Montreal City Weblog

Kate 16:45 on 2023-07-18 Permalink Reply  

• walkerp 17:38 on 2023-07-18 Permalink

  Yeah, I was up behind UdeM last night and looking east the sun was a hazy orange ball and the horizon looked like LA. Is this still because of the wildfires or just pollution?

• MarcG 17:46 on 2023-07-18 Permalink

  According to this map the smoke from the big fires northwest of here aren’t blowing this way right now… but basically the whole continent is burning so who knows… https://firesmoke.ca/forecasts/current/

• EG 18:58 on 2023-07-18 Permalink

  I went out to the store today, and the sunlight had that orange quality we’ve seen too many times lately.

• DeWolf 19:02 on 2023-07-18 Permalink

  La Presse reported yesterday that this is smoke from Western Canada:

  https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/2023-07-17/incendies-de-foret/montreal-va-gouter-a-la-fumee-de-l-ouest-canadien.php

  It’s meant to ease up tomorrow. And it’s supposed to be sunny for the next couple of days. Maybe we’ll actually have a couple of days this summer that aren’t smoky or raining?

• Chris 19:50 on 2023-07-18 Permalink

  So the air is considered dangerously unhealthy by the government. And what do we do to mitigate this? Basically nothing. Do we implement a congestion charge on smog days? No. Do we allow only odd number license plates? No. Do we offer free public transit? No.

  No doubt we’ll end up like China, and just wear masks outside routinely. Anything but give up our precious automobiles!

• Kate 20:20 on 2023-07-18 Permalink

  You can take the bus for $1 in Laval on smog days.

  I venture to guess that the action is still too remote from the result for any change to be accepted by the public. “Leave your car at home today and the forests will stop burning tomorrow” might work. Might work. “Leave your car at home forever and the forests might stop burning in 10 or 20 years” doesn’t have the traction.

• MarcG 20:36 on 2023-07-18 Permalink

  Handy tool for finding an air filter to suit your space https://filters.cleanairstars.com/

• MarcG 20:41 on 2023-07-18 Permalink

  Also to Chris’ point about wearing masks outside routinely: this is how my wife and I have been rolling this summer. Someone yelled at her last night walking down the sidwalk (the yeller flying by safely on a bicycle, of course) “Ooh, I’m scared of the air!” and we’d have a few funny looks, especially with the P100s when it was really bad a few weeks ago, but otherwise people don’t seem to care… but they also don’t wear them themselves, which I find is a big problem. A child asked their parents “Why are they wearing masks?” after walking past us and the parents said “Because the air quality is bad”. You’d think one thing would lead to another but it doesn’t always for a variety of reasons. In this case, I think that a lot of it is social pressure to pretend things are normal and masking being stigmatized in North America. I read it somewhere suggested that it’s related to anti-Asian sentiment and that wouldn’t surprise me.

• Chris 21:38 on 2023-07-18 Permalink

  Kate, yeah, agreed. But still, I was astounded how accepting, mostly, the population was about all the drastic measures during covid. Perhaps they would surprise us again if drastic climate measures were invoked now.

  >I read it somewhere suggested that it’s related to anti-Asian sentiment and that wouldn’t surprise me.

  Seems unlikely. If it were so, why did so many wear masks during covid, even before/after compulsion? The simpler and more likely explanation is that their risk calculation, right or wrong, deems it just not worth it.

• SMD 23:52 on 2023-07-18 Permalink

  Chris, you might appreciate this thought experiment about cars that I came across recently:

  “What if I were a scientist and I announced that I had invented a form of instantaneous transport. Anyone could lease a unit for about $200 a month, plus the cost of energy. And it would allow you to travel between any two points in the US instantly. The dream of teleportation realized. The only catch, I announced, was that in order for everyone to use their units, 100 random users would have to be sacrificed to the machine every single day. Their deaths would be painful and bloody, but it would keep everyone else’s machines humming along. Could anyone seriously support such a proposal? It’s madness to even contemplate it. And yet this is the Faustian bargain we have struck with the automobile.”