This is exactly how the law ought to work. We make exceptions for events that would legitimately obfuscate the data and there is a strict review process (less than 20% of requested exceptions got approved). Increasing numbers of wildfires are a concern, but it's a problem totally unrelated to the EPA's air quality monitoring. The EPA isn't keeping air dirty, it's keeping human activity from making the air excessively more dirty, which is what it's supposed to do.
Yes, let's keep believing that the increase in wildfires isn't in any way related to human activity at all (climate change and bad forestry practices don't exist).
Dust storms in Asia spread further and further (because of deforestation), is that also totally unrelated to human activity?
No one is claiming the wildfires are unrelated to human activity, just that they are unrelated to the EPA's emissions standards, which neither regulate the gasses responsible for climate change, nor affect actions in other nations.
How is it tautological? Anthropomorphic climate change is driven by the global emission of greenhouse gasses that have very little direct effect on air quality. These standards are for regulating local emissions of substances that negatively impact local air quality.
Climate change is a driver here, but the smoke itself is local (at least to the same extent as most regulated emissions) and negatively impacts air quality.
EPA regulation is not going to reduce wildfires. Conflating it's pollution measurements with those from non-industrial sources just makes EPA's job harder and less meaningful.
I was talking about dust storms in my comment, because it happened in the USA as well in the 1930s (dust bowl) and pushed the US government to create the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS).
The point is that there needs to be a regulatory government tool to assess, measure, predict and prevent human-caused natural pollution, be it from dust storms or wildfires or anything else.
If you believe that shouldn't be the EPA's job, then it needs to be someone else's.
How is including days where Canadian smoke covered Ohio, Pennsylvania, and whatever other states useful in regulating pollution caused by local industry?
I explicitly said that if you think it isn't the EPA's job, then it should be someone else's job, and not just ignored. How do you think this could be tackled?
Also, if you have read the article, you could see that Ohio and Pennsylvania were low on the list, with <10 days excluded. California and New Mexico have >50, and that smoke ain't coming from Canada, so your point is deceptive...
> I explicitly said that if you think it isn't the EPA's job, then it should be someone else's job, and not just ignored. How do you think this could be tackled?
I did not explicitly say whether it should be the EPA's job or not. The data being nixed is at the local level. No one said it should be ignored at higher levels.
> Also, if you have read the article, you could see that Ohio and Pennsylvania were low on the list, with <10 days excluded. California and New Mexico have >50, and that smoke ain't coming from Canada, so your point is deceptive...
Sorry, but it is not deceptive. You just seem to fail to understand there can be local level data useful for regulating local companies and macro level data for getting a better overall picture. The article was specifically talking about lower than state level. Should a forest or industrial fire two counties over ruin another county? At least for California, I would imagine the locals have great motivation to have something they have no control over stricken from their record since the state more than likely uses EPA numbers in ways that could hurt them.
> EPA regulation is not going to reduce wildfires.
Not in the US so I'm perhaps missing some context related to which bodies are responsible for which regulation but... why can't EPA regulation reduce wildfires?
EPA can't sue the forest and demand it stop emiting pollution through wildfires. Mother nature doesn't respond to court summons.
Conceivably, the EPA could demand changes in forest stewardship, but a lot of the wildfires are already in national forest land, so the nation forest service would be a more appropriate agency.
EPA could perhaps help issue guidelines and emission allowances for prescriptive burns that should probabalistically reduce wildfire emissions, but will absolutely have emissions during the burns.
The issue highlighted in the article seems to be with the broad classification of all wildfires by the EPA as “natural” or “uncontrollable” events - it's pretty clear that this isn't the reality for the majority of recent wildfires. Though wildfires are historically a natural & necessary occurrence, manmade wildfires are a well-documented occurrence & something the EPA seems well-positioned to take action on.
Unless, that is, I as an ignorant non-US observer am unaware of some other regulatory body that is already (or is better suited to) regulating human contribution to wildfire frequency.
Wildfires are handled by the US Department of the Interior. However they're not really something that can be regulated. Intentionally starting a wildfire is just arson, which would be handled by either local law enforcement or the FBI depending on how big the fires got. But the overwhelming majority of wildfires are unintentional - someone left a campfire unattended, someone didn't properly put out a cigarette, an electrical line went down, etc.
But from an emissions standpoint, the proximate cause of a wildfire is irrelevant. The fact is that a wildfire's emissions are not due to industrial pollution, which is what the EPA regulates.
> they're not really something that can be regulated.
They can be and are regulated, often by controlled burn bans. Climate change isn't the sole human cause of uncontrolled wildfires, nor do they need to be intentional to be suggested to (proximate) human decisions.
Big agree here with a ban on controlled burns, with one caveat: Pine barrens need controlled burns to continue to exist, and should be exempt from that ban.
> Mother nature doesn't respond to court summons...
Conceivably, the EPA could demand changes in forest ownership. When government owns things it does whatever. Some of the worst pollution was from socialst countries without meaningful private property.
No, what we should be doing is sorting out the baseline of natural events from the specific events that can be credited to the industries under your jurisdiction, instead of punishing everyone off of whatever gut feeling of environmental virtue you happen to be feeling that day
No, we shouldn't be removing datapoints. If the law says that you can be in-compliance but remove "force majeure" type events, then so be it.
But the EPA should be tracking and controlling ALL sources of pollution. This is like politicians deciding PI should be 3. EPA numbers are now meaningless, which is probably the point.
But, but but. If an event makes the air super dirty, the government should look for ways to make sure we all put our gran of salt on fixing the problem, instead of hiding it.
> for events that would legitimately obfuscate the data
You'll need to define "legitimately obfuscate" here - presumably you're proposing that a majority of data consumers would consider wildfires irrelevant in their assessment of air quality. Why do you think this?
Anecdata but off the top of my head I can only think of data consumption in which wildfires would be relevant - excluding the data gives a harmfully incomplete picture.
It also strikes me that data annotation would solve whatever your use-case might be if data needs to be excluded?
You seem to be confused, the data isn't being deleted so that no one else can consume it. It is just being annotated to be excluded from the EPA's evaluation of whether stricter pollution controls than already implemented are necessary.
No, it's positing that valid pollution control measures don't reduce human caused wildfires. These specific valid pollution control measures are just restrictions on industrial emissions, not "all conceivable pollution controls".
The problem is, it makes the data less usable for people depending on actual air quality (e.g. asthmatics). For them, it doesn't matter if they have difficulty breathing because there's a factory running decades old tech upwind or if it is because every year the smoke from wildfires makes everything smell like a badly lit BBQ.
The data isn't being deleted, it's being ignored when the EPA needs to determine if pollution controls need to be added. Yes, asthmatics don't care about the source of pollution, but the EPA doesn't care about asthmatics. It's job is regulating human polluters; asthmatics are the concern of the department of health and human services.
I find it difficult to believe that people would be shocked to discover that datapoints can be removed as a result of the spike identified as non-human-caused pollution.
We can’t regulate acts of nature, even if these acts are made worse by carbon emissions, as it’s useless to include data about these events as the EPA regulations are focused on voluntary emissions.
The real problem is that we rely on the blunt instrument of overall air quality to measure elective pollution in a shared atmosphere. This is far from my area of expertise so I don’t know how or if it’s possible to fix this measurement problem.
I doubt we can control something like a volcano, but the main example in the article, wildfires, can absolutely be controlled more than they are today.
If your dataset excludes natural fires, but doesn't exclude controlled burns, for example, controlled burns would end up looking more negative because they cause pollution and don't get "credit" for any prevention.
It sounds like we’re either measuring the wrong thing or putting too much weight behind a measurement that sums up an inherently complex system. This measurement matters enough to be able to petition days to be excluded, why can’t we just codify the exclusion of clearly out-of-normal datapoints? Ignoring everything else, a random spike caused by anything transient is not useful information to us, our goals need to be aligned to the trend over time.
In an ideal world, I don't think opinionated manipulation of the underlying dataset is a good idea. If you want to avoid outliers dominating your analysis, you should aggregate it in an outlier resistant method like using the median or other percentile based strategy.
If you allow for manipulating the data, especially on such a politically charged subject, the manipulation method itself will get gamed like it seems is happening here.
I love clean air but I find the article's title and opener a little unrealistic. I probably missed the gist here of the article but it seems to me this number being calculated by the EPA is being used to go after local governments and commercial polluters. They have no control over pollution from wildfires. Do we measure the number in the AM and decide its too high and tell everyone in the plant to go home for the day? Pollution is bad but this to be going after it the wrong way, should we not be focusing more on the past few years of insane wildfires?
For the purposes of tracking direct man-made pollution ignoring wildfires and other “acts of God” is the way to go. You get absurd data otherwise - none of the EPA’s tools “work” against wildfire pollution so it makes sense to factor that out.
However, later misuse of the data for other purposes may cause issues - if you were very sensitive to pollution you’d want to know where the wildfire areas are and avoid them, and the EPA data doesn’t show that.
> none of the EPA’s tools “work” against wildfire pollution so it makes sense to factor that out.
Factor that out for part of the analysis on one hand, and include it and add some new tools to the EPA on the other.
Wildfires are made worse by bad forest management and climate change, and the USA isn't a small player in the field. Claiming that it can't have an impact is preposterous.
Is there any evidence most wild fires are not direct consequence of human action?
This "act of good" argument seems disingenuous as even if no direct human action caused the fire, there is evidence that human actions caused general higher risks for wild fires in certain areas.
Something can be the consequences of human action and still not under the purview of the particular agency.
The EPA could likely require changes to certain things that might mitigate some possible causes of wildfires (like building clearances, smokestack spark arrestors, etc) - but other cases of "human caused" including direct arson aren't under it's jurisdiction.
The problem comes when there's stuff that falls through the cracks as it is under nobody's jurisdiction.
Foresters have been complaining for years that they are not allowed to manage forests the way they should be. Every time they try to start a fire to burn of underbrush someone goes to court to get an injunction against it.
It also seems like the EPA has the power to accept or deny requests:
> In total, local regulators made note of almost 700 exceptional events. The EPA agreed to adjust the data on 139 of them.
So the EPA is only making adjustments for 20% of the events, and it seems like the EPA has the ultimate authority here. Doesn’t seem like there’s an issue.
I think I’d take issue with the article calling this a loophole when it’s exactly how the law was designed to operate.
If I had to take the opposite stance I would say that our lungs and bodies can’t tell the difference where the pollution comes from. Perhaps a state with more frequent wildfires does need to have more stringent human-made emissions standards than states that have few wildfires to keep the overall air quality at an acceptable level.
As an analogy, a state with more snowfall might need to spend more money on snow removal and road resurfacing. We don’t just throw up our arms and say “sorry we aren’t doing anything about it because it isn’t the state’s fault.”
Why is a single day of productivity more important than the health of the country? Also, the last few years of insane wildfires are in part due to climate change. We're way past the point of both having and eating that particular cake, as it's long past its expiration date.
That said, Covid has already seen us pick "productivity" over what was basically the health of the entire country, so...
productivity is what feeds and powers the country. it's amazing how many people forget that no amount of financial engineering will permanently abstract the physical output of goods and services countries produce. there's a line between PE vultures juicing the marginal penny and just totally discarding productivity.
I chose the CNN one at random, it doesn’t mention the motive of the arsonists. I don’t think you can just assume they are all due to climate activists.
As far as I can tell, only one of them hints at even a potential political motive, and that was an animal rights activist burning down a slaughterhouse.
doesn't really matter what the motives are - the news regularly tell us that the wildfires are a result of climate change (with no proof) - when in fact a lot of them are caused by arsonists - clearly not by climate change. Nothing wrong with calling out lies in the media.
The key metric of wildfires that climate change affects is their intensity - once the fire is lit, they'll cause far more destruction and burn much longer in a hot, dry environment than they will in a cold wet one.
Is there actually any evidence of this? I agree with the mechanism you describe, but I imagine increasing temps by a degree would have marginal effects compared to things like forest management.
If we want to reduce harms from fires, I don’t think combatting climate change would make the top 5 in terms of effective policy.
If there was some backroom conspiracy on a mission to erode pollution standards, this is how they would do it: "What about natural disasters! Why are counties getting a free pass when nature strikes, but not when industry operates!"
I don't believe that the root cause of this article is anything like that (sibling comment points out an interesting subtlety, why are they allowed to hide the numbers, instead of granting a visible exception in terms of enforcement?), but it would look pretty much the same.
USA can control half the World when they want to impose profit-making sanctions against Huawei, or to increase copyright terms; I can't see how they couldn't do something on air pollution if they wished to.
Find a way to make it make absurd profits for USA business and it'll happen.
Aside from that, is Canadian produced air pollution a problem in USA?
In theory, we napalm and some F-16s laying around somewhere. It would be a very American solution to the problem. Doubly so if we avoid doing controlled burns in our territory.
Does the reverse not happen in the Northern of the States of USA? Are approaches better in USA, do you do more controlled burns? Is wind direction generally Southerly along the border?
Along the New York / Canadian border, yes the wind is generally southerly and easterly, very rarely are you getting the wind to go up from new york and into Canada. Since the fires were in Ontario, that wind brought it over Lake Ontario, and down across new york and down the coast.
On a little bit of a tangent, this article made me think about how far we've come in terms of air quality in Southern California. We can and should always do better. But in my high school years, we had up to 160 hazardous/very unhealthy air days in a year, and up to 305 mildly unhealthy to very unhealthy days that same year (1981). For comparison, in 2022, we had one hazardous/very unhealthy day, and fewer than 10 every year from 2007 on, with the exception of 2020. That actually inspires me when we see actual results from the efforts.
Look up images of LA pollution in the 1970s and 1980s. It was madness. And even with that obvious, visible soup we called air back then, there was extreme resistance to anti-pollution measures.
From the graphs in the article it's clear that the omitted days were very close to each other, almost a vertical line in some. That seems to indicate that these are from particular events, rather than just chopping out inconveniently high readings that happen to cross the line. Not that this rule can't be abused, but these spikes look like relatively isolated events that local enforcers may have no control over.
On the days of the outlier events, I don't think it is exactly hidden on how things are going, is it? I certainly know when wildfires are causing bad air here and we don't go out on those days, if we can avoid it.
I can kind of see how it is annoying to allow outliers to be struck from target measuring goals. That said, I also don't see how or why it helps people that are trying to hit targets to include the outliers that they didn't cause. If anything, that would help obscure if they were also rising.
Why are the air quality measurement devices located on the roof (pictures in tge article)? Fresh air is up there, but what people breathe is air closer to the surface.
There's not going to be any significant difference between 2m and 10m.
A better question might be why they are measuring temperature there on a hot roof and not over grass. According to NOAA, that's a Class 5 location (the worst):
Class 5 (error ≥ 5ºC) – Temperature sensor located next to/above an artificial heating source, such a building, roof top, parking lot, or concrete surface. (Section 2.2.1 of the U. S. Climate Reference Network Site Information Handbook)
Edge effects are a massive thing in fluid flow. I'd expect there to be a significant difference between air quality at ground level (human mouth level) and 2nd-storey level. Isn't the turbulent flow around ground obstructions likely to make more pollutants gather in the boundary layer, and the lower flow rate ensure they're not swept away? (I don't know the answer, I'm asking a question to check my intuition)
The cylindrical unit half way up the pole and to the right with the louvres is a solar radiation shield that would be typical for containing a thermometer and possibly a humidity sensor - the louvres let the air through without letting direct sunlight hit the thermometer and throw off its reading.
But I’m sure they aren’t using it as a calibrated value (obviously they would have guidelines for placement and would know this doesn’t meet them), it’s probably just being used as an indicative reading.
I'd assume (maybe wrongly) proper air measurement would require some adjustment for things like density based on altitude, temperature, etc so there's a standard to compare it to.
Natural fires have been happening naturally for, what millions of years? All of the rest of nature seems to be able to cope with that, and even we've survived up until today...
The seas also get "polluted" by underwater volcanic vents, amongst other natural things, constantly...
It makes no sense to stand over a fire and inhale the smoke, or to drink the water from too close to those vents, but are we really trying to change the nature of the planet?
I mean, who's going to stop the sand from the Sahara Desert making it's way over to the UK for everything that breaths air to breath in, not to mention leaving a layer of red dust everywhere, especially on vehicles and the like, caught by the dew that happens naturally when the temperature changes.
Shouldn't the focus be more on what industry is doing to the air and water and soil, and what we seem to be inadvertently supporting with the present lifestyle?
> All of the rest of nature seems to be able to cope with that, and even we've survived up until today...
Extinctions are a very natural thing, too. Polio is natural. Smallpox was. Humans tend to want some control over the environment they live in.
> Shouldn't the focus be more on what industry is doing to the air and water and soil, and what we seem to be inadvertently supporting with the present lifestyle?
"Is the air clean" statistics should reflect if the air is clean, as a variety of decisions on ventilation, filtration, etc. rely on it. "Is the air polluted by humans" is a different question.
And that desire for control leads humans to suppress small fires, which then leads them to build settlements literally in the middle of the forest and to neglect trimming trees around power lines because fires are kept under control, until, because of drought caused by climate change it's not possible to keep them under control anymore, and then you get huge fires which cause pollution thousands of miles away (and the destruction of the settlements in the middle of the forest and also some which were previously thought at a safe distance)...
Most people forget that the Sahara Desert is man-made. Back during the Cathigenian period, the southern Mediterranian was the breadbasket of Rome, and the land was verdant plains, antelope, hippos, rivers and streams everywhere.
Is there good evidence that either are becoming more frequent?
I’ve seen some rough evidence for wildfires increasing, but in most places this seems to be a function of less aggressive forest management (controlled burns and clearing).
For trains, I would guess that overall train frequency is increasing over time (more people need more stuff transported) so the frequency of derailments should increase proportionally.
Can we have a new rule? Anytime a clickbait headline such as this is posted, the top comment is just a reworked headline with the missing pieces revealed.
