I Do Not Like Mondays

“It smells like a bonfire,” my wife noted as we got into the car and went out on a drive. She pegged it: yellowish haze loomed overhead and seemed to continue all the way down to ground level.

It’s noticeable enough almost to stick to your clothes, so you can smell it when you come back indoors.

Canada is right now reporting a whopping nearly 860 active wildfires, and closest to us in Connecticut, Quebec has 190 active wildfires and Ontario has about 180. The state of Minnesota also has many wildfires blazing away.

Pretty concerning when the swath of smoke and pollutants is spreading over not only those locations, but across a number of U.S. states. That’s a very sizeable land mass. I also heard from my family in Upstate New York, and the smoke and haze are worse there than here.  

What caused all these fires? Supposedly, it’s been bouts of extreme heat this summer coupled with lightning strikes during storms stoked by clashing environmental conditions.

Sometimes I reflect on these things, and I like to say “We broke Earth.” Do you chalk it up to the malaise of global warming?

Just being honest, it doesn’t even feel like the same sun we had when I grew up. It feels much stronger and extreme now than several decades ago.

And if you want my opinion, I’ll tell you I think we’re burning too much across the world. The global human population has exploded over the past several decades, and all those people tend to have needs such as transportation, electricity, and so on.

Those needs require that we burn more and more things — like in engines and power plants — to meet them. It’s pretty simple. All that carbon dioxide caused by the burning is disrupting how Earth’s atmosphere works, radiating heat back to the ground and magnifying it.

It’s baking us.

These past few days have come with air quality warnings for vulnerable groups, such as those with respiratory conditions. It’s not all that healthy out there for the rest of us, either.

What do you hope for to fix the wildfire situation at hand? Maybe a good stretch of a good, drenching rain, and expedient efforts to contain and control the flames.

It’s been a pretty intense summer so far. Here’s hoping all those wildfires will soon be brought under control!