Wednesday, June 07, 2023
The Smoke in Jersey
I flew out of Newark Airport yesterday, and the haze there was overwhelming-- a thick smoke that dulled out everything.
It wasn't that bad in New York yesterday morning (where it had rained), but on the NJ Transit train to the airport I thought something was wrong with the windows, as everything was blurred out and tinted brown. (It's something that one might expect, after all). But later it became clear that the scrim was not the windows, but the air.
Wildfires in Canada are creating this, and it has affected a wide swath of the midwest and the east. The increasing prevalence of these wildfires is, of course, linked to climate change. It's one more of the bits of our lives that will be effected by what seems like a small change in global temperature-- a crisis that we refuse to address with the alacrity we bring to bear on, say, the crisis created by having two professional golf leagues.
The plane slid through the grime, rose up above and found sunshine. But that escape is not a solution.
