The Palpable Effects of Climate Change in the Yoop

I awoke this morning to yet another advisory from the weather service of dangerous levels of air pollution here in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, which we affectionately call “The Yoop.” I believe we’ve been under such advisories for a full week now, and for the Summer, it would be accurate to say that we’ve had fewer days without such advisories than with them. This isn’t just a matter of spoiling our beautiful views of the largest lake in the world, it is an actual danger to our health. 

The Yoop is not in some congested urban area with fumes from cars and factories. We’re a sparsely populated and mostly wilderness area of the USA. The Yoop is covered by a vast forest–called Hiawatha–of almost a million acres. 

As widely publicized, this intense haze of dangerous air pollution originates in largely uncontrolled forest fires in Canada. We’ve been coming to the Yoop for more than 30 years, and yes, there have been other times when these Canadian fires have had an impact on our air quality. But we’ve never seen anything like this, going on for weeks at a time. 

Climate scientists have said that the cause for these increasingly vast and dangerous fires is global warming, one feature of climate change. The USA is the largest contributor in the world, by far, to this issue. The current administration has responded to the problem by forbidding government agencies to speak about it and attempting to eliminate all the scientific research into the problem. It has advocated renewed interest in coal mining and burning. The efforts of the administration to reduce federal employment have resulted in the loss of thousands of employees at the US Forest Service, and are reducing the ability of that agency to deal with the effects of climate change. 

All this amounts to a classic case of burying one’s head in the dirt. No federal dicta forbidding research into climate change will change the fact that climate change is happening, and the negative effects on human populations are almost certainly going to be exacerbated by these foolish policies. 

Every summer, large parts of the USA experience heat waves. But those heat waves are going on for longer, and coming more often, than they used to. We’re on track for yet another record-breaking global temperature average. And we’ll soon see whether this translates into more devastating storms in the USA southland. Insurance rates in Florida have taken large parts of the housing market out of affordability–a trend that is likely to continue and worsen. Invasive insects are spreading into more areas killing trees and causing illness among both human and animal populations. Native fish populations in the Great Lakes are losing territory to invaders from warmer waters. 

We need more research, not less. And we need policies that are crafted with the help of actual experts, not politicized morons, to do what is possible to reverse these trends.