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    canadian wildfires

    Smoke and flames from a wildfire erupts from a tree-covered mountain .

    Three Ways to the End-Time

    Give humanity credit. Between nuclear war, the climate emergency, and potentially AI, no other species could possibly have discovered so many different ways to destroy itself and most other creatures on Planet Earth.

    Tom Engelhardt
    Jul 14, 2023

    In case you hadn’t noticed—and how could you not?—there have been more than 500 (yes, 500-plus!) wildfires burning across the vast reaches of Canada, an unheard-of number, and more than half of them completely out of (human) control in a record-shattering fire season. That’s been true for seemingly endless weeks now with no end in sight. (And, by the way, elsewhere in the northern hemisphere, Siberia is having its own possibly record fire season.) If you didn’t notice any of this, though, I have a possible explanation. Perhaps the vast clouds of smoke from those fires that recently gave the skies of Chicago and Detroit, New York and Washington, D.C., the worst air quality on the planet blurred your vision.

    Anyway, if you were to look back, say, a decade or two ago, I have no doubt you would be struck by how few commentators even faintly imagined the planet we’re living on at this very moment—and not, as predicted, 2033 or 2043 or 2053, if ever. Few imagined that the oceans would heat so quickly; that Texas and parts of the southern U.S. would be experiencing the sorts of fever-dream temperatures this summer that once might, at worst, have been associated with northern India; that Europe would, in recent years, have recorded heat and drought of a sort not seen in half a millennium; that China would break heat, fire, and flood records, while Antarctica’s sea ice hit record lows.

    Keep ReadingShow Less
    Opinion
    climate emergency
    People walk and jog along the shoreline of Lake Michigan with heavy smoke from the Canadian wildfires in the background

    'We Need to Declare a Climate Emergency': Deadly Heat and Toxic Smoke Envelop the US

    "We can't afford to wait. Climate action now."

    Jake Johnson
    Jun 29, 2023

    More than 120 million people across the U.S.—over a third of the country's population—were living under air quality alerts as of late Wednesday as smoke from hundreds of out-of-control Canadian wildfires blanketed much of the Northeast and the Midwest, temporarily leaving Detroit and Chicago with the most polluted air in the world.

    Michigan's air quality alert was extended through Thursday "as weather forecasters expected low-level winds to change direction, potentially resulting in more smoke and reduced visibility as a result of the Canadian wildfires," the Detroit Free Press noted Wednesday.

    Keep ReadingShow Less
    News
    climate emergency

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