New York

The last few days saw astonishing scenes in New York, as smoke from Canadian wildfires has turned the air orange and caused a massive spike in pollution such that New York had the poorest air quality of any city in the world.

🇺🇸 | #ClimateCrisis: This is a live view of New York City.

This is due to Canadian wildfires.

FAA has banned flights at LaGuardia Airport in #NewYork due to law visibility.#NYC is currently second only to Delhi, India for the worst air quality out of 100 tracked countries. pic.twitter.com/Ynia9J6U6r

— POLETICO 🇺🇸 (@Poletico_News) June 7, 2023

Susan Hassol and Michael Mann provided this piece in The Independent on the impacts:

This week the east coast learned distance is no comfort or protection from smoke. Just as remarkable—how quickly that revelation came. It's only been a few years since Americans anywhere began worrying about smoke like this. Now we're worrying everywhere. https://t.co/gtZroF43xU

— David Wallace-Wells (@dwallacewells) June 9, 2023

Here's a quote to ponder: 

“You can do some things to protect yourself but this just shows that climate change isn’t just affecting glaciers and polar bears, it’s affecting us to the point we can’t breathe clean air any more. I hope as part of this crisis there is an opportunity to realize we need to act on climate change. We’ve gone from three years of not going out because of Covid and now we can’t go outside because of polluted air. The world and nature is telling us something, it’s sending us a very strong message.”

Francesca Dominici, an expert in air pollution and climate at Harvard University

This tweet summed it up nicely...

why would Just Stop Oil do this? don’t they see how much this inconveniences working people and just turns everyone off their cause? pic.twitter.com/vXIjbuYkV6

— Russell Warfield (@russellwarfield) June 8, 2023