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On Trump’s power pledge, America’s offshore nuclear, and Japan’s offshore wind
France’s deadliest heat wave since 2003 killed more than 2,700 people — and possibly as many as 5,700.
We didn’t know days like this could happen. Then we learned how bad they really are.
When I woke up this morning in Chicago, the Air Quality Index was in the 300s, and I could barely see the top of the skyscraper across the street. The weather app on my phone featured a little image of a man wearing a World War I-style full-face gas mask. That’s fun, I thought. I didn’t know it could do that.
I went downstairs. Old photographs of the city were hanging in the hotel lobby — girls playing in bathing suits next to the lake — and I realized that the haze shrouding the old Lakeshore Drive condos was in fact haze, smoke, particulate matter, and not a lens artifact. It really used to be that smoky all the time, back before the Clean Air Act. Then I glanced up and saw that the haze out the window was far worse than the century-old pollution in the picture.
It’s significant, I think, that a mass smoke-out like this has now happened to the eastern U.S. for a second time. Second times matter. When exhaust from Canadian wildfires blanketed the Northeast and parts of the Midwest in June 2023, exposing more Americans to wildfire smoke than on any previous day in history, one could almost write it off as a freak occurrence. It was upsetting, sure, and reminiscent of California’s climate-addled amber skies. But didn’t wildfire smoke also descend on New England once in the 1780s? Even on a warmer planet, couldn’t this remain a once-in-a-century blip?
Twice in just over three years, though — that‘s more than a hiccup. That’s almost a trend. To get smoked out once may be regarded as a misfortune; for it to recur again, without any plan to respond, starts to look like carelessness. The federal government is doing roughly diddly squat about adaptation — President Trump can build a fan on the border and make Canada pay for it — but state and local governments across the eastern U.S. will now need to reckon with a new form of extreme weather. You grew up with snow days, but now we’ll have smoke days — and schools and sports leagues and concert venues will need rules about how to deal with them. When should games be canceled, tickets refunded? Is smoke more like a heat wave or a hurricane? Hotels and office buildings will need to review their ventilation policies and possibly upgrade their equipment; municipal emergency response plans will be revised and printed in triplicate.
All this will happen because the smoke has invaded a second time — and arguably a third, if you count last year’s minor episode — and that means it could come back again. For that reason, this event strikes me as a much bigger deal than what happened in 2023. The smoke is now a fact of life; institutions will need a policy about it. The tortious creep of litigation risk will enforce that outcome, even if no federal official enforces it.
So it goes. But to be clear, this new inconvenience is not what worries me most about today’s events. No, what frightens me instead is that today’s airborne toxic event is not something that was supposed to happen. Until a few years ago, we had not thought too hard about whether a major smoke exposure event like this could happen on the East Coast at all. It had not seemed possible.
For years, economists and climate scientists have simulated how global warming might affect the U.S. and global economies. They poured years of careful work into this modeling, and they simulated — with ever-increasing levels of statistical persnicketiness — what extreme heat and sea-level rise might do to agricultural yield, labor productivity, energy demand, heat mortality, and real estate values, among other potential sources of damage. This work was useful; it improved our practical understanding of coastal flooding, to name one example. It also helped calibrate U.S. regulatory policy, even if it never achieved the crowning heights of helping to set a national carbon tax.
Yet these careful models almost never accounted for mass smoke exposure days. Indeed, the kind of thing that happened this week — when heavy haze blows down from Canada and exposes more than 100 million people to hazardous air — was not countenanced by the simulations at all. Only in recent years did economists begin to study events like these, and only because mass exposure events like 2023’s happened first.
We’ve long known that the tiny shreds of particulate matter in wildfire smoke dance across the body’s barriers and penetrate its deep places, etching their way into lung, heart, and brain tissue. Inflammation follows. What makes days like today unique is the scale: Tens of millions of Americans inhaling wildfire smoke at the same time. As we’ve started studying this phenomenon, it’s become clear that the mortality effects of days like today, the deaths elevated above what you’d otherwise expect, can persist for years. That becomes extraordinarily expensive for society.
How costly? “When monetized,” a group of Stanford and Princeton economists wrote in Nature last year, in the first major study on the topic, “the climate-driven smoke deaths result in economic damages that exceed existing estimates of climate-driven damages from all other causes combined in the U.S.A.”
You read that right: The cost of climate-worsened wildfire smoke alone is larger than what earlier studies said every other estimated cost of climate change would be, combined.
To summarize, wildfire smoke did not appear in our economic simulations of climate change. As recently as a few years ago, we did not really know that days like today — or June 7, 2023; or September 15, 2020; or September 9, 2020 — could occur. Then they happened. And happened again. And then we studied them and discovered that, in fact, they may be more expensive for the U.S. economy than we once thought climate change itself would be.
That worries me. Now we know these smoke-out days can happen; now they are fast becoming a rare but predictable feature of summer life. But until recently they were unimaginable. What other ignominies, what other tail risks and airborne surprises, are lurking in the uncontrolled experiment we’re running on the biosphere? What else — unforecast, unmodeled, unstudied, unthought of — lies ahead? After 10 years of covering the climate system, I am not someone who lies sleepless fretting about atmospheric CO2. But I do wonder what else we don’t know enough about to ask.
Smoke is back. Again. It’s time to make a plan.
Heat kills more Americans than any other extreme weather event in the United States. But wildfire smoke — while not strictly “weather” — appears to kill even more. Current excess death estimates put American heat mortality at about 10,000 people per year, or possibly as high as 12,000. Recent studies on wildfire PM 2.5 exposure suggest a mortality of double that: 24,000 all-cause deaths every year.
Needless to say, wildfire smoke is definitely not something you want to inhale if you can avoid it. (And really, you should try to.) But for the 115 million Americans in the Great Lakes and Northeast regions of the country who’ve been exposed to hazardous air from the fires in Ontario and Minnesota this week, there’s a chance that the damage is already done. According to a wildfire smoke mortality estimation tool from Cornell University’s School of Public Health and the Northeast Regional Climate Center, the total mortality for this smoke event could already be as high as 424 people so far, including nearly 100 in Michigan and more than 50 in both New York and Wisconsin.
Alistair Hayden, an assistant professor of practice in Cornell’s Department of Public and Ecosystem Health, stressed to me that the tool is a “first draft,” and that his team is still working on getting it peer-reviewed. “We intend it as a hypothesis that people can test in the coming weeks or months to confirm our numbers,” Hayden told me. “I’m really hoping to be proven wrong.”
But Hayden also emphasized that while the West Coast might historically be where many smoke-related deaths have occurred, “this is the third out of four years [in the Northeast] that we’re having the smoke, so it seems like something we should be planning for,” he said. “It reminds me of that saying: ‘Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.’”
Admittedly, the smoke this week is a bit of a freak occurrence. A cooler-than-average sea surface pattern across the North Pacific, known as a negative phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, helped produce weak low-pressure areas in the northwestern part of the United States, which in turn allowed for heat domes to develop across the Southwest and Plains. After one did just that earlier this month, the hot, high-pressure dome then shifted north, where it developed “dryness across Canada, followed by the lightning-producing thunderstorms,” Chad Merrill, a senior meteorologist at AccuWeather, told me. Then, boom: widespread fires.
“It is very unusual to have a combination of an El Niño and a negative phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation,” Merrill went on. “That’s one of the unusual factors this year, which contributed to the heat dome being farther north in that particular position.” The heat dome and jet stream then worked together to direct the thick smoke down into some of the most populous regions of Canada and the U.S.
That’s what makes this particular smoke event so bad. Were the smoke blowing over remote regions of Canada, as it would under more usual conditions, “then the big cities and the Great Lakes wouldn’t experience the smoke; it would have gone north toward the Hudson Bay and then Greenland,” Merrill said. In fact, the Canadian fire season is tracking below average overall; it’s the meteorological conditions that made this week’s smoke events, as one outlet put it, “the perfect storm.”
Wildfire smoke in the region is not historically anomalous, however. A 1903 article in The New York Times describes a “yellow day” similar to smoky events in 1894, 1881, and earlier. But large-scale burns in Canada’s dense, remote boreal, which produce more smoke, are increasing. Though it’s difficult to attribute any one wildfire directly to climate change because of the complex nature of such events, we do know that fire weather is becoming more common with the warming of the atmosphere from greenhouse gas emissions. As modeled by Zeke Hausfather in the Friday edition of his newsletter The Climate Brink, “hotter, drier seasons burn the most” in Canada — and “recent years cluster there” as the country has outpaced the global average in warming.
But as Hausfather also writes, “While overall area burned is the climate-linked trend, who breathes the smoke on a given week in July is mostly driven by the weather.” This is similar to the way that, though it may be a quiet year in the Atlantic, it only takes one hurricane making landfall in the right (or wrong) spot for the season to be remembered as catastrophic.
On the other hand, as foolish as it might be for the Central Plains and East Coast to still believe smoke is the exclusive domain of Westerners, it is also a mistake to assume smoke only comes from without. As I reported earlier this year, the Eastern half of the country has seen a 10-fold jump in the frequency of large burns over the last 40 years. Nowhere is safe from the smoke.
Planning and preparation, then, should be paramount. But as Grist learned last month, there are no established Air Quality Index numbers that would trigger the postponement, relocation, or cancellation of, say, a FIFA World Cup game, including the final, which is set to be played in New Jersey on Sunday. White House officials are reportedly meeting with FIFA’s president on Friday to discuss contingencies, given the unhealthy air quality in the region.
Which brings us back to Hayden’s modeling. He offered a note of optimism in that research by Stanford’s Sam Heft-Neal and his colleagues indicates that emergency room visits do not rise in tandem with increasing wildfire smoke. “As smoke gets bad, the health impacts get bigger. But then as smoke gets worse and worse, the amount of health impacts actually goes down, measured for emergency room visits,” Hayden said. “The idea is that people modify their behavior in higher smoke” — say, by staying indoors, wearing masks, or canceling outdoor events.
It’s time to treat smoke as an East Coast phenomenon, in other words. Doing so will save lives. “Will [smoke events] become more frequent in the future? Most likely we will see a recurrence,” Merrill, the meteorologist, told me. “How often they happen is yet to be determined.”
