Above is the forecast for the distribution of smoke from wildfires at 6 p.m. PST November 10, 2018.
UPDATE at 11:20 a.m. PST November 10, 2018:
At 11:20 a.m. PST Saturday the air quality north of Sacramento was Unhealthy to Very Unhealthy.
At this time the air quality web site AirNow.gov is down. Perhaps because so many smoke-affected people are trying to access it.
Does anybody know ~ and would anybody dare to publish ~ what the impacts of these fires may be on global environmental change? Has the poor management of California’s (and others, worldwide) grassland and forestation resources actually contributed to the problem, and if so, how much? How high and how far does this smoke go, and how long does it persist? How do these impacts compare (percentage-wise) to other man-made impacts (e.g., coal-fired electrical plants, car emissions, charcoal barbecues [which Los Angeles County once banned because of their purported impact])? And, I guess, the same questions apply to volcanic eruptions, over which we have much less control. Unless we know how much of what does what, we can pretend to help by controlling things that are small contributors, giving us a false sense of “doing something” while the major contributors continue to be beyond our abilities to control. Really, does anybody know? Or is knowing what is going on no longer all that important?
These natural environmental factors are closely studied and considered in all global climate change models. Volcanic ash, for example, is present in ice core samples going back hundreds and thousands of years. Your questions are very good ones and important! Scientists definitely consider these things and their impacts over time. This study from 2015 actually helps coorelate reported cold periods with volcanic eruptions around the globe: http://www.washington.edu/news/blog/ice-cores-tree-rings-show-how-huge-volcanic-eruptions-cooled-the-planet/
Andrew, Nick Smith with Healthy forests published a statistic from the OR DEQ last year showing estimated emissions of 2017 Oregon Wildfires compared to all other sources of CO2.
Looks like wildfires contributed 6-8x the emissions of all other industrial sources. 3.3MM tons vs. <500k for all other sources.
http://healthyforests.org/2018/02/2017-oregon-wildfires-emitted-nearly-3-3-million-tons-of-carbon-monoxide/
Alas, that link is misleading. It’s from a group seeking to divert funding from cap-and-trade programs (which are aimed at reducing global carbon dioxide) into their own industry managing forests, because catastrophic wildfires release more carbon monoxide. Megatons of carbon monoxide (which in high concentrations is deadly, but the plume from wildfires is temporary and rarely causes human death from wildfire CO), versus gigatones of carbon dioxide (which lingers in the atmosphere for hundreds of years and causes slow but enormous cumulative effects). They could just as well be arguing to reduce lead contamination in water supplies as an alternative to trying to reduce climate change. Both are worth causes, but neither supplants the other. And it’s not nice to try to confuse people.
Zeph, if you had read the article, source, or original post, you would understand it was published by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. Hardly a source of a conspiracy involving cap & trade policy.
Regarding Healthy Forests, Nick individually advocates for restorative management on our largely overstocked, second-growth public land forests to help rebuild our rural economies & improve the health of the land.