The Swiss air quality company IQAir called Chicago, the city where I live, the most polluted in the world. Judging from the haze outside my home office window this morning, not much has changed.
The Chicago Tribune reported that PM2.5 pollution (the most dangerous since small particulate matter from wildfires, internal combustion vehicles and industrial pollution easily enters the lungs and bloodstream) tripled the city’s previous high, which was already deemed hazardous to health. Some northern suburbs saw their previous highs quintupled.
Those previous recorded highs were set during the 2023 Canadian wildfire season, the worst until this year. Summer has been cancelled, one headline said, as public health officials warned everyone in the upper Midwest, Northeast and mid-Atlantic states to remain indoors.
Cancelling summer is depressing. Cancelling life is more important.
As of yet, there has been very little reporting about the immediate health effects of the hazardous conditions suffocating central Canada and the north and northeastern third of the U.S. Studies of previous PM2.5 wildfire seasons estimated at least hundreds and probably thousands of people died prematurely from acute asthma and cardiovascular attacks. Longer term, the studies projected thousands more will die prematurely from increased cases of lung and other cancers, heart attacks, and strokes.
On July 17, the Associated Press reported some of the research behind those estimates. To quote from its story:
On average 24,100 people died each year in the Lower 48 states between 2006 and 2020 due to long-term exposure to tiny particles from wildfire smoke, according to a study this year in the journal Science Advances. A Stanford study projects that U.S. wildfire smoke deaths will increase with climate change and by midcentury hit an annual cost of $244 billion in terms of the economic value the government puts on each life.
On a global scale, wildfire smoke particles cause 677,745 deaths annually, with almost 39% of them children under age 5, according to a 2021 study that combined observations, studies on how the body responds to the particles and computer models to calculate the toll.
That AP story arrived just as I was concluding my own brief review of the medical literature. Here are just a few of the studies I found:
- A Canadian study in Geohealth of the health effects in Canada from wildfires between 2019 through 2023 found immediate deaths increased anywhere from 49 to 400 per year. Increased deaths from chronic exposure ranged anywhere from 660 to 5,400 deaths per year. Canada’s population is one-eighth that of the U.S.
- A U.S.-led study in Environmental Science & Technology Letters of the effects from the 2023 Canadian blazes found a three-fold increase in attributable deaths from smoke exposure.
- An Australian study in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology found asthmatic mothers-to-be exposed to at least 10 days of wildfire smoke in the first five months of pregnancy (compared to those with less or no exposure) resulted in four times more low birthweight babies, three times more pre-term babies, and five times more babies requiring neonatal intensive care.
Each of those studies was published earlier this year.
Who deserves the blame?
How has the majority party in Washington responded to this unprecedented outbreak of forest fires in our northern neighbor? They’re blaming Canada for an alleged lack of response.
Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) announced last week that he plans to introduce the CANADA FIRE act (Countering Atmospheric Nuisances Arising from Drifting Airborne Foreign Incendiary Residual Emissions Act”). “My bill will declare an emergency, sanction all Canadian officials responsible, and study a victims compensation fund driven by imposing additional tariffs,” he said in a prepared statement.
Blaming political opponents for the increasing devastation from wildfires has become the go-to Republican trope for deflecting attention from the overwhelming consensus that greenhouse gas emission-driven global warming is entirely responsible for the unsurprising escalation in forest fire ferocity. President Trump took the lead last year when he accused California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s environmental and water management policies for the Palisades and Eaton wildfires, which led to 41 immediate deaths, another 440 health-related deaths, destroyed over 18,000 structures and forced over 200,000 from their homes.
Those charges were immediately debunked on the PolitiFact website. “Regional water reservoirs in Southern California are at historical highs,” the Poynter Institute’s factchecking organization noted. “Hydrants ran dry during recent firefighting because the city’s water infrastructure was not built to respond to fires so large.”
The real culprit
The Atlantic magazine environmental reporter Joshua Partlow offers a brief summary of why this year’s Canadian forest fires are shaping up as the worst ever.
When the boreal forests of Canada catch on fire, no one can do anything about it in many cases. The forests are part of Earth’s largest land biome, a greenbelt of wilderness that encircles the globe, and they’ve been suffering from the planet’s thermostat being jacked up. Wood-boring pests that flourish in milder climates have swept north and east, through tens of millions of acres. Droughts and dwindling snowpack have stressed the trees. They are ready to burn.
Trees are not just innocent victims of global warming. They are our most important allies in the fight against it. Why? Because trees take in carbon dioxide and through the miracle of photosynthesis pump out oxygen.
The majority of the earth’s arboreal forests lie in the upper reaches of the northern hemisphere. That fact is aptly reflected in the following chart. The downward-sloping portions of the saw-toothed line reflects the decline in atmospheric CO2 concentrations during the northern hemisphere’s spring and summer months.
Bottom line: Climate change’s impact on Canada and Russia matters a lot.
The vast forested lands of those two countries are the largest component of the planet’s lifeline. They are being assaulted daily by the warming temperatures caused by fossil fuel emissions. When they burn, it’s like puncturing a hole in our life preserver.
And who deserves the most blame for those fires when we look around the world? It is the current U.S. government and its environmental policies — not malfeasance by the Canadian government for failing to contain the growing number of forest fires in its 1.4 million square miles of forest land, which is more than twice the size of Alaska and constitutes nine percent of the world’s total.
Let us now review current U.S. policy as pertains to global warming:
- The current president calls global warming a hoax.
- His government supports more coal-fired plants and less renewables like wind and solar to produce electricity.
- His Supreme Court majority in 2022 severely limited the government’s ability to regulate CO2.
- His Environmental Protection Agency initiated at least 70 actions to roll back rules designed to protect the environment and limit global warming.
- He withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement on fighting global warming.
- His science agencies de-funded research into the causes and effects of global warming.
- His Interior Department has opened federal lands, including national treasures like the Arctic Wildlife Preserve, to fossil fuel exploration.
- His State Department has destroyed the Agency for International Development, which provided crucial assistance for less developed countries that wanted to combat their own contributions to global warming.
If Americans want to become part of the fight against the health harms of global warming, the place to start is in Washington, not Ottawa.
Merrill Goozner, the former editor of Modern Healthcare, writes about health care and politics at GoozNews.substack.com, where this column first appeared. Please consider subscribing to support his work.
Reprinted with permission from Gooz News
