The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track planetary extreme, or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😉
Main Topic: Wildfire Smoke is Seeping into Homes More Often Due to Climate Change
Dear Diary. Today’s main topic is fairly obvious. Where there is wildfire there is smoke. Even if your property is not damaged from wildfires, be they just miles away or if large hundreds of miles away, your home probably will have indoor pollutants depending on the direction of prevailing winds. These indoor smoke particles can be very bad for your health, not to mention adding to increased dust and vacuuming duties.
Climate change has greatly increased smokey wildfires across North America and elsewhere. During 2023 wildfires large dense columns of smoke spread deep into the United State from Canada where record acreage burned. Here is one photo of a smokey New York City from that summer:
This year wildfires are striking Canada early:
Here are more details from the Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2025/05/14/wildfire-smoke-health-indoor-air-quality
Wildfire smoke seeps into homes. Global protection would cost billions.
People are often told to stay indoors when the air is thick with wildfire smoke, but pollutants get in. A study shows the most affected the parts of the world.
May 14, 2025
A wildfire approaches a home near Hemet, California, west of Los Angeles, in 2022. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images)
By Ruby Mellen
When wildfires burn, residents as far as hundreds of miles away maybe advised by health officials to stay inside, to protect themselves from the harmful smoke that can travel across entire continents.
But sheltering indoors might not be as safe as we think, according to research published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, because microscopic pollution from these blazes can seep into homes and other buildings. More than a billion people worldwide — around 1 in 8 on Earth — were exposed to at least one day of unhealthy air from wildfires annually from 2003 to 2022 while staying inside, researchers found.
When it comes to protecting yourself from wildfire smoke, the indoors are safer than the outdoors, but exposure to dangerous particles from smoke is still a possibility.
Air purifiers and proper insulation can help stave off these hazards. But they are costly, creating disparities in which poorer parts of the world bear the brunt of the harm, the researchers said. According to their models, the countries that experienced the most indoor wildfire smoke exposure were predominantly low-income and lower-income countries in central Africa.
“The unequal distribution of resources, resulting from socioeconomic disparities, has the potential to exacerbate global injustice,” the authors wrote, “by exposing those who cannot afford the cost of air purifiers to higher health risks.”
Wildfires — and their smoke — are becoming more and more of a reality for much of the world. The season has kicked off in North America with fierce blazes and plummeting air quality in many parts of the country, including the Southeast, Midwest and Mid-Atlantic. The American Lung Association’s 2025 report on air quality found that 25 million more people in the United States breathed unhealthy air last year than the year before, due in part to extreme heat, drought and wildfires.
Past research has mostly focused on outdoor exposure to wildfire particulate matter, but people spend more than 80 percent of their time indoors, the authors said. And “during wildfire smoke events, people are often advised and inclined to stay indoors to seek refuge from both the smoke and heat.”
Smoke contains fine particles, referred to as PM2.5, that are about a 30th the width of a human hair and can travel into our hearts and lungs — as well as creeping through the minuscule cracks in our windows and doors. Exposure to these particles has been linked to respiratory illnesses, dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and increased overall mortality.
Air purifiers can mitigate these hazards, but they are expensive. The researchers looked at three hypothetical scenarios of global air-purifier use and estimated the cost per country. Ensuring every house experiences the World Health Organization-recommended annual limit of PM2.5 concentrations under 5 micrograms per cubic meter could cost more than $4 trillion, according to the researchers’ models. But pollution and even certain kinds of cooking can all produce these fine particles. Just mitigating wildfire PM2.5 would cost more than $68 billion.
The western coast of North America and northern Asia — where large Siberian wildfires regularly rage — would see the highest total price tag, but Africa would incur the highest cost per person.
Wednesday’s study is one of the few to look at wildfire smoke indoors across the world.
“Looking at the issue from the global perspective is very difficult to do,” said Yifang Zhu, a professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.Data across countries on wildfire-related indoor air quality is limited and uneven. “There is also a general scarcity of prior research on this topic in many parts of the world,” she added. Zhu and her team have been collecting samples and data since the Los Angeles fires in January to understand more about their impacts on public health.
The authors’ global ambition comes with caveats, noted Zhu, who was an anonymous peer reviewer of the paper. Given the lack of localized data from every country, the scientists had to make assumptions. But because the authors combined their data from many sources and developed a range of scenarios, the main findings of cost and vulnerability are clear, she said — including the financial burden many regions face to improve indoor air quality during fires.
“Air purifiers are simple and easy to implement, but they have a certain economic burden in low- and middle-income countries and require policy design,” said Bin Zhao, one of the paper’s authors and an associate professor at Tsinghua University’s School of Environment.
For Zhu, such blueprints would entail more subsidized assistance.
“The cost in my mind, especially for those low-income countries, should not be borne by individuals at a personal level. This is more a government responsibility,” she said, adding that people shouldn’t have to decide between whether to eat or whether to buy an air purifier.
“These people have the right to breathe clean air inside their homes,” she said.
Wildfires in Los Angeles
The latest: At least 27 people have died in multiple wildfires around Los Angeles. The Palisades Fire has destroyed thousands of buildings and burned through more than 23,700 acres, and the Eaton Fire consumed more than 14,000 acres — though crews were gaining ground on both after more than a week of fighting the flames. Track their spread in maps.
What we know about the fires: The direct cause of the fires has not been determined, but the Palisades Fire may have been caused by the reignition of a previous blaze. A Washington Post review found a key “weakness” in the Los Angeles fire strategy went unaddressed for years. The extreme behavior of the fires made containment efforts a challenge — and Los Angeles’ urban sprawl and water system left the city particularly unprepared for multiple blazes. See before and after images of the devastation, and our visual timeline of how the fires evolved.
Life in Los Angeles: The fires erupted quickly, in a way residents knew was possible but many were unprepared for. For the city’s service workers, the flames took jobs and dreams. For many, recovery will be slow and uncertain. Families of notable sports figures were among those who evacuated, and the flames forced cancellations of Hollywood events while some celebrities’ homes burned down.
Related:
Here are more “ETs” recorded from around the planet the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks, as well as any extreme precipitation reports:
Here is More Climate News from Tuesday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)