Kate Cell and Amanda Fencl contributed to this post
This week in Danger Season, people across large areas of the Midwest and Northeast are breathing dangerous air as climate-exacerbated wildfires in Canada and the western US send smoke eastward. Meanwhile, the Trump administration doubles down on convincing us there’s no danger in a changing climate, whatever our stinging eyes and lungs may say.
Beware the air
This week, some of the worst air quality (AQ) conditions on Earth enveloped US cities, particularly in the Midwest and Northeast. The air in Chicago and Detroit registered among the top 3 most polluted, globally. Unhealthy conditions were widespread, including in Syracuse, New York, where UCS Science Fellow Marc Alessi reported air quality index (AQI) values above 100 and air quality alerts issued by the National Weather Service in effect since Sunday. In coastal Massachusetts, where air quality only reached “moderate” danger, my asthma, normally inactive, has been flaring.
The Air Quality Index (AQI), EPA’s tool for reporting air quality, combines monitoring of five major air pollutants regulated by the Clean Air Act, including the particle pollution found in wildfire smoke. The current acute air quality situation is mainly the result of the large wildfires burning in North America, particularly in Canada, but also in parts of the western United States.
When a fire consumes a tree, the smoke it sends aloft includes particulate matter fine enough to be transported thousands of miles on prevailing winds. (The smoke that has blotted out blue skies in New England this week traveled onward over the Atlantic to reach western Europe as well.)
Those particulates are so fine that, when inhaled, they can travel deep into the lungs and even enter the bloodstream. The people at greatest risk from breathing wildfire smoke are people with cardiovascular or respiratory disease, people who are elderly, young, pregnant, outdoor workers, and of low income. Whether or not you are among the folks at greatest risk from the health impacts of breathing smoke, it’s worth digging out your COVID K/N95 masks to protect yourself when air quality conditions get dangerous. This is particularly important any time wildfire encroaches and burns in residential areas where household items, when incinerated, mobilize toxic heavy metals and other carcinogens.
Where there’s smoke there’s climate-driven fire
The 2025 wildfire situation in Canada, the main source of our current air quality trouble, is on track to be the country’s second worst year on record. Already, an area roughly the size of West Virginia has burned, more than double the 10-year average area burned by this date. Roughly 60 large fires are currently burning uncontrolled.
Looking ahead, the North American wildfire season tends to extend well into the fall and the forecast for the next two months is indeed for ongoing, widespread, and increasing fire risk.
These wildfires are being made worse by climate change, which can increase the conditions conducive to fires. In western North America, climate change nearly doubled the area burned by wildfires between 1984 and 2015. As my colleague, UCS Scientist Carly Phillips, recently blogged:
The wildfires burning now aren’t the same fires that burned 30 years ago. They are burning at higher elevations, over longer fire seasons, growing with greater speed, and under more extreme fire weather conditions. They are also burning later into the night and ramping up earlier in the morning, due in part to increases in vapor pressure deficit, an increase in which has been attributed to climate change. Fires are also burning at higher severity, […].
“No danger to see here”?
The Trump administration would like us to believe their claim that there’s no need to regulate power plant and vehicle heat-trapping emissions because there’s no real danger in the climate change they cause.
The administration would also like us to believe that there are sufficient wildland firefighters to help keep communities safe. The truth is there remains a high vacancy rate. ProPublica and other outlets’ reporting demonstrate how the DOGE-related cuts and forced early resignations leave us woefully unprepared for this year’s fires with nearly a third of open firefighting jobs still vacant as of mid-July. In California, Governor Newsom is sending the President model Executive Order language to facilitate federal level staffing improvements.
As has been on terrible display in Danger Season 2025—between flooding, extreme heat, drought, wildfires, and this week’s unhealthy air, many harms of which are exacerbated by the administration’s actions—we are deeply endangered.
Not only is there danger, there’s accountability for it
In 2023, UCS released research showing that nearly 40% of the total area burned between 1986 and 2020 in the western United States and southwestern Canada can be attributed to the emissions traced to the world’s 88 largest fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers.
That is of course the industry being served by the Trump administration’s ongoing work to roll back fossil fuel regulation and derail climate science. That is of course the industry that has deceived the public for decades on the climate dangers of using their product.
Push back against the danger
As we wrote last week, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a proposed rule to undo the agency’s 2009 foundational scientific finding that global warming pollution endangers public health and the environment.
Please take time now to tell the EPA that its mission is to protect the public and the environment, not to make policy based on climate disinformation. Submit your comments to the EPA.
Plus, Congress is now fully in recess, and your elected officials read the local papers when they’re home. It’s a good time for a letter to the editor about what you’re experiencing during Danger Season, because it’s NOT a good time to roll back funding or staffing for FEMA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
And if smoke gets serious where you are, consider finding a local mutual aid group collecting and distributing masks for your unhoused neighbors. For example, when wildfire smoke is bad in Oakland, California, Director of Climate Science Amanda Fencl supports Mask Oakland.
We’ll be back next week. In the meantime, tell your friends: believe your lungs, not the lies.