Smoky Days & Nights, Climate Change In the West

For many days now, we’ve had hot days (though not as hot as clear skies would give us) warm nights (not as much cooling as clear skies would give us) and problems with pollution from forest fires.

Our area of the country and British Columbia managed to be the most polluted place on the ENTIRE PLANET, and that’s including industrial China, the fires of Southeast Asia (burning jungle to make room for more palm oil trees), and Urban India. Yeah, that’s how bad the air is lately around here!

~ On the plus side, eerie light during the day (everything looks like a sienna photograph) with a PINK sun, and sunrises and sunsets that take your breath away.

~ On the down side, your breath can literally be taken away by particulates in the air that make asthmatics, those with lung diseases, the young, the old, and those with allergies (like yours truly) rather miserable.

I’ve been waking myself up snoring, which is always a sign my sinuses are NOT happy! And one night I actually woke up choking, unable to breathe at all when I rolled to my back. That wasn’t much fun…  I’ve been running air cleaners every day after turning off the fans that HAVE to blow the dirty air in to cool the house, which does not have air conditioning, like most homes here. The single A.C. room unit we have is set up in my room, the second hottest in the home, so I can keep cool at night without resorting to a window fan because my roomies agree my health cannot handle sleeping with polluted air.

A couple of days of it might happen in any given year anyplace you live next to mountains and forests, but it comes, then the winds shift and blow it away, and life goes back to normal.

Thanks to climate change, weather systems are getting ‘stuck’ in place for longer periods, which means winds aren’t shifting, and the extra hot and dry air is encouraging forest fires and wild fires (over grasslands or sage and other shrubs) in general. Right now, British Columbia is pretty much just ON FIRE. They have gigantic fires going on all over the place and I’m devastated to think of those magnificent trees annihilated like that.

But I’m breathing in bits of those dead trees and I’m sure a part of them will be with me… forever.  =^/