when I was a little kid watching LotR for the first time and Boromir described Mordor by saying "the very air you breathe is a poisonous fume" I thought, okay I get what you're going for, but even for this setting that's a little over the top melodramatic, dontcha think?

now I can't leave my house because the greed of evil men has literally corrupted the very essence of the Earth and blotted out the Sun

Wow! We're officially the worst air quality in the world right now!

I travelled up to Michigan to visit family and friends for a few weeks, as well as enjoy the lake. Can't go outside because the air is, according to the news, "the equivalent of smoking 17 cigarettes for every hour you're outside".

Shits fucked up here right now.

There are people responsible for climate change. We should feed them to the fires. Perhaps it will appease the gods.

Welcome to what the west coast has been dealing with for many years now. There are more important people in the east maybe we'll start to think about trying to start to take this seriously.

This is fine.

don't worry, USA cut all of the ability for the EPA to do anything, so this will definitely get better.

This afternoon...

There's also Windy for a more detailed map. Also just a cool website.

500 where I am right now. I didn’t even have a sense of the AQI scale until today, and now it’s quite skewed.

674...is there even air in there?

I live in southern Minnesota and had to drive up to St Paul this morning. Anything more then a few feet away looked like it had a grey filter over it. A block away and it looked like it was shot in black and white.

I came back from vacation this week, and it was quite a moment when I saw the sun rising in the morning, through a yellow haze, colored a fluorescent shade of “apocalypse pink.” Very reassuring, very comforting.

I should’ve stayed up in the mountains a while longer.

Reminds me of the videos people made of the smoke in San Francisco in the style of blader runner 2049 during covid times

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_m9TUP_t_Y

So how long until the boreal forests burn up and this ends?

I woke up thinking the house was on fire, the smell of smoke was so thick. I'm not even in the worst parts.

Can people catch explosive diarrhea from this too?... But really, I'm surprised there's data on this but not that

I was in NYC today. The visibility is bad, probably down to less than a mile sometimes, but the local airport says it was 2 miles.

If people are in the affected areas, check out https://worldwide-maskbloc.org/ to see if there's a mask bloc near you! I'm a part of one, and we've been giving a lot of masks the last two days.

Take care!

What is happening? Arent there air usually very clean?

Last year our area hit 800+. It was surreal. Apocalyptic looking skies.