Ok, I can get sort of disagreeing the wildfires are from climate change - that’s a couple of logical steps you have to make. But “It’s not causing anyone to cough” is plainly ludicrous. It was making me cough when I went outside.
“It doesn’t smell bad”? Maybe they have COVID and lost their sense of smell altogether? It certainly smelled bad to me. And if you thought it smelled great - wow. I just don’t ever want to be around you if you like those sorts of smells. I can’t see it actually working with anyone who’s ever been in wildfire smoke before - like you don’t need science or education or anything to notice if it makes you cough, or tell something doesn’t smell great.
People I work with are infinitely suspicious of the wildfires. They say shit like, “Hmm, isn’t it odd they all started around the same time?”
Yes, Jeffrey, that’s how wildfires work. Entire biomes burn to the ground if the conditions are hot and dry for long enough.
Yeah, there’s a “Trudeau started the wildfires as an excuse for carbon taxes” narrative that is insanely popular among the Canadian right wing.
I’ve even seen some “15 Minute Cities” theorists claiming the fires are being lit in order to “drive people into the liberal cities so the government can control them”.
It’s just entirely divorced from reality.
I mean, to me (in the DC area, so not nearly as bad as it was further north) it just smelled like a campfire outside to me. It wasn’t a particularly offensive smell.
But I could FEEL that the air quality was bad every time I took a breath, and I don’t have any kinds of respiratory issues.
Ok, if you were further away it could have smelled different. Up here in NY it smelled like burning trash and plastic and chemicals. It was horrible. I was referring to people who live in the same small town as I do, so they had to smell the same thing.
To be clear I’m not downplaying how terrible it must have smelled in more heavily effected areas; I didn’t mean to come across as doing so.
I kind of gave up trying to convince my family that this isn’t healthy, especially my high risk family members. I don’t get why they just don’t seem to care, especially the ones with major health problems.
I don’t know why it’s so hard to understand that breathing particulate matter into your lungs isn’t a good thing… A child should be able to understand this. My 10 and 12 year old INSTINCTIVELY understood this… they pulled their shirts up over their nose on their own when we woke up and went outside on the first bad day.
Same … it’s clear that attempting to convince my own family is just as effective as speaking to a charcuterie board. Want to breathe the smoke? Fine, go ham. I’m fresh out of pity for the science deniers.
I don’t get this weird need to be contrary to everything, doesn’t it get exhausting?
They’re not just doing it to do it
well that’s part of it, but it’s mainly “if we accept that climate change is real, then it’s us who are at fault for it; as such we need to discredit and downplay it and anything resulting from it”
like they have a vested interest in saying that it’s not a big deal, it’s a conscious choice that they’re making; they’re not being stupid (or at least not in choosing to deny this)
It comes from the same place as the deeply held but mutually exclusive beliefs that the government is both totally stupid and incompetent but also so capable and efficient that they are somehow carrying out massive conspiracies on the entire citizenry.
You don’t need a high level of education to know you shouldn’t inject bleach into your system to kill COVID-19, and yet people died listening to Trump’s suggestion.
“people died listening to Trump’s suggestion” is undoubtedly true, but are there any documented cases of someone actually injecting bleach, much less that leading to their death?
