We all know smoking cigarettes is bad for you. So just imagine how bad it is to smoke a Canadian pine tree! Because that’s what we’ve been doing lately. Although Canada is pretty far from Iowa, we (along with 100 million other Americans) were strangling under a toxic haze from more than 500 out-of-control Canadian wild fires that have already incinerated more than 20 million acres.
I used to heat with wood in the winter and I still love the smell of wood smoke. But why does this smoke smell like burned plastic? Well, it turns out that the smoke from the wildfires is made up of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) which combine in the atmosphere with ultraviolet radiation to form formaldehyde (you know, that stuff they use in embalming fluid) and benzene, a highly flammable chemical and a principal component of gasoline. So the smog smells like burning plastic. And it’s not good for you.
Not surprisingly, people have been complaining of sore throats, headaches, nausea, difficulty breathing and heart palpitations. And just when we thought we could put away our N95 Covid masks, now health experts are advising us to mask up again if we have to spend much time outside. The Air Quality Index (AQI) in Des Moines last Wednesday hit an “unhealthy” 172 while Dubuque’s air was rated “very unhealthy” at 217. Softball games at Linn-Mar were cancelled due to dangerously poor air and Xavier softball and baseball were also shut down.
The smog was so bad in New York City that the AQI hit 392. It was estimated that breathing this level of pollution for 24 hours was the equivalent of smoking 22 cigarettes. While there are notable differences between cigarettes and pine trees, the smoke they produce is chemically not that different. Dr. John Balmes, a University of California, San Francisco pulmonologist, told the Daily Mail, “Biomass smoke from wildfires is very similar to tobacco smoke, without the nicotine.” (And cigarettes don’t have gasoline and embalming fluid.)
Having a poisonous cloud blanketing much of the United States seems bad. But to put things in perspective, back in 1883 on the Indonesian island of Krakatoa, there was a volcanic eruption so powerful, it was considered to have been 13,000 times greater than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The sound of the blast was heard 2,200 miles away in Perth, Australia. It destroyed 165 villages in the area, spewing an unimaginable six cubic miles of rock into the sky, killing 36,417 people. Ash and steam hung in the air for months and global temperatures dropped by over two degrees and oceans cooled for over a century.
In 79 A.D. the city of Pompeii, Italy was buried in ash when the volcano on Mount Vesuvius, threw rock and pumice into the air at the rate of 1.5 million tons per second, catching the stunned residents off guard so suddenly that they were sometimes preserved in the act of going about their daily routines, giving archeologist a snapshot of their lives.
Then there was the giant asteroid that struck the Earth 66 million years ago, wiping out three-fourths of all living species including the dinosaurs, blocking out the sun, releasing sulfur dioxide and producing acid rain. Breathing that air would have been as bad as smoking—well, a lot of cigarettes.
Living in Iowa: If you go outside, try not to breathe
July 6, 2023