How wildfire smoke and air pollution affect your health
Zero: The Climate Race
Bloomberg
4.7 • 219 Ratings
🗓️ 8 June 2023
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A hotter planet is also a smokier one, as residents of New York City are finding out this week. As the intensity and size of wildfires grows, more and more people are being exposed to dangerously unhealthy air. Just how dangerous? Oscar Boyd asks Akshat Rathi to explain the health effects of exposure to intense air pollution. It’s not a new problem, but it’s a growing one and many of us will need to learn how to deal with the risks.
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- How wildfire smoke affects human health
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- A documentary on Australia’s bushfire babies
- The Big Take podcast on the Black Summer bushfires
Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Oscar Boyd and our senior producer is Christine Driscoll. Special thanks to Janet Babin, Kira Bindrim, Zahra Hirji, Kendra Pierre-Louis and Todd Woody. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit bloomberg.com/green
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Zero, I'm Oscar Boyd. |
| 0:04.0 | Over the past couple of days, smoke coming from Canada's worst-ever forest fire season |
| 0:08.0 | has blanketed much of the country and spread southeast to the United States, smashing pollution records in both countries. |
| 0:14.0 | On Wednesday afternoon, New York had the worst air quality of any city worldwide, as the smoke turned the sky as sickly orange. |
| 0:20.0 | It looked like it was gloomy looking. |
| 0:23.2 | It just, I don't know, it looked like something out of a movie, |
| 0:26.5 | apocalyptic type of movie. |
| 0:28.3 | I think everyone in our school was freaked out. |
| 0:31.1 | It was so dark, first of all. |
| 0:33.0 | And then everything was orange. |
| 0:34.3 | It felt like weird. |
| 0:35.4 | Sort of horrifying to see not only how much of an effect it has, |
| 0:39.3 | it's because I mean the entire city was lit yellow, |
| 0:42.3 | and just how far everything travels and what that means for the environment. |
| 0:46.3 | Wildfires are not new, but they are increasing in scale and intensity as we warm the planet, |
| 0:51.3 | exposing more and more people to dangerous levels of air pollution. |
| 0:55.0 | So today on Zero, I'm talking with ACHAT about the effects of that pollution on the body, and what you can do to protect yourself from it. |
| 1:01.0 | ACHAT currently more than 400 fires are burning across Canada, with smoke-blanketing cities across North America, |
| 1:09.0 | and this is going to have huge impacts |
| 1:11.1 | on people's health as they breathe in the polluted air. But North America isn't alone |
| 1:15.1 | in this. How big is the problem of air pollution globally? |
| 1:17.6 | It's actually quite big. You know, we're talking about it during a time of an intense event, |
... |
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