This week it’s all about smoke. Clean Air Night is less than two weeks away, and we’ll come onto that shortly. But first we wanted to spare a thought for our friends battling wildfires in California. After life and limb, and the risk to homes, the longer-term effects of inhaling wildfire smoke are shocking. This article in Wired has a good overview of how wildfires have cancelled out any improvements in air quality in recent years.
Gone up in smoke
And when do we simulate fires? - well, new year’s eve! We were far from Brixton last week but we have been checking our monitoring node and saw another significant spike as 2024 turned to 2025. While short-lived, it can still cause health effects, as described in this article.
Back to Clean Air Night, which seeks to highlight the impact of domestic wood burning. We covered the impact on health in our last post. This video, featuring friends of this blog, Dr Gary Fuller and Suzanne Bartington, also focuses on the environmental impact. Once trees are cut down for burning, they no longer absorb carbon dioxide - something that bothers us with every cut Christmas tree too.
Smoke detector
Want to find out more? There is a seminar on Monday run by Global Action Plan with some great speakers including the eminent Professor Stephen Holgate. And if you are up for spreading the word, there is a great set of communications resources on the Global Action Plan site.
And finally… Not long left to complete our survey. We’d love your feedback to help us improve this blog!