Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
when I was a little kid watching LotR for the first time and Boromir described Mordor by saying "the very air you breathe is a poisonous fume" I thought, okay I get what you're going for, but even for this setting that's a little over the top melodramatic, dontcha think?
now I can't leave my house because the greed of evil men has literally corrupted the very essence of the Earth and blotted out the Sun
USA = Mordor Got it
Make Mordor Great Again
Trump is working on that.
Wow! We're officially the worst air quality in the world right now!
NUMBER ONE! NUMBER ONE! NUMBER ONE! WOOOOOOOO USA BABY YEEEHAW 🇺🇸🎇🔥🌡️🎆🇺🇸
So much winning!
🎉😷
I travelled up to Michigan to visit family and friends for a few weeks, as well as enjoy the lake. Can't go outside because the air is, according to the news, "the equivalent of smoking 17 cigarettes for every hour you're outside".
Shits fucked up here right now.
There are people responsible for climate change. We should feed them to the fires. Perhaps it will appease the gods.
It won't work, but we should still try.
Welcome to what the west coast has been dealing with for many years now. There are more important people in the east maybe we'll start to think about trying to start to take this seriously.
We've been dealing with wildfire smoke for years now, our genius Conservative provincial government has been cutting the budget for the services that prevent and put them out.
The fires are in Ontario, just north-ish of Thunder Bay.
This has been happening here for the last three years.
The problem is being attributed to the disappearance of some mystical "forest rakers" that no one has ever met.
This is fine.
don't worry, USA cut all of the ability for the EPA to do anything, so this will definitely get better.
I understand the naysayers' point but a functioning EPA would work WITH Canada. We could, you know, be a good neighbor. Together both nations could help predict fires, track them, respond together, etc. The current environment of aggression is not the only possible course of action. Unfortunately, there is no hope in that changing this moment.
I cannot stress enough that Canada is a sovereign country and not under the jurisdiction of the EPA.
The EPA can't do anything about Canadian forest fires. Canadian Right wingers have cut firefighting budgets and dropped emissions laws to align with the USA, so this problem, which literally never happened before 5 years ago, will be the new summer experience for North America.
I swear chicago is at some sort of crux. no matter where the wildfires are we seem to get hit. north, south, east, or west.
The good news is the heat wave in Toronto has ended... things cooled down when the smoke blocked out the sun.
On Tuesday I was actually thinking "huh, we haven't had smoke this year, that's cool." Wednesday morning.... well shit there it is.
There's also Windy for a more detailed map. Also just a cool website.
500 where I am right now. I didn’t even have a sense of the AQI scale until today, and now it’s quite skewed.
It’s like learning what airplanes are on 9/11
I don’t know why I’m replying to myself instead of editing my first comment but, well I don’t think comments cost money, and they seemed like iterative thoughts to me. So don’t worry about it.
674...is there even air in there?
I live in southern Minnesota and had to drive up to St Paul this morning. Anything more then a few feet away looked like it had a grey filter over it. A block away and it looked like it was shot in black and white.
I came back from vacation this week, and it was quite a moment when I saw the sun rising in the morning, through a yellow haze, colored a fluorescent shade of “apocalypse pink.” Very reassuring, very comforting.
I should’ve stayed up in the mountains a while longer.
Reminds me of the videos people made of the smoke in San Francisco in the style of blader runner 2049 during covid times
So how long until the boreal forests burn up and this ends?
Never, cause it'll keep regrowing to burn again.
At some point a dust bowl or flood will rip away the topsoil after a fire, and the forest will stop growing back. It'll just be a barren desert.
Of course then the dust and sand storms can still give you dust pneumonia, silicosis, and lung cancer, but technically that's not the forests.
Can people catch explosive diarrhea from this too?... But really, I'm surprised there's data on this but not that
I was in NYC today. The visibility is bad, probably down to less than a mile sometimes, but the local airport says it was 2 miles.
