Ozone pollution has worsened in much of the continental United States over the past decade, fueled by wildfires and the long-distance transport of unhealthy air, according to a new study titled “Fires reverse progress toward ozone air quality standards in the U.S.,” led by University of Iowa researchers and published in the journal Science.
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Forests need to burn. It’s part of their natural cycle. Problem is climate change is exasperating droughts & heat waves which in turn are causing fires to burn out of control. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-46702-0
We need to shift our wildfire management from preventing forest fires entirely to mitigating the harm they do to protecting human life, infrastructure, and wildlife (prevent animal encirclement by fire).
I’m sure the environment would handle the pollutant influx of more wildfires just fine if we weren’t doing the equivalent of burning a continent’s worth of grasslands a year.
Do you mean like from agriculture burns?
All I know is that we’ve effectively delayed the fires, not prevented them. Now that the weather is hotter and drier it’s burning regardless.
No I meant that all the fossil fuels we burn are overloading the ecosystems ability to absorb it all, and normally it wouldn’t have a problem absorbing the CO2 from more wildfires if we weren’t doing that.
