It was a smell that stirred up a memory. For both Emily Kuchelbauer in North Carolina and Ryan Bomba in Chicago. It was the smoke of wildfires, the smell of an increasingly hot and ever-burning world.
Kuchelbauer was surprised to find soot on her car three years ago when she had recently graduated from college in San Diego. Bomba had deja vu from San Francisco, where the air was so thick with smoke that people had to cover their faces. They thought they had put California wildfire worries behind them, but Canada, which has been burning from sea to sea as warming waters, has brought home one of the more severe impacts of climate change. , who once seemed immune.
“It’s a very apocalyptic feeling, because the dialogue in California is like, ‘Oh, it’s normal. That’s what happens on the West Coast,’ but it’s not at all common here,” Kuchelbauer said.
Scientists say that as Earth’s climate continues to change due to heat-trapping gases circulating in the air, fewer people are farther away from the plumes of smoke and deadly fingertips of wildfires. Wildfires are already burning three times more frequently in the United States and Canada each year than in the 1980s, and studies show that the fires and smoke may be getting worse.
While many people exposed to bad air may be asking themselves whether this is the “new normal,” several scientists told The Associated Press that they reject any such idea, especially because the phrase sounds like As the world has shifted to a new and stable pattern. extreme events.
“Is this a new normal? No, it’s a new abnormality,” said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. “It keeps getting worse. If we continue to warm the planet, we will not settle into a new state. It’s a constantly moving baseline of worse and worse.”
It’s so bad that perhaps even the term “wildfire” needs to be reconsidered, suggested Jennifer Francis, senior scientist at the Woodvale Climate Research Center.
“We can’t really call them wildfires anymore,” Francis said. “To some extent they are not at all, they are not wild. They are not natural anymore. We’re just increasing their chances. We are making them more intense.”
Several scientists told the AP that the problem of smoke and wildfires will get progressively worse unless the world significantly reduces greenhouse gas emissions, which it has not done despite years of international negotiations and lofty goals.
Fires in North America are generally getting worse, burning more land. Even before July, which is traditionally the busiest fire month for the country, Canada set a record for the most area burned with 31,432 square miles (81,409 square kilometers), almost 15% more than the old record.
UCLA bioclimatologist A.J. “Such a year could happen with or without climate change, but rising temperatures make it more likely,” Park Williams said. “We are seeing, particularly across the West, a large increase in smoke exposure and a decrease in air quality, which is attributable to the increase in fire activity.”
Several studies have linked climate change to an increase in North American fires because global warming is causing an increase in extreme weather, especially drought and mostly in the West.
As the atmosphere dries, it draws moisture from plants, creating more fuel that burns easier, faster, and with greater intensity. Then you add lightning events from more storms, some of which are dry lightning strikes, said Mike Flanigan, a Canadian fire scientist at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia. Warmer weather is causing longer fire seasons, which start earlier and last longer, he said.
“We have to learn to live with the fire and the smoke, that’s the new reality,” Flanigan said.
Ronak Bhatia, who moved from California to Illinois for college in 2018 and now lives in Chicago, said at first it seemed like a joke: wildfire smoke following him and his friends from the West Coast Is. But if it continues, it won’t be as much fun.
“It makes you think about climate change and how it can affect essentially anywhere,” Bhatia said. “This is not just a California problem or an Australia problem. It’s kind of a everywhere problem.”
Wildfires in the US now burn an average of about 12,000 square miles (31,000 square kilometers) annually, roughly the size of Maryland. From 1983 to 1987, when the National Interagency Fire Center began keeping statistics, only 3,300 square miles (8,546 square kilometers) burned annually.
During the past five years, including 2020’s record low, an average of 12,279 square miles (31,803 square kilometers) has burned in Canada, three and a half times as large as the 1983 to 1987 average.
The type of fires seen in western Canada this year are similar to what scientists and computer models have predicted for the 2030s and 2040s. And eastern Canada, where it often rains, didn’t see years of occasional fires like this until the middle of the 21st century, Flanigan said.
If the Canadian East is burning, it means that eventually, and perhaps sooner than the researchers anticipate, eastern US states will also burn, Flanigan said. He and Williams pointed to a devastating fire in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, that killed 14 people in 2016 during a brief drought to the east.
America has lit a lot of fires in the past, but it happened because people didn’t try to stop the fires and they were less dangerous. Large and regular fires occurred in the West until the mid-19th century, Williams said, with more land settlement and then the US government trying to extinguish every fire after the Yellowstone fire of 1910.
From about the 1950s, wildfires in the US were largely reduced, but not since about 2000.
Williams said, “We thought we had it under control, but we couldn’t do it.” “The climate changed so much that we lost control of it.”
As the Arctic warms and the more ice and snow melts there – the Arctic is warming three times faster than the rest of Earth – the summer difference between the Arctic and mid-latitudes narrows. Mann and Francis said that this causes the jet stream of air above the ground to deviate and become trapped, prolonging the period of severe weather. Other scientists say they await more evidence on the effects of the stalled season.
A new study published June 23 links stunted weather patterns with a decrease in North American snow cover in the spring.
For people exposed to air polluted by wildfire smoke, the growing threats to health are part of the new reality.
According to a 2021 study from the United Kingdom, wildfires expose about 44 million people per year to unhealthy air worldwide, causing about 677,000 deaths annually, of which about 39% are children.
A study that looked at a dozen years of exposure to wildfire smoke in Washington state found that the odds of a non-traumatic death increased by 1% on the same day the smoke arrived in the area and 1% later. The next day there was an increase of 2%. The risk of respiratory death increased by 14% and, even more, by 35% in adults aged 45 to 64.
Based on peer-reviewed studies, the Health Effects Institute estimated that smog, the main pollutant, caused 4 million deaths worldwide in 2019 and about 48,000 in the US.
The tiny particles that make up the main pollutant of wildfire smoke, called PM2.5, are just the right size to travel deep into the lungs and be absorbed into the blood. But while their size has attracted attention, their composition matters too, said Chris Eby, a climate and health scientist at the University of Washington.
“There is emerging evidence that wildfire smoke PM2.5 toxicity is more toxic than tailpipe smoke,” AB said.
Ed Avol, professor emeritus at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine, said health effects could become a growing concern in the wake of wildfires, including wind drift from the source.
In addition to burning eyes and itching in the throat, breathing in wildfire smoke can also cause long-term problems throughout the body. Avol said these include respiratory effects, including asthma and COPD, as well as effects on heart, brain and kidney function.
“In the long term, climate change and wildfire smoke unfortunately isn’t going away because we haven’t really done enough to make a change fast enough,” Avol said, adding that people are more likely to wear masks or use air filters. Steps can be taken to use In trying to protect ourselves, we are ultimately “behind the curve in terms of how we react to this.”
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Borenstein reported from Washington and Walling from Chicago.
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