Summer is smoke season now

Wildfire smoke from northern Minnesota and Canada is blanketing the Midwest and Northeast, forcing millions of Americans and Canadians to contend with dangerously poor air quality. Per Axios, officials in New York, Chicago, Toronto and beyond have issued air quality alerts, urging residents to stay indoors. The fires have destroyed homes and disrupted local tourism, but the larger pattern is the acceleration of wildfire smoke as a recurring climate phenomenon. Research shows that per-person exposure to harmful wildfire smoke in the United States was four times higher in the years twenty twenty through twenty twenty-four, on average each year, compared to two thousand six through two thousand nineteen. While researchers caution that it's too early to directly tie these particular fires to climate change, they have established that human-caused warming is making wildfires both more likely and more intense. Hot, dry conditions mean the current fires could burn for weeks to come, with models suggesting the smoke could drift southward as soon as next week—a reminder, as Axios reports, that there's no safe harbor in a changing climate.

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