" ... my mother would instantly have understood a study out of California asserting that the soot from California’s wildfires is up to ten times as dangerous as man made pollutants.
The study, which appeared in the prestigious Nature magazine, is entitled “Wildfire smoke impacts respiratory health more than fine particles from other sources: observational evidence from Southern California.”
The four authors are associated with two very reputable institutions: the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science, both of which are at the University of California, San Diego.
The study examined particulate matter (P.M.) from wildfires and from the usual manmade pollutants that bedevil environmentalists and concluded that the former were more deadly:
... Fine particulate matter, PM2.5, in wildfire smoke adversely impacts human health.
Recent toxicological studies suggest that wildfire particulate matter may be more toxic than equal doses of ambient PM2.5.
Air quality regulations however assume that the toxicity of PM2.5 does not vary across different sources of emission.
Assessing whether PM2.5 from wildfires is more or less harmful than PM2.5 from other sources is a pressing public health concern.
... We found increases in respiratory hospitalizations ranging from 1.3 to up to 10% with a 10 μg m−3 increase in wildfire-specific PM2.5, compared to 0.67 to 1.3% associated with non-wildfire PM2.5.
... the article says the particulates from wildfires are up to ten times as harmful as the pollutants people inhale from car exhaust, factories, and power plants.
The issue is the fineness of the particles.
Wildfires reduce particulate matter to such a minute size that it penetrates deep into the lungs, triggering serious respiratory ailments.
Additionally, this small P.M. can enter the bloodstream, triggering heart attacks and strokes, as well as other serious, and potentially fatal, illnesses.
The wildfires that led to these observations swept across the western United States last summer, especially California, burning over four million acres of land.
... For weeks, people on the West Coast lived in a dark orange haze
... When pollution in America peaked in the 1960s, most notably with the Cuyahoga River turning into a raging fire because it was so filled with industrial debris and chemicals, all sensible people across the political spectrum realized that America had a problem that needed to be addressed.
And so they did.
Today, America is one of the least polluted industrial nations in the world.
But the serious environmentalists didn't stop with that.
They didn't want clean industry; they wanted an end to industry.
... In California, the environmentalists formed a particularly powerful lobby.
One result of their lobbying was the fact that, over the course of many years, California ceased performing — and ceased requiring power companies to perform — maintenance of the type that diminishes fire risks.
It wasn't climate change that triggered these fires; it was extreme environmentalism
It shouldn't surprise anyone that extreme environmentalism exposed people to greater, not lesser, risks. "
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Sunday, March 7, 2021
"Mother Nature is a more serious polluter than humans are"
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