Painting the town brown

OOF. The air in New York is a bit foul at the moment (and that’s only about half as bad as it currently is a bit further south in parts of Pennsylvania) thanks to the amount of filth in the air from the wildfires up in Canada that have been raging there since April… now that it’s actually affecting the US, the world suddenly gives a shit in a way that it didn’t before. Needless to say, I am grimly reminded of the conditions here in Australia over the 2019/20 season…

That right there is a shot I took myself at the top of my street one particularly awful day back then; I’ve done no editing to this except to reduce it to a more manageable size, the colour was actually like that. And I live somewhere that was well removed from the nearest fire, it’s just the air was that fucked from the smoke.

And the air quality index reading for New York at the moment is still nowhere near as bad as we got it on a few days back then; the CNBC article where I got the top picture from observes that New York’s air measured 342 of whatever units they use… I mean, a reading of anything over 200 (at least on the scale the NSW government uses) is considered potentially dangerous, and I remember we got a few days where the air was over two thousand; I had to go to Eastgardens one of those days, and I remember the new apartments that had just been built right next to the shopping centre were literally only about half-visible from the front of the centre. Don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it here apart from the famous dust storm of 2009…

So, welcome to climate change, it’s finally mildly irritating the east coast of the US. Will anything actually be done to mitigate it now?

Yeah, let’s not be optimistic. We’ll be seeing and breathing a lot more of that orange-brown air in the years ahead…