Canada’s Wildfires Causing World’s Worst Air Quality

Unprecedented levels of particulate matter in smoke from Canadian wildfires are causing acutely hazardous air quality levels across the eastern third of North America.
The densest concentration of fires has been centered in Quebec province, but prevailing breezes have spread the event thousands of kilometers southward and eastward.
Despite meteorologically “clear” skies under high pressure on Tuesday, the sun was obscured in Ottawa–Canada’s capital–as eyewitnesses described the scene as post-apocalyptic, per the Toronto Star.
On Wednesday, the New York City skyline was seen on a time-lapse video gradually disappearing behind a thick orange veil.
On the same day, along the rural, idyllic northern shoreline of Lake Ontario–which straddles the U.S.-Canadian border–the usually pristine air of the modest-sized city of Kingston (Ontario province) was measured to be worse than that of New Delhi, India, widely regarded with the dubious distinction as having the world’s worst chronic air pollution problem. The Air Quality Index (A.Q.I.) in the area was quantitatively measured at 492, considered “Hazardous” and literally almost off-the-chart (of which measurement ceases at 500).
Today, central areas of Pennsylvania (U.S.) took the brunt of the conflagration, with an A.Q.I. of 435 recorded in Harrisburg, the state capital.
Outdoor activities have been cancelled or moved indoors, and it is unclear when the smoke will dissipate. The disaster has burned nearly four billion hectares of land, as fire crews from as far way as France and South Africa have assisted. Canada’s most severe wildfire season in thirty years is a virtual certainty, which have thus far incurred forced evacuations, economic disruption, and significant emotional trauma
Typically, the drier, Western provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba experience these events, as it is highly atypical from a climatological perspective for the East to experience such drought and heat so early in the year. (Montreal reached 35 degrees Celsius one day last week in “boasting” the highest temperature on North America’s east coast.
Incidentally, areas of Morocco and Algeria have experienced rain this week and last, an occurrence very rare in June, indeed. Yet, the anachronistic presence of (invariably politically-motivated) climate change denial still exists. So does Flat Earth Society.