Trying to learn from the orange sky
The haze over Old Country Road in Carle Place on Wednesday. Credit: Howard Schnapp
The sky turned orange Wednesday, compelling us to comb our vaults of vocabulary for descriptions. Eerie. Otherworldly. Unsettling. Surreal. Unprecedented.
But was it historic? Will it be a turning point? Or will it be written off?
Tens of millions breathed the unhealthy air drifting south from Canada’s wildfires, with burning throats, scratchy eyes, wheezy windedness. We exchanged texts and photos, relentlessly checked air quality apps, and pondered how we could be experiencing a cloudless day with no sun.
Added to the physical symptoms was the feeling that this just wasn’t right. A colleague told of her 4-year-old niece seeing the sky and saying that COVID is outside now. Scars upon jarring scars, as it were. Uneasy before, uneasy again.
We’d seen these orange skies from afar, over San Francisco and other parts west. We sympathized with vineyard owners whose grapes were destroyed by smoke.
Was that now us?
Even many climate change believers assumed the effects in our area — apart from the threat of a major hurricane — would show up years in the future. Instead, they were here now. What an unwelcome shock.
And now what? What do we think and do going forward? That depends on who we are.
There are those of us who didn’t need a reminder that climate change is a clear and present danger. There are those of us who believe all manner of hoaxes and conspiracies and simply don’t and possibly never will see climate change as anything more than a spate of bad weather. And there are those of us who were rattled Wednesday but who will try to tuck away that memory in some cranial recess where it will sometimes be forgotten, but other times it won’t, and it will nag and gnaw and erode our confidence that things will be OK.
We’ve been through this with Superstorm Sandy. We were battered, brought to our knees, served an indelible reminder of our fragility by a storm that wasn’t even a really big one. But look at how many of us carry on now as if that never happened.
One might argue that Wednesday was an anomaly, that fires like those in Nova Scotia and Quebec are rare and only dropped their poison on us because the winds were blowing south and the smoke got trapped between fronts to the west and east — a configuration ominously called an Omega Block, ominous since as the last letter in the Greek alphabet omega is commonly used to designate the end.
That would be foolish. We’re not so special that we should think we’d avoid something that’s wracked the rest of the world for some time. Extreme wildfires are expected to rise 14% by 2030, and 30% by 2050. Exposure to their smoke already results in more than 30,000 deaths worldwide every year. At some point, barring major changes, our own forests will be vulnerable and burn.
And yet, I am deeply pessimistic that Wednesday will produce a massive awakening or game-changing action.
Because: Sandy Hook. The unimaginable slaughter of 20 first-graders was going to be the catalyst at last for major gun reform, but it wasn’t.
And sure enough, in smoke-plagued Washington, Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, the top Republican on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, noted the menacing skies and talked about making forests more resilient against catastrophic fires. Well, sure, thinning trees would help but that gets filed under the category of necessary but not sufficient. Not even close to sufficient.
Years from now, experts will tally the toll of this smoke, the premature deaths from exposure that will remind us of the 9/11 first responders who breathed in toxic air and died, years later but years too soon.
One can only hope it doesn’t take too many more Wednesdays for all of us to agree that we have a problem.
Columnist Michael Dobie's opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
