[SAM] So in case you missed it, millions of acres in the west are on fire right now.
[DR. KALMUS] Our house is in the middle of smoke. We've had smoke for like the last five
days. So if you look at the AQI and look at
the PM2.5, which is the little tiny particles
you can convert that into numbers of cigarettes per day,
it's been approaching sometimes like the health equivalent of
smoking a pack a day of cigarettes. It's not good when it goes into your lungs.
[SAM] One of our animators lives in Portland, so i wanted to check in with her.
All right Elaine, what's Portland like right now?
[ELAINE] Actually, here let me show you. This is what it's looking like in Portland now.
It is creepy and uh super eerie.
[SAM] Alright, stop. Why is it orange? And it's not just Portland,
friends in San Francisco sent me these. Even more orange. Why?
[DR. MARLEY] It looked like a movie, but in the real world i've never seen anything or
seen photos of anything comparable to that, because it was this red coming from
every angle it seemed. Because the fires were so powerful
the fires lofted the smoke very high in the atmosphere
and so we had a very high thick coating of soot. The color you get depends
on what the soot is made of how big the soot particles are.
[SAM] I called up climate scientist Dr. Peter Kalmus to learn more, and where he
lives the smoke is actually so bad that he had to wear a mask inside
during part of our interview.
[DR. KALMUS] There's a kind of scattering called Rayleigh scattering which is when the particle doing the
scattering is smaller, significantly smaller than the
wavelength of the light that's coming in, and so you have these small particles
from the smoke so blue light gets scattered a lot more strongly than red
light. So if you have all this smoke the blue
light can't even really get into where you are,
the red light comes in and then if you have fog,
for example, the fog is these really big water vapor
particles and it's going to scatter every wavelength equally
but if only the red light can get in, it's going to be scattering all this red
light so you're going to get this really
intense red glow.
[DR. VAHIDINIA] I've never seen anything like it either. Yeah it was like the perfect conditions that don't normally
occur, and so you have a layer of sooty particles
absorbing and scattering the blue and letting the red in,
and then you have a layer of bigger droplets, water droplets, that are right
below that soot. It's like a cake.
[SAM] It's like a cake. The top layer of the cake—all right, stop.
Pro tip: if you get a layered mousse cake from
your local national chain grocery store it might not actually have the layers
you were expecting— is made of really small carbon-based
molecules that you would find in soot. The bottom marine layer is mostly water
droplets which are much bigger. Usually wildfires don't produce this
much smoke and don't shoot it so high into the atmosphere,
so you don't see the same layering filtering and fogging effect.
Is the cake metaphor helping? I feel like it's helping. these
conditions seem very unusual, but what are the chances that we might
see this again?
[DR. KALMUS] In terms of, should we expect more of this? Unfortunately the answer is a solid yes.
The most important factor in these kinds of climate fires is
temperature. In southern California we had places that were
in excess of 120 degrees fahrenheit, it shattered records all across southern
california, and what that does is it makes it, you know, it's like a giant
sponge that sucks all of the moisture out of fuel.
And this is projected to get worse, that's the frightening thing. The one
thing I do want to say to your audience is that we need massive rapid systems
change. You know, no matter how bad this gets
it's always worth fighting as hard as you can to stop it. This is genuinely a
life or death emergency.
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