2024 was a grim milestone in the history of our planet. Not only was it the hottest year in recorded human history, for the first time Earth’s average global temperature reached 1.5º C above pre-industrial levels. While it may seem like an arbitrary number, scientists who spoke with Salon agree: This is a warning sign for humanity that will be reflected in more disasters like hurricanes and wildfires.
The 1.5º threshold was established in 2015 during the Paris Climate Accords, with almost 200 nations agreeing to phase out fossil fuels and thereby keep the planet’s warming below 1.5º C above levels prior to the industrial revolution. Beginning in the 18th century, that period of rapid technological progress was marked by a surge in burning fossil fuels.
The scientific consensus is that climate change is the result of these industrial activities. Dr. Juan Declet-Barreto, a senior social scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), told Salon that he and his colleagues perceive the warming as a long-term trend and that extreme weather events like the ongoing Los Angeles wildfires will only get worse “if policymakers continue to be derelict in their responsibility to address the climate crisis.”
“The fossil fuel industry has a leading role in creating this hell that is causing death, destruction and misery all over the planet — and at home as we can tragically see unfold in front of us in Southern California,” Declet-Barreto explained.
Some scientists reacted to the news by saying it merely confirmed their darkest suspicions about our planet’s trajectory. Dr. Kyla Bennett, director of senior policy at the activist group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, told Salon that she and most other scientists paying attention expected humanity to blow past the 1.5º goal. Many people want to believe they can continue their carbon-intensive lifestyles without consequences, from vacationing using airplanes and eating meat and dairy to generally engaging in mass consumption.
“It is a myth perpetuated by the very corporations profiting from these purchases,” Bennett said. “Renewable energy is not a silver bullet; not only are they themselves environmentally destructive, but they will only result in more energy consumption. Indeed, in 2023, CO2 [carbon dioxide] emissions reached a new record high of 37.4 billion tonnes, despite the explosion of solar and wind.”
Bennett argues that climate change is not the underlying problem, but rather a symptom of “ecological overreach.”
These disasters will get much much worse…
It’s going to be a nightmare that we can barely imagine… impacts to our food system… heat waves that kill millions of people in a matter of a few days…’ #LosAngelesFirepic.twitter.com/fivpNNrsRT
“We live on a planet with finite resources, and there are too many of us using too much,” Bennett said. “We are trying to solve the wrong problem: we have a resource consumption problem, not a fossil fuel problem. And I fear we, as a species, will never be ready to admit that and deal with it head on.”
Dr. Michael E. Mann, a professor of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, identifies the problem squarely as one of excessive fossil fuel use, albeit exacerbated by natural phenomena like El Niño.
“The wildfires out west and the devastating floods back east this past fall are a reminder of the damaging and deadly impacts climate change is already having,” Mann said. “It will all get worse if we continue to extract and burn fossil fuels.”
Prof. Joeri Rogelj, director of research at the Grantham Institute – Climate Change and Environment, Imperial College London, explained in a statement that the 1.5 degree threshold was established to limit human suffering. The news here therefore is not merely one involving scientific statistics; global warming has serious real-world consequences.
“A single year with temperatures 1.5° C above preindustrial levels does not mean we’ve reached 1.5° C of global warming,” Rogelj said. “However, it does mean we’re getting dangerously close.”
He added, “The Paris Agreement sets limits to global warming not out of convenience but out of the necessity to limit harm to and suffering of people. Even if we surpass 1.5° C in the long term, these reasons don’t change. Every fraction of a degree — whether 1.4, 1.5 or 1.6°C — brings more harm to people and ecosystems, underscoring the continued need for ambitious emissions cuts.”
The Los Angeles wildfires are the latest example of this crisis, with experts agreeing that climate change exacerbated the fires by first flooding the area, allowing tons of plants to spring up followed by unnaturally warm and dry conditions that created perfect fuel when the Santa Ana winds hit. As climate change worsens, weather will swing between extremes like an out of control pendulum. Even though California’s wildfire season typically runs from May through November, experts say the region is now experiencing a mid-January series of wildfires amidst the unusual and unnatural changes to the regional environment.
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“Some people are grasping for excuses as to why the fires are happening, playing the blame game,” Bennett said. “The blame lies squarely at the feet of fossil fuel companies and corporations pushing consumption of stuff. But for climate change, the fires in LA would not be what they are.”
As a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists, Declet-Barreto said “there is a lot of disinformation and misinformation being put out there by the fossil fuel industry. It is imperative for the public and policymakers to pay attention to the climate science that has unequivocally established that fossil fuel extraction and burning is the driving force behind the climate crisis.”
In reference to passing the Paris threshold, on Monday the activist group Just Stop Oil painted on Charles Darwin’s grave in Westminster Abbey “1.5 is dead.” Just Stop Oil explained in a statement that “we have passed the 1.5 degree threshold that was supposed to keep us safe. Millions are being displaced, California is on fire and we have lost three quarters of all wildlife since the 1970’s.”
“What’s really going on,” Just Stop Oil co-founder Roger Hallam told Salon in October “is the extraction of resources by the global elites, and the global elites are involved in a universal suicide project for humankind. We don’t need to talk about the climate, we don’t need to talk about change. What we need to talk about is power and criminality and evil. What we’re talking about is a death project, and that’s what we should call it.”
Humans like to imagine Earth as a pristine blue marble surrounded by empty space and glowing stars. In fact, though, human space exploration and industrialization has polluted the area around our planet, with the resulting debris known as space junk. The problem is expected to only grow as the demand for satellites increases with our desire to explore our solar system, but it could get so bad that it could ground space travel indefinitely. What can be done?
An international collaboration of scientists in fields from satellite technology to ocean plastic pollution authored a recent review in the journal One Earth suggesting a strategy for one day restoring Earth’s orbit to its once-uncluttered status: Just use the same methods for cleaning up our oceans.
Because this space junk poses serious risk to astronauts and infrastructure in space — as well as presenting problems on the ground for people using GPS, cell phone data and weather monitoring — scientists are determined to fix this mess. The researchers argue this can be accomplished by forcing the producers of debris to be held financially accountable, developing and enforcing international legislation, creating incentives for companies to minimize orbital debris and stimulating collective scientific cooperation.
“The buildup of debris in these crucial orbits heightens the risk of collisions with operational assets and diminishes the sustainability of these valuable spaces,” the authors write. “Therefore, it is crucial to treat the orbital environment as a finite resource that requires protection and conservation.”
Perhaps most importantly, they call for the United Nations to get involved in the matter, urging the establishment of a new UN sustainable development goal. The UN creates these goals to establish international benchmarks for protecting the planet, ending poverty and promoting peace. There are already 17 sustainable development goals and the scientists are urging an 18th that would promote space conservation and sustainment of Earth’s orbit, particularly to prevent the accumulation of space junk.
These proposals are all based on similar measures adopted to help clean up Earth’s oceans. The authors explain that this approach, though seemingly incongruous, is actually quite sensible.
“There are noticeable differences between marine and orbital environments, both physically and in terms of their chemistry and biology,” the authors write. “However, they share a common problem: the increasing presence of debris across large areas of our planet’s shared spaces.”
As of Friday, the plague of wildfiresin Los Angeles has consumed more than 20,000 acres, destroyed roughly 13,000 buildings, forced more than 180,000 evacuations and caused at least 11 deaths. Though this is one of the most destructive disasters in California history, some have wasted no time in leveraging the crisis to further an agenda.
In the midst of the ongoing crisis, President-elect Donald Trump and his supporters in right-wing media are spreading misinformation about the cause of the fires and how future disasters can be addressed in the future. Scientists who spoke to Salon emphasized two points: The fires are being exacerbated by climate change, and the misinformation being spread about it can be dangerous.
“Climate change is 100% responsible” for the wildfires Kyla Bennett, director of senior policy at the activist group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, told Salon. “No question. I am very scared about our future — meaning all of us, not just Americans.”
Bennett drew attention to false claims from conservatives that the wildfires occurred because of pro-diversity DEI programs, and from Trump specifically that firefighters lacked water to put out blazes because it was diverted to protect the Delta smelt, an endangered fish. Gov. Gavin Newsom has demanded an investigation as to why the hydrants ran dry, which officials say occurred as water supplies were overtaxed. Some online conservatives incorrectly claim the fire departments lack money because of funds given to support Ukraine against Russia, while top Trump adviser and Tesla CEO Elon Musk expressed agreement with a post from conspiracy theorist Alex Jones attributing the wildfires to a “larger globalist plot to wage economic warfare and deindustrialize” the United States before “triggering total collapse.”
The narratives coming out from many Republicans on social media are “all bogus,” Bennett said. “This is climate change — they [southern California] have not received rain in eight months. This is a harbinger of things to come for much of the country. We are in deep trouble, and there is no relief in sight.”
She also expressed apprehension about the incoming Trump administration, which has a history of denying climate change and propping up fossil fuel companies. “With a climate change denier coming into office, I fear we are doomed,” Bennett said.
University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael E. Mann told Salon that there are “so many lies out there right now” that it is difficult to even count them. The problem is exacerbated by countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia that have bot farms pumping out misinformation to distract the public from the facts. The overwhelming majority of scientists agree that climate change is caused by human activity, particularly burning fossil fuels. The overheating planet causes droughts and heatwaves to become more frequent and more intense, sea levels to rise and hurricanes to become more extreme.
“It’s a deflection campaign aimed at preventing the people and the press from focusing on the true cause — our ongoing burning of fossil fuels,” Mann said. “They’re trying to throw as much mud on the walls as they can in the hope that we’ll ignore the real problem: fossil fuels.”
Dr. Peter Kalmus, a NASA climate scientist who emphasized his opinions are his own, added that the mainstream media is failing “terribly” to dispel false narratives.
“Some of the many narratives they aren’t telling, or not clearly enough, include: these sorts of impacts are all projected to get much worse; they’re caused by the fossil fuel industry; oil and gas executives have been systematically lying and blocking action for decades; [and] carbon capture and carbon offsets are dangerous distractions pushed by the fossil fuel industry,” Kalmus said.
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While experts agree that climate change is exacerbating the current wildfires by creating unnaturally warm and dry conditions, they caution against saying it was the sole cause of the current blazes. Until more data is available, experts can’t attribute the entire disaster to global heating, according to University of Washington climate scientist Nicholas A. Bond.
“There is some evidence that summer dry periods in the western U.S. are liable to lengthen, resulting in longer fire seasons,” Bond said. “But we are well into winter, of course, and so I am unsure whether that aspect is so important in this case.”
Bond pointed out that the colder and weaker La Niña phase of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) can be “often, but not always, accompanied by relatively dry winters” in southern California. “The weather patterns over the last few months differ somewhat from those with previous La Niñas, but one can make the case that ENSO might have played a role in priming the landscape for intense fires if the wind blew strongly.”
Michael Wehner, a senior scientist in the Computational Research Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, agreed with Bond and other experts that climate change is lengthening the western United States fire season because the hotter temperatures make the vegetation drier and more flammable. He also noted that because there was so little rain this year (which may not have been linked to climate change), the circumstances behind the current fires are very unusual.
“Given that the effect of climate change on the Santa Ana winds is unclear, the question becomes: did climate change cause the chances of such a dry year to change?,” Wehner said. “So while climate change has increased the risk of fire, quantifying its effect on this particular event is challenging. But it is important to say that scientists often can state very precisely how climate change has altered individual extreme weather events.”
Kevin Trenberth, an esteemed climate scientist who has published more than 600 articles on climatology, told Salon that experts still do not know what exactly set the current fires in motion, particularly whether or not they were human-caused. At the same time, “one should not confuse the actual cause of the start of the fire with the risk for it to take off.”
The key is to recognize that, even if scientists cannot precisely quantify the extent to which climate change caused the wildfires, it obviously played a major role in the current calamity.
“The main very robust role of climate change is the increase in surface drying,” Trenberth said. “This is the increase in surface evapotranspiration. As the atmospheric temperatures increase, they suck more moisture out of plants and the surface at a rate of about 7% per degree C (4% per deg F). They carry that moisture away and, in the absence of rainfall, lead to wilting and drought conditions, and increased risk of wildfire.”
Mann agrees with the consensus view that “climate change played a clear role here.”
“The unusually dry conditions in southern California are part of a longer-term pattern of longer dry seasons and late winter rains, due to human-caused climate change,” Mann said. “The dry season now extends well into winter, where it is more likely to overlap with the offshore wind/Santa Ana season. It was the confluence of these two things that was behind these devastating, fast-spreading, record damage-causing fires.”
He added, “All of this gets worse as we continue to warm the planet, underscoring the urgency of moving away from fossil fuels as quickly as possible.”
Juan Declet-Barreto, a senior social scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that people who want accurate information about how to get assistance can go to government links or reliable local sources. He urged concerned citizens to learn about climate change rather than listen to partisan outlets.
“Younger people everywhere should expect only more of this chaos and loss, so long as climate change continues to deepen fire conditions and other climate extremes,” Declet-Barreto said. “Meanwhile, fossil fuel companies are eagerly expanding production and profits. The injustice can’t be overstated.”
On January 20, 2025, Donald Trump will join Grover Cleveland as one of only two American presidents to serve nonconsecutive terms. Like Cleveland, Trump won his second election due largely to the fact that his predecessor presided over a poor economy. But Trump does not seem to recognize this, treating his victory as a sweeping mandate to impose a wide range of nationalist policies.
Unfortunately for opponents of both imperialism and the military-industrial complex, these policies include a spirit of outright acquisitiveness for other sovereign lands. This is why Cleveland’s career is especially relevant today.
Trump says that America should own Greenland as an “absolute necessity,” even though its more than 50,000 residents have given no indication of wanting to be under American sovereignty. He similarly lusts over the Panama Canal, which Panama is no more likely to cede to full American control than Denmark is to peacefully relinquish Greenland. Even closer to home, he’s made comments about making Canada America’s 51st state.
Even if Trump utterly fails in these geopolitical gambits, the fact that he is trying in the first place shows his hand. In his second term, Trump plans on using his executive powers to expand America’s global empire. By contrast, Cleveland spent his second term trying to roll back America’s then-nascent imperialist ambitions—and did so without flinching when genuine strength in our foreign policy was needed.
The standout story from Cleveland’s presidency involves Hawaii. When he returned to office in 1893, Cleveland was greeted with a treaty that had been presented to the Senate for the annexation of Hawaii. Newspapers across the land waxed poetic about how the American flag would soon wave in the Hawaiian breeze, but few journalists questioned the official story about how this land had come into our possession. They were told the Hawaiian natives had willingly betrayed their own monarch, Queen Liliuokalani, by replacing her rule with that of white foreigners (mostly Americans).
Cleveland suspected there was more to it. He knew that sugar plantation owners and other wealthy business interests were suspicious of Liliuokalani, who wanted to reduce foreign influence in her country. Once those Americans learned she was planning concrete policies toward achieving this goal, American jurist Sanford Dole and U.S. Minister to Hawaii John Stevens led a conspiracy to dethrone her. By the time Cleveland took office, they had succeeded in doing so (with the unwitting aid of American locals who believed they had support from Washington) and were only awaiting the Senate’s ratification of an annexation treaty to consummate their plot.
Cleveland rebuffed the conspirators. First, he appointed former Rep. James H. Blount (D–Ga.) to visit the islands and investigate the coup. After Blount confirmed Cleveland’s hunch—that the queen had been overthrown through violence and against the will of the Hawaiian natives—the president sent emissaries to Hawaii saying they would help her regain power as long as she promised to neither execute nor otherwise excessively punish the Americans who had ruled since she was deposed. Cleveland insisted upon these points at the urging of Secretary of State Richard Olney, who pointed out that America still had an obligation to protect the rights of citizens who had acted according to plans they had been led to believe were fully condoned by their own government.
While Liliuokalani was grateful to Cleveland for his support, she informed his emissaries that she had to follow Hawaiian customs. In cases of treason, the traditional laws were clear: The guilty parties had to be executed, and everyone connected with them would have all of their property confiscated.
Because Liliuokalani took this stand, the next four years of Cleveland’s presidency turned into a stalemate. Despite eventually relenting in aspects of her hardline position, Liliuokalani nevertheless held firm that she could not be restored to power without inflicting some measure of punishment on the Americans who currently resided in her domain. As a strict constitutionalist, Cleveland referred the entire matter to Congress for resolution. This caused the matter to languish without resolution until 1897, when Cleveland’s second term ended. His successor, William McKinley, did not share his qualms about annexing Hawaii, and before the end of the 19th century, the deed was done.
This was not the only occasion when Cleveland stood up to American imperialism. When the final Cuban insurrection against the Spanish empire broke out in 1895, millions of Americans—whipped up by newspapers—clamored for America to simultaneously liberate its neighbor and flex its military muscles. Cleveland did not yield to these calls, displaying a strength of character that his successor lacked. Just as McKinley relented to the annexationists and acquired Hawaii, he folded to the imperialists and in 1898 launched America into the Spanish-American War despite his reservations. Most foreign policy historians regard McKinley’s decision to start the Spanish-American War to be the beginning of America’s status as a modern world power.
Cleveland never wanted America to become a global power, but that does not mean he was weak. When the British Empire threatened to bully Venezuela into accepting an unfair resolution of a boundary dispute in 1895, Cleveland reminded the British that such actions would violate America’s Monroe Doctrine. Declared in 1823, the Monroe Doctrine asserted that the United States would not peacefully submit to any nation in our hemisphere having its territorial integrity violated by outsiders, therefore considering an attack on any Western Hemisphere country to be an attack on all of them. Cleveland was ultimately successful in pressuring Britain to agree to peaceful arbitration with a warning—one America should bear in mind, especially in light of rumors that Trump will abandon our alliance with Ukraine to curry favor with Russia’s imperialist president, Vladimir Putin. As Cleveland stated in his annual address to Congress:
“There is no calamity which a great nation can invite which equals that which follows a supine submission to wrong and injustice and the consequent loss of national self-respect and honor, beneath which are shielded and defended a people’s safety and greatness.”
This was not the only time when Cleveland defied a powerful empire to protect American values. At the beginning of his first term, the Austro-Hungarian empire refused to accept Cleveland’s appointed ambassador, Anthony M. Keiley, because his wife was Jewish and therefore was considered socially unacceptable among the Viennese upper crust. Instead of acceding to Austro-Hungary’s request that he appoint two gentiles in Keiley’s stead, Cleveland left the post vacant through his entire first term, explaining in his 1885 State of the Union message that he refused to agree to “an application of a religious test as a qualification for office under the United States as would have resulted in the practical disfranchisement of a large class of our citizens and the abandonment of a vital principle in our Government.”
There is a crucial difference between showing strength over matters of principle and abusing that same strength for self-glorification. Cleveland demonstrated a wise and discerning ability to recognize this difference, being strong when matters of principle were genuinely involved and otherwise deferring to the rights of other countries. He did this both because he believed the laws that govern individual relations should be extrapolated on the international level and because, on a deeper level, he was suspicious of geopolitical greed.
This is why, as Americans and the rest of the world prepare for Trump’s geopolitical aspirations, we should think of Cleveland’s wisdom. He best articulated it when rejecting the Hawaiian annexation treaty:
“I suppose that right and justice should determine the path to be followed in treating this subject,” Cleveland said. “If national honesty is to be disregarded and a desire for territorial extension or dissatisfaction with a form of government not our own ought to regulate our conduct, I have entirely misapprehended the mission and character of our Government and the behavior which the conscience of our people demands of their public servants.”
While hundreds of thousands of Californians are fleeing from flames, there are other risks aside from the immediate damage: air pollution and the charred toxins that are left behind.
To give one example, a recent study in the journal JAMA Neurology has looked at the effects of wildfire smoke on dementia. Previous research has established that tiny particles in the air (2.5 micrometers or less in diameter, known as PM2.5) are linked to dementia, but the researchers found that long-term exposure to wildfire smoke specifically “was associated with dementia diagnoses.” They added that as climate change worsens, “interventions focused on reducing wildfire PM2.5 exposure may reduce dementia diagnoses and related inequities.”
To conduct their research, the scientists looked at health data from more than 1.2 million people from between 2008 and 2019 among members of Kaiser Permanente Southern California. Within this cohort, they discovered “people with higher exposure to wildfire fine particulate matter (PM2.5) had elevated risk of developing dementia,” explained Dr. Joan Casey, the study’s corresponding author and a professor of public health at the University of Washington.
Because this study only examined existing patient data, Casey told Salon that scientists will need to do more research on the precise relationship between wildfire exposure and dementia. “We looked at the umbrella of all dementia diagnoses, but certain sub-types like Alzheimer’s or frontotemporal dementia might have stronger links with wildfire PM2.5,” Casey said. “We also want to understand the relevant time window of exposure. Here, we looked at exposure in the prior three years, but a longer window is likely important (up to 20 years.)”
The researchers’ work is unfortunately relevant to human beings because climate change is making wildfires more frequent and more intense. From California and Hawaii to Greece and Spain, more and more of Earth’s wooded areas are bursting into flame as humanity overheats the planet with heat-trapping fossil fuel emissions. While these conflagrations engulf millions of acres of lands, they belch fine particulate matter into the air, which humans inevitably inhale. But more and more research is making it clear how devastating to our health this toxic air can be.
Although this study focuses specifically on wildfire PM2.5, other research firmly establishes that PM2.5 in general is bad for human health. A report from the National Bureau of Economic Research released last April found that wildfire smoke contributes to the deaths of around 16,000 Americans per year, with that number expected to rise to 30,000 by mid century. A systematic review published in the journal Neurotoxicology found a link between air pollution and increased depressive and anxiety symptoms and behaviors, as well as physical alterations in brain regions believed to be associated with those conditions. A 2024 study in the journal Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety likewise found links between various types of common air pollution and diseases including PTSD and multiple sclerosis, while a 2021 study in the journal Neurology found a link between urban air pollution and central nervous system diseases.
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“The results of our studies on the effects of nanoparticles in the air show a link between exposure to air pollutants and neurological diseases and neuropsychiatric disorders,” 2021 study lead author Mojtaba Ehsanifar, an assistant professor of environmental neurotoxicology at Kashan University of Medical Sciences’ Anatomical Sciences Research Center, told Salon by email. Although Ehsanifar has not specifically worked on the effects of pollutants from fires, he noted that pollutants produced by both gases tend to be similar. He blames climate change for this problem.
“A recent investigation establishes a connection between climate change and the exacerbation of certain neurological disorders,” Ehsanifar said. “As temperatures and humidity increase, conditions such as stroke, migraines, meningitis, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease may worsen.”
He added that as temperatures continue to rise, the heat will combine with the smoke to hurt our brains.
“Currently, brains are already operating toward the upper thresholds of these ranges, and as climate change elevates temperature and humidity, our brains might struggle to maintain temperature regulation, even malfunctioning,” Ehsanifar said. “A high internal body temperature, especially above 104 degrees Fahrenheit, with cognitive impairment such as confusion, defines heat stroke.”
This research underscores how global heating is intrinsically linked to our health.
University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Dr. Michael E. Mann said it is fair to directly attribute diseases like dementia to climate change when they are demonstrably caused by wildfire exposure.
“The connection is epidemiological, much like the negative health consequences of smoking are epidemiological, i.e. statistical in nature,” Mann said. “So in other words, while it’s always possible that a victim could have suffered neurological diseases for other reasons, we can say that exposure to wildfire smoke substantially increases the likelihood of e.g. developing dementia, enough so that there is effectively a causal connection there.”
Mann added, “This is yet another example of the profound, yet grossly understated negative health consequences of human-caused climate change.”
Dr. Kevin Trenberth, a distinguished scholar at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told Salon that he is not surprised the study found adverse effects of wildfire pollution. The revelation that PM2.5 may indirectly increase dementia risk, however, was new to him.
“But there is no question that air pollution is bad for health in many ways,” Trenberth said. “On bad pollution days, either one should not exercise or should do it indoors. So this affects exercise, which should help health. With wildfires around, one should not breathe the foul air. So this can be partially controlled from industry although mainly for larger particles. It is harder to see the smaller particles.”
Nor are humans alone in suffering, Trenberth noted. “Think of all the poor animals exposed.”
Scientists writing in 2022 for the journal Environmental Research described air pollution broadly as an underrecognized public health risk, arguing that “policy needs to be matched by scientific evidence and appropriate guidelines, including bespoke strategies to optimise impact and mitigate unintended consequences.” In addition to mitigating the impacts of climate change, experts urge ordinary citizens to take measures to protect their lungs during times of intense air pollution. Whether it is caused by wildfires, urban smog or any other source, the overwhelming evidence is that breathing it in is bad for a person’s respiratory health.
What remains after a wildfire can also be dangerous. The charred ruins of houses and burnt out cars contain countless pollutants from melted plastics, paints, electronics and household waste.
Until the environment is adequately cleaned up, the likelihood is that those who struggle with disease because of exposure to wildfires both during and after may continue to risk their health.
“Seeing the magnitude of the relationship between wildfire PM2.5 and dementia was quite striking,” Casey said. “I was especially struck by how much stronger this relationship was for people living in communities with higher levels of poverty, suggesting that climate change is again increasing health disparities.”
