25 July 2014
Wildfire Smoke Reaches New York and Ontario
Posted by Dan Satterfield
The wildfires from Washington and western/northern Canada continue to send a shroud of dense smoke to areas thousands of miles away. It’s been an almost autumn like afternoon over the Northeast U.S., and here in Maryland we have a deep blue sky with low humidity. No deep blue sky to our north however, where a dense layer of smoke covers southern Canada and New England.
Below is the temperature anomalies for the month of July through the 24th, and the warm and dry weather continues for much of the western third of North America.
our own monitoring systems haven’t picked this up here in ottawa. i walked out this morning and was choking on the air. how long is this going to hang around here??–we’ll never know by our pathetic monitoring standards. i can tell (i have bronchitis) when the air is good or bad before the knobs at environment canada get off their arses and let us know how bad it is. without getting into a rant on how bad the situation is in the world with regards to air quality and climate change…. this country is getting worse every year with massive fires and the horrible resulting smoke that travels thousands of miles. we can be guaranteed every summer to have weeks of terrible air quality from fires that are so much more enormous. if not for the many volunteers and “private” ventures like yourself i fear we would never find out anything.
Don’t be too hard on EC, John. They’ve had their monitoring budgets slashed, communicating anything to the public can be grounds for job dismissal or discipline as the rules seemingly are applied arbitrarily to situations in which they weren’t supposed to applied in the first place. In fact, every environmental monitoring agency across Canada has been muzzled and budgets cut to the point of making them nearly useless (air, water, wildlife, fisheries, weather, climate).
Our government doesn’t want any agency giving them information that may interfere with their business comes first mindset—and that includes agencies like stats Canada and even our various archival libraries, all of which have suffered butchering cuts and have been told not to communicate with the public until getting their message approved by a muppet controlled by the PM.
I have to agree, the muzzling of scientists in Canada has damaged the countries reputation in the international community, and I have talked with several EC folks who tell me that budgets and equipment are getting ever worse.