people breathe every single day of their lives. Yet perhaps there’s a pedagogical benefit here, as Bill McKibben argues:Į’re all lucky. Michael Mann sees climate change worsening that pattern. Second, is this a story about climate change? There’s some debate about causality here, as a stretch of Canada reliably burns each spring, apparently. Add to that concerns about gas stoves and longer allergy seasons, and it’s clear we should be on the precipice of a new public health movement to improve the air we breathe.Īir pollution is bad for us, and we’ve known that for a long time… If the pandemic was whispering to us about air quality, the wildfires are screaming to us about it. Let me step back and consider what this might mean.įirst, will this strange (to people east of the Mississippi) event get people thinking more ambitiously and seriously about air quality and public health? In a New York Times editorial Lindsey Marr offers this forecast: So much for the personal experience of myself and my family. dropped the air quality status down to “Moderate.” I was able to eat lunch on our front porch, although an unusual headache has appeared in my skull since. Today blue has started returning to the cottony skies. My son took this photo Thursday morning, and if I zoom in a little you can see the haze right on the ground, blotting out the train tracks and sprawling across the horizon to the right: You could stare at the sun, directly, for several seconds at a time. A kind of mist seemed to have enveloped us. We drove to the edge of town to eat a delicious meal at an Indian restaurant, then checked the skies. When Reclaim ended, Ceredwyn and I headed out. That morning as we walked across campus the skies looked… wrong: extremely hazy, the sun dimmed as if behind layers of gauze.

#Bryan rust status full#

On Wednesday Ceredwyn and I were in Fredericksburg, Virginia to address the Reclaim Open conference ( my blog post with all slides full recording).

Those clouds have since drifted south, across the international boundary, and down across several American states, including the one where my family and I have been this week.

#Bryan rust status series#

Vast firestorms across a series of Canadian provinces sent huge plumes of smoke aloft, as I noted on Sunday.