Could Wildfire Smoke Become America's Leading Climate Health Threat By 2050?

'New research suggests ash and soot from burning wildlands has caused more than 41,000 excess deaths annually from 2011 to 2020,' reports the Los Angeles Times:

By 2050, as global warming makes large swaths of North America hotter and drier, the annual death toll from smoke could reach between 68,000 and 71,000, without stronger preventive and public health measures...

In the span studied, millions of people were exposed to unhealthful levels of air pollution. When inhaled, this microscopic pollution not only aggravates people's lungs, it also enters the bloodstream, provoking inflammation that can induce heart attacks and stroke. For years, researchers have struggled to quantify the danger the smoke poses. In the paper published in Nature, they report it's far greater than public health officials may have recognized. Yet most climate assessments 'don't often include wildfire smoke as a part of the climate-related damages. And it turns out, by our calculation, this is one of the most important climate impacts in the U.S.'

The study also estimates a higher number of deaths than previous work in part because it projected mortality up to three years after a person has been exposed to wildfire smoke. It also illustrates the dangers of smoke drifting from fire-prone regions into wetter parts of the country, a recent phenomenon that has garnered more attention with large Canadian wildfires contributing to hazy skies in the Midwest and East Coast in the last several years. 'Everybody is impacted across the U.S.,' said Minghoa Qiu [lead author and assistant professor at Stony Brook University]. 'Certainly the Western U.S. is more impacted. But the Eastern U.S. is by no means isolated from this problem.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.