IN THE COMMENTS: Chest Rockwell said: "There's a calculator for that!"
Thanks! So it's like I'm smoking 10 cigarettes today. That's about the number of actual cigarettes I've smoked in my entire life.
There's also this, from Enigma, about why cigarette smoke is much worse.
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Filtered or unfiltered?
Why? Do you need to know how much to cut back to even things out? ;-)
A quick DuckDuckGo search reveals:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33823195/
Our results showed that intrathoracic deposition was higher in cigarette smoking, with 36.8% of inhaled biomass smoke particles and 57.7% of cigarette smoke particles depositing in the intrathoracic airways. We observed higher fractions of cigarette smoke particles in the last few airway generations, which could explain why cigarette smoking is associated with more emphysema than biomass smoke exposure. Mean daily deposited dose was two orders of magnitude higher in cigarette smoking.
Two orders of magnitude higher in cigarettes: An order of magnitude is 10x greater than the starting value, so cigarettes were 100x worse than the level of biomass smoke they evaluated in this study.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude
There's a calculator for that!
We've got over 200 here in the Detroit area. Went out for a walk though, didn't seem too bad.
Close your house and run the AC. If you have it.
I lived in the SLC basin. Every day looks like this during the inversion layer. Lungs burn when you step outside. Don't.
That dial thingie with alarming colors looks like Pure Science. Never you mind about cigarette equivalency, purple means you’re doomed. Just like global warming!
Eventually, someone will attempt to convert the carbon content of the Canadian forest fires to the equivalent output of, say, the US, expressed in terms of yearly global warming CO2 output due to manufacturing, vehicles, power generation, and so on.
If Canada won't do anything about these wildfires that pollute our air, then we should do it for them. Where are the environmentalists when you need them? Isn't this a major carbon pollution event? Compare to pizza ovens in NYC?
For folks who have forced air heating/cooling, it might make sense to temporarily flip the thermostat’s FAN mode from “AUTO” to “FAN ON”. Right now, the weather is neither hot nor cold, so the home’s furnace/air conditioning is likely not running and therefore you’re not getting the benefit of recirculating indoor air through your system’s furnace filter. Temporarily flipping the thermostat to the “FAN ON” mode, the recirculation through the furnace filter runs continuously (and the heat or air conditioning kick in as needed).
Moose smoke is bad, but Camels is worser.
"Close your house and run the AC. If you have it."
That's what we've been doing.
With fires it will be mostly PARTICULATES, which can be dangerous to people with compromised respiration. I suspect that levels of ozone, NOx, SO2, VOCs, and such will be fairly normal.
When inhaling tobacco smoke or, even worse, cannabis, the combustion is incomplete and the smoke is inhaled both immediately and directly into the lungs. It will contain substantial concentrations of chemical pollutants, most of which are absorbed almost immediately into the body. Furthermore, most tobacco is treated with a potent array of crop chemicals -- including a strong fungicide about 2 days before harvest. So you've got all sorts of synthetic pesticide compounds in tobacco, with and organic substrate [the leaf] and you then mix it all in environment where they can interact, forming completely new and bizarre compounds, which you then inhale.
As a farmer, I can tell you that your lungs usually hork up all the particulates in a few days. Not ideal, but vastly better than tobacco or weed.
"There's a calculator for that!"
Great! Thanks for finding exactly what I wanted.
Whoa...according to the color code, living in Madison today can't even convert to cigarette smoke equivalence. You're more like a full slab of babyback ribs after being in the smoker for 24 hours.
It is the equivalent of smoking for 5 years.
Just kidding.
Bart Hall (Kansas, USA) @ 7:10: "...hork..." Great word, I'm stealing that!
Brylinski @ 7:08: "...Canada..." Yes: "Blame Canada" is a time-honored move. But how shall we punish them for their negligence? Should we bomb the Great White North, and set the rest of the forests ablaze? And is the negligence all theirs, or have we contributed to the bad air with our own crop of arsonists?
"There's a calculator for that!"
Filing that next to my Sportball-Hail Size Scale
now convert it into Joints! then you can pretend, that there is NO ILL EFFECT
I grew up in the '60s in L.A. You couldn't see the mountains two miles away. In August, you could watch the air roll by in puffs. Nonetheless, my friends and I spent every day outside, doing one thing or another, playing one sport or another, then smoking one thing or another.
By any measure, the air was unhealthy to breathe. After pickup basketball games, our lungs hurt. But this was before the establishment of the SoCal Air Quality Management District, so there were no official warnings, which we'd have ignored anyway.
As far as I know, we're all--with the exception of one friend whom I heard had drunk himself to death--fine. I think this is a major factor in why I tend not to be alarmed by alarming, above-the-fold health news.
While we're writing about wildfires ...
Canada’s Ability to Prevent Forest Fires Lags Behind the Need
Provincial firefighting agencies are stretched thin, there is no national agency and it’s hard to get approval for controlled burns — factors that have exacerbated recent outbreaks.
NYT
Owen says: "Blame Canada" is a time-honored move. But how shall we punish them for their negligence? Should we bomb the Great White North, and set the rest of the forests ablaze? And is the negligence all theirs, or have we contributed to the bad air with our own crop of arsonists?
"Bomb Canada?" Perhaps a little extreme. How about some forest management?
"Have we contributed to bad air with our own crop of arsonists?" Allegation made without evidence. Your solution is just shut up and suck up the polluted air?
What about NYC pizza ovens? I guess you're ok with that. And John Kerry's private jet too?
Why does this stuff smell a bit synthetic?
Changed the furnace filter a little early last weekend as we've had the fan constantly running during these bad air days (like Nate Holt suggests)
Sadly it's been all the cool weather days when air quality is bad, preventing us from keeping windows open during times when AC is not needed. Hopefully will clear out when it gets back into the upper 80s this weekend.
Let's see, if you smoke a pack a day you'll be smoking for about 3 hours total (10 minutes per) each day. During that time you'll likely take 4-8 breaths between cigarette inhalations. With the heavy smoke from forest fires you'll be inhaling the toxicity with every single breath you take for every hour you breathe.
"I think this is a major factor in why I tend not to be alarmed by alarming, above-the-fold health news."
Somebody once said something about not letting a crisis go to waste. Alarming, above-the-fold health news appears to be one way of creating them.
The SLC basin is pretty ugly, smog-wise. Quite pretty if you get to see the surrounding mountains. Stobe the Hobo on his trip through this area did a video in which all this smog obscured everything. He filmed from Temple Square and the visual was like the London fogs of yore (1850 to the 1960s; those fogs were the combo of real fog with huge amounts of coal fire dust).
at 08:15, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOG7NBcxWFQ
Great London Fog of 1952,
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/learn-about/weather/case-studies/great-smog
You know what's worse than breathing outside today? Sitting around a campfire.
We have the windows open at home -- the temperatures have been wonderful. Laundry is out on the line. I suspect I will survive this.
Cassandra @ 8:26
Ditto. No Wilson, no Baldy.
Used to wait for my big sister at the bus stop. Liked the smell of bus exhaust. Sheesh.
Not like cigarettes since there is no tar in wood smoke from a distance.
It might be like smoking 10 joints a day
You can just stop breathing until the fires pass. Before making that decision, you should know that Canada has a policy of just letting these fires burn if they are not threatening a developed area, so they might keep burning until fall/winter quenches them.
“If Canada won't do anything about these wildfires that pollute our air, then we should do it for them. Where are the environmentalists when you need them? Isn't this a major carbon pollution event? Compare to pizza ovens in NYC?”
“Owen says: "Blame Canada" is a time-honored move. But how shall we punish them for their negligence? Should we bomb the Great White North, and set the rest of the forests ablaze? And is the negligence all theirs, or have we contributed to the bad air with our own crop of arsonists?”
Most of these fires are being set by environmental activists. Several have been arrested. It’s pretty obviously arson, when fires simultaneously break out in an almost perfect arc.
This isn’t fire season. At least out west, it was a wet winter, and wet spring. In NW MT/N ID, it’s the greenest that we have seen for years. That’s why almost all of the reservoirs in CA are almost full. Of course, they would be fuller, if they weren’t trying to protect some rare, insignificant, fish. Still, fire season just doesn’t get started until July, or even August in normal years.
Try 300 for weeks at a time, every couple of years. That’s a result of idiotic forest management practices, including most of a century of fire suppression, and elimination of most logging in our national forests. It’s so bad these days that the NFS budget is mostly taken up these days with fire fighting. Driving from NW MT through N ID to Spokane yesterday, I noted several of their wood road signs so weathered that they were almost unreadable. The money to do that normal maintenance has had to have been diverted to fighting fires.
Finally, many of us who face these air quality issues on a semi regular basis, utilize HEPA filters. Honeywell makes some good floor units, and they can in normal times be found at Home Depot. We have a smaller one in the bedroom, and a bigger one in the living room hat also covers the kitchen. With them, it’s not uncommon for the air outside to be so bad that we can’t see the mountains to the west, and sometimes not even much beyond the house across the street, but the air inside be clear.
My fitness friends tell me that sitting is the new smoking!
Brylinski @ 8:34: A spirited reply, sir. Well done. I guess I should have used the sarc font?
Multiple factors have converged, yielding Canada's new wildfire reality. Climate change is driving warmer and drier summers and longer fire seasons—conditions more conducive to wildfire ignition and spread. But equally important is the condition of the forests. Over the last century, Canada has implemented widespread fire exclusion policies across fire-dependent landscapes. Although many provinces have adapted policies to support modified response—including managed wildfires—particularly in parks and protected areas, BC and AB have a long legacy of highly aggressive fire suppression mandates. The accumulation of large amounts of dry and dead fuel—a direct result of over 100 years of fire exclusion, cumulative disturbances, and forest management practices—is intensifying wildfire behaviour, putting firefighters and the communities they protect at greater risk.
Western Canada's new wildfire reality needs a new approach to fire management
From the news this evening, NY and a coalition of northeast states are sending people and equipment to fight the Canadian (Quebec) fires.
Unless you have a serious, pre-existing respiratory condition, the impact of smoking ten cigarettes on any particular day almost certainly will have precisely zero measurable impact on your health.
Ten smokes a day, every day, for years, is a completely different question.
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