19h ago

Smoke from Canada’s wildfires killed nine-year-old Carter Vigh – and 82,000 others around the world

www.theguardian.com

World News @lemmy.world

TheDwZ @lemmy.world

19h ago

Smoke from Canada’s wildfires killed nine-year-old Carter Vigh – and 82,000 others around the world

www.theguardian.com /environment/2025/sep/10/smoke-from-canadas-wildfires-killed-nine-year-old-carter-vigh-and-82000-others-around-the-world

Europe @feddit.org

TheDwZ @lemmy.world

19h ago

Smoke from Canada’s wildfires killed nine-year-old Carter Vigh – and 82,000 others around the world

www.theguardian.com /environment/2025/sep/10/smoke-from-canadas-wildfires-killed-nine-year-old-carter-vigh-and-82000-others-around-the-world

10 comments

Yet fossil fuel infrastructure is dubbed "nation building projects" by the government.
- The wildfires are happening for multiple reasons not just global warming. Our forests literally evolved to burn down and we have been stopping that for decades. Just building up deadfall and dead trees throw in drier weather and boom. We should have been doing controlled burns. And yes I know climate change is having an effect on the fires but it is not the only reason we are here.
  
  Always have been. The difference is that more severe wildfires happen more frequently. The 6th IPCC report from 2021 (we are now on the 7th and the 8th is being prepared) had this nice figure (page 18) that showed this for extreme temperatures, floods and droughts:
  If you don't immediately understand what this means, ask your insurance broker.
Well, we should probably stop having massive wildfires then.
- Better start raking those forests ....
Canadian wildfires killed 82,000 people in 2023
I'm not surprised. I don't live near the wildfires, but our air quality was often in the danger zone these past few years. Yet I saw people out walking, jogging, cycling... without any kind of mask or respirator, as if they were oblivious to the dangers.
I mean, FFS, even the photo in the article, of the guy spraying the ground. The SKY IS ORANGE, and he's out without a mask or anything. Dude, WTF?
Any weather app would give you a notification about air quality pretty early in advance, so it's not like most people would be caught-out unexpectedly.
And it's not like we haven't normalized "masking up" by now, since the pandemic. So it's such a small inconvenience to save your lungs. Just do it.
- The mask that you would wear to protect yourself from wildfire smoke is not some flimsy surgical mask. Those only minimized aerosols coming out of your mouth, it's not a filter, it doesn't make wildfire smoke air safer to breath.
  
  I think most people learned that because of COVID, didn't they? N95s (worn properly) block 95% of pm2.5, which takes a danger level of 400 μg/m³ (well into the hazardous range) down to 20 μg/m³ (about half the cutoff for "unhealthy").
  Yet only a handful of people locally were wearing N95s when the levels were that high, locally. People just don't care about their health, I guess? Not sure how else to interpret it.
  
  Right, I didn't try to imply the same masks, but there are so many options for cutting back on wildfire smoke particles.
  N95, N99, P100... Any hardware store would carry these.

10 comments