Sounds similar to what has been going on with Russian forests. The Northern Hemisphere is heading for a major catastrophe it would seem (which of course will affect the whole planet).
Just a question of time now compounded by denial nut jobs.
First the geese, now the smoke. Ffs
Smoked geese?
It has reached us, but is too far up in the atmosphere to affect air quality. So we get a chance of seeing a white cloud at worst, or a redish sunset (but we get that anyway where I am at) at best.
Hope you and family is safe.
Bloody Canadians sending their unwanted smoke to Europe.
If they had towed the line and become the 51st state like Trump wanted we would not be in this mess
We confess to having failed to rake our forests.
Ottawa air quality this morning
A large rainstorm in Northern Ontario was cleaning the air at the critical altitude for a couple of days, but that effect fell away last night
Wow that is pretty bad, @Arminius. Are you and your family personally affected by this?
Yes, that is characteristic of the region. Still nowhere close to as bad as June 2023. That scale hits the top fairly early in the health risk range, but PM2.5 is still only about 20% of what we saw two years ago. Saturday-Sunday look like they will be worse than today.
How is it going now, mate? Better?
Since a few days, it’s impossible to see the alps here. We are plunged into a deep smog, apparently provoked by these fires. There is no blue sky, and the light is strangely yellow/orange. Last night, the moon was a deep-red blurry.
Last time I saw this kind of light, it was in Calcutta, decades ago, because of the smog.
That’s when you come to poignantly realise how the world, while seemingly vast at our human scale, is deeply interconnected. What happens at one end will influence all the rest.
This makes me think of the Pale Blue Dot picture, taken by Voyager 1 from a distance of 3.7 billion miles:
In his 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan comments on what he sees as the greater significance of the photograph, writing:
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar”, every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
— Carl Sagan[25]
We had a countercyclical front roll in on Sunday, reversing normal wind directions and bringing cooler/cleaner air from the northeast. We also got rain, which helps enormously. Air quality is now a non-issue. Even better, the same front caused some rain over the fires.
The presence/frequency of that polar vortex is itself a sign of climate change (Gulfstream did not use to weaken that often, which causes that vortex). However, for Europe it does mean that in a couple of days you will see similarly cleaner air.