Corrective action seems like a very likely cause. That still supports your idea that suppressing small fires and living with occasional big ones is the right move since the danger seems to be the middling where people aren’t aware their air is bad.
In my current city, we had a bad air day and didn’t even notice until we tried to figure out why our anxiety was so high for so little apparent reason.
Very interesting. It also seems to me that we’re seeing a longer and longer list of chronic negative health effects being associated with air pollution, like autism and dementias, cardiovascular diseases and cancers.
And of course there are all the combustion engine sources of particulates with two stroke engines like gas-powered leaf blowers being especially bad.
> These are not due to simply hastening the deaths of the very weakest by a few weeks —
We have robust data showing that smoking cigarettes is a net benefit for the economy because smokers die quickly from lung cancer, often before they get their first Social Security check. I’m about 95% confident this is also true for wildfire smoke.
This isn’t just a case of being callous: money not spent on an Alzheimer’s facility is money that could be used to save children, for a much larger QALY gain.
> the deaths from wildfire smoke plumes were not compensated by lessened mortality in the weeks after.
It does not follow that you’d see lessened mortality because wildfire smoke would equally damage everyone. For some it would be enough to trigger an immediate death, for others it would hasten their deaths in the weeks following the smoke exposure.
Do we know if there is increasing marginal property damage + direct lives lost as a fire increases in size? Intuitively, it feels like large but controllable in extremis fires would cause less property damage and loss of life than the combination of mostly small fires quickly extinguished + rare completely uncontrollable fires, assuming similar total burn area. Due to authorities having no way to stop the completely uncontrolled fires from hitting high value + densely populated areas.
Would have to pencil out to see if the decreasing marginal effect of air pollution outweighs my (assumed) increasing marginal effect of property damage and direct loss of life.
Corrective action seems like a very likely cause. That still supports your idea that suppressing small fires and living with occasional big ones is the right move since the danger seems to be the middling where people aren’t aware their air is bad.
In my current city, we had a bad air day and didn’t even notice until we tried to figure out why our anxiety was so high for so little apparent reason.
Very interesting. It also seems to me that we’re seeing a longer and longer list of chronic negative health effects being associated with air pollution, like autism and dementias, cardiovascular diseases and cancers.
And of course there are all the combustion engine sources of particulates with two stroke engines like gas-powered leaf blowers being especially bad.
> These are not due to simply hastening the deaths of the very weakest by a few weeks —
We have robust data showing that smoking cigarettes is a net benefit for the economy because smokers die quickly from lung cancer, often before they get their first Social Security check. I’m about 95% confident this is also true for wildfire smoke.
This isn’t just a case of being callous: money not spent on an Alzheimer’s facility is money that could be used to save children, for a much larger QALY gain.
> the deaths from wildfire smoke plumes were not compensated by lessened mortality in the weeks after.
It does not follow that you’d see lessened mortality because wildfire smoke would equally damage everyone. For some it would be enough to trigger an immediate death, for others it would hasten their deaths in the weeks following the smoke exposure.
Do we know if there is increasing marginal property damage + direct lives lost as a fire increases in size? Intuitively, it feels like large but controllable in extremis fires would cause less property damage and loss of life than the combination of mostly small fires quickly extinguished + rare completely uncontrollable fires, assuming similar total burn area. Due to authorities having no way to stop the completely uncontrolled fires from hitting high value + densely populated areas.
Would have to pencil out to see if the decreasing marginal effect of air pollution outweighs my (assumed) increasing marginal effect of property damage and direct loss of life.