Forest Fire Smoke and Mirrors

Steven Milloy of Junk Science fame debunks the hysteria surrounding the smoke from Canadian wildfires. Among other things, he notes that "At least eighteen of these dark or 'yellow days' occurred in the US and Canada from 1706 to 1910."

On top of all this, Milloy raises a fair question:

Image by Marcus Kauffman, via Unsplash, license.

Per EPA's PM2.5 [soot --ed] modeling, New York City's death rate should have just about doubled on June 7-8. But not a death occurred that was or could be attributed to the atrocious air.

Even EPA's back-up expectation of an epidemic of asthma failed. While emergency room visits for asthma did uptick on June 7, the uptick was not all that much greater than a similar uptick six weeks before the wind shift to which no one paid any attention.

Though New York City has almost 8.8 million people, 10 percent for whom are reportedly asthmatic, only about 200 more visits than average were made to hospital ERs on June 7-8. Hardly apocalyptic.

Given that asthma can be an anxiety-driven condition and that the media was bent on creating as much anxiety as possible, one might fairly wonder if many-to-all of those "extra" visits were really caused by media scare-mongering... [link omitted, bold added]

Way back in my Navy days, our command was involved in a dangerous incident. News of this incident was leaked before relatives were informed that we were okay -- sending one of the officers' wives to the hospital with an asthma attack.

Whatever the case, this episode is global warming hysteria in miniature: Irresponsible and unaccountable members of the press carelessly cause panic with garbage "analysis" and predictions, which can cause real harm, including bad energy policy -- while blaming energy producers for something they did not cause.

Oddly enough, we are lucky to hear anything at all about how wrong (factually or morally) any of this is.

-- CAV