New Study Estimates Wildfire Smoke Will Soon Kill 71,000 Americans Each Year
You may live many miles away from a wildfire, but it could still kill you. That’s because all that smoke wafting in from afar poses a mortal risk. The threat is so great, in fact, that any official tally of people killed in a fire most likely is wildly low, given that it counts obvious victims, not those who later died after inhaling its far-flung haze. Los Angeles’ catastrophic blazes in January, for instance, killed 30 people according to authorities, but more like 440 according to scientists, who determined excess deaths at the time were likely due to smoke.
As climate change makes such conflagrations ever more catastrophic, that mortality is only going to escalate. A new study in the journal Nature estimates that wildfire smoke already kills 40,000 Americans each year — the same number who die in traffic crashes — and that could rise to more than 71,000 annually by 2050 if emissions remain high. The economic damages in the United States may soar to over $600 billion each year by then, more than all other estimated climate impacts combined. And the problem is by no means isolated to North America: A separate paper also publishing today estimates that 1.4 million people worldwide could die prematurely each year from smoke by the end of this century — six times higher than current rates.
Together, the studies add to a growing body of evidence that wildfires are killing an extraordinary number of people — and are bound to claim ever more if humanity doesn’t rapidly slow climate change and better protect itself from pollution. “The numbers are really striking, but those don’t need to be inevitable,” said Minghao Qiu, an environmental scientist at Stony Brook University and lead author of the first paper. “There are a lot of things we could do to reduce this number.”
https://truthout.org/articles/new-study-estimates-wildfire-smoke-will-soon-kill-71000-americans-each-year/