The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

The 2023 Canadian Smoke-Out continues

As the smoke from Canadian wildfires continues to spread through the American Midwest, I want to mention that the effective use of government regulation of industry has made this week's air quality that much more surprising. Just take a look at Evanston, Ill., yesterday around 7pm:

The fact that this looks really weird says a lot about what the government can do when people are behind it.

No, really: the air-quality alerts from Minnesota to West Virginia look bizarre right now because we hardly ever see AQIs above 150 these days. In my lifetime, even 35 years ago, Chicago looked like this all the time.

The Chicago Tribune reported on this incredible change in 2015:

As early as 1874, as the city rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1871, the Tribune warned that the huge increase in factories and hotels, and the new skyscrapers with their steam-powered elevators, was a serious problem. "So dense is this volume of smoke that, unless there is a brisk, stirring breeze, the whole of it settles down in the central part of the city and leaves its dirty imprint," the editorial said.

Civic leaders, including the editors of the Tribune, crusaded tirelessly against the "smoke horror."

It is hard to know how often the sun lost its battle to shine — though it happened regularly into the 1950s — because the Tribune wrote stories only when it was unusually bad. On Jan. 18, 1925, the newspaper reported the pall that turned day into night was "the densest, thickest and darkest smoke screen which has been thrown over the city this season." The "plague of darkness" on Dec. 7, 1929, was caused by low-hanging clouds, fog and "the customary smoke screen."

And the power needed to light the day meant Commonwealth Edison had to burn even more coal.

By the late 1960s people had had enough. So finally, in 1970, Congress unanimously (except for one demon from the 3rd Circle of Hell) passed the Clean Air Act, starting a decades-long process of cutting emissions and switching from dirty power sources that continues today.

In 1980, ten years after the Clean Air Act passed, Los Angeles had only 6 days with AQIs below 50 but 206 above 150. (I know, because I was there for many of them.) In 2021, LA had 41 days below 50 and only 27 above 150.

This week we have unhealthy air due to natural pollution from an unusual combination of record wildfires in Canada and a weather system blowing the smoke south. Air quality should return to normal (or even healthy) by the weekend. But absent bipartisan regulation 53 years ago, it would look like this (or worse) more than half the year.

So when I say I want a real opposition party and not the whackadoodle nihilists currently destroying their constituents' faith in government, this is why.

Chicago air quality worst in the world today

Chicago has an air quality alert right now as the World Air Quality Index lists us first (last?) in the world for worst air quality:

Canadian wildfire smoke pouring into Chicago has made its air quality the worst in the world Tuesday.

The World Air Quality Index ranked Chicago as the worst for air quality, with Dubai, Minneapolis, Jakarta and Doha, Indonesia rounding out the top 5. Chicago’s air is labeled an “unhealthy” 172 by the index.

The National Weather Service blamed the conditions and low visibility on the wildfire smoke that has wafted down from Canada and impacted large regions of the U.S. The service suggested limiting prolonged outdoor activities.

The problem is predicted to last through the day Tuesday.

I haven't seen air quality like this since I visited Los Angeles in the early 1980s:

A low cloud layer hung over the area until just a few minutes ago, but as you can see from this GOES-East image, we've got thick enough smoke that it almost makes now difference:

I just snapped this photo from my office door:

(I'd send up my drone but it's a bit too windy.)

People wonder what anthropogenic climate change looks like. Well, here it is.

Late lunch

I had a lot going on this morning, so I'm only now snarfing down a Chipotle bowl. Also, I'm going to have to read these things tomorrow:

Finally, today is the 35th anniversary of the best baseball movie of all timeBull Durham. If I had time I'd watch it tonight.

Canadian smoke

A persistent weather system continues to bring smoke from Canadian wildfires through the Chicago area:

You may have been wondering about the recent vibrant, reddish sunsets and hazy skyline in Chicago. What’s behind these phenomena can be traced back to a combination of particulate matter and smoke from Canadian wildfires and pollutants that create ground-level ozone.

While the red sun and milky-looking skies might give the city an otherworldly, even awe-inspiring appearance, Chicagoans — especially those with respiratory or pulmonary disorders, as well as active children and adults — should take precautions.

Because blue light has the shortest wavelength, it’s scattered the most effectively. But a high concentration of particulate matter in the air, which may travel from faraway fires carried by the wind, allows longer wavelengths of orange and red light to scatter around as well. Recent dust storms have also caused vibrant, colorful sunrises and sunsets in the state as well.

Right now at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters, our outside weather station shows an AQI of 40, with pm2.5 the primary pollutant. So at least for now, the smoke isn't reaching the ground. But I only have to look out the window to see what NOAA sees from space:

Perfectly useless Sunday

Cassie got about 4 hours of walks yesterday, plus about 9 additional hours of outdoor time. I got sunburned. So I didn't have any time to post, but I did have time to get side-eye from this girl:

That's Butters, a beagle whose every look is side-eye. It's quite a talent.

"If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live."—Lin Yutang

The roof repairs continue

Today they got through about half of our flat roof which doubles as an upstairs patio. Imagine how much noise all this made:

Note that all the crap on the roof off to my left was at the other end of the balcony while they laid down the material directly under me. They timed it so they had the power saw going exactly when I had a Teams meeting for work. But they did got a lot of it done, and they should reconnect my A/C units just in time for next week's heat wave.

Even smokier

As the wildfires in western Canada continue to burn, we in Chicago continue to live under the smoke plume, going on four days now. NASA's Earth Observatory has art:

Raging fires filled the skies of southern Canada and the northern United States with smoke in mid-May 2023. The fires had scorched 478,000 hectares (1,800 square miles) in Alberta, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan, as of May 16, which is 10-times the average area burned for this time of year.

As of May 16, there were 87 wildland fires burning in Alberta, a quarter of which were classified as out of control, meaning the fires were expected to grow in size. A majority of the 478,000 hectares burned have been in Alberta, according to the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System, but several fires were classified as burning out of control on that day in British Columbia and Saskatchewan.

Wind brought smoke from the fires down to Maryland on May 10, making the Sun look milky in the sky. The AERONET instrument at NASA Goddard in Greenbelt, Maryland, had an average AOD value of about 1 in visible wavelengths on that day. On May 16, smoke contributed to hazy skies and hazardous air quality in North Dakota and northern Minnesota. An AERONET sensor at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks measured an average AOD of 2.3 on May 16, with peak values close to 3.

Unseasonably hot weather is expected to continue over the next few days in Western Canada. In British Columbia, temperatures are expected to reach 30° Celsius (86° Fahrenheit) through May 18, according to Environment Canada.

New York Times columnist David Wallace-Wells forecasts a hazy future:

[A] new lesson from the evolving science of wildfire is about how far its toxic smoke spreads and how widely its noxious impacts are distributed. You may think of fire in terms of scorched homes and go bags sitting ready for sudden evacuation. But distance is no cordon sanitaire for smoke. In fact, according to one not-yet-published study led by Stanford researchers exploring the distribution of wildfire smoke, an estimated 60 percent of the smoke impact of American wildfire is experienced by those living outside the states where the trees are in flames. Eighty-seven percent of the impact is experienced by those living outside the county of the original fire. And the problem is getting much worse.

[W]hile Americans often think of wildfires as a California problem, it’s much bigger than that, with more burning elsewhere in the country every year. By some estimates, land burned across the American West grew ninefold between 1984 and 2015. It may increase several more times over in the decades ahead. The number of people exposed to what are sometimes called extreme exposure days — when particulate matter is about seven times as high as the World Health Organization safety standard — has grown 27-fold in just the last decade.

In recent years, wildfire smoke accounted for up to half of all air pollution in the American West — meaning that if you live there, as much particulate matter has blown into your skies and your lungs from the burning of trees and brush as from all other human and industrial activity combined. And the grim effects are not locally constrained: Approximately half of American deaths from all forms of air pollution come from out-of-state sources, according to one study published in Nature in 2020 — a finding that implies a remarkably large toll, given that estimates for the total number of premature American deaths attributable to fossil fuel pollution in a given year run as high as 350,000.

Today's layer of smoky haze is pretty high up over Chicago, so my ground-based AQI is a healthy 23. But you might want to reconsider your getaway weekend in Calgary.

Wild weather phenomena yesterday

We seem to get a lot of pneumonia fronts lately. Here's yesterday's:

The temperature at IDTWHQ was 23.5°C at 17:35, 22.6°C at 17:45, 20.9°C at 18:00, and down it went, to 15.9°C by 19:00. (For the Philistines, that's a 14°F drop in 90 minutes.) At about that time, smoke from fires in Alberta combined with rapid condensation aloft (i.e., clouds from the cold front) to give us one hell of a filter for the sun:

I used a daylight color temperature (5700K) for that shot so you can see the color I saw.

Here's the NOAA Global Systems Laboratory map from that moment:

Strangely, the air-quality index at WHQ—right now, a super-healthy 15—suggests not a lot of the smoke is getting to the surface. It still seems a bit hazy though. And we're likely to have another beautiful sunset tonight.