US cities under air quality alerts amid haze of Canada wildfires

Chicago had the worst air to breathe in the United States and in the world by some measures on Wednesday the windy City's iconic Skyline over Lake Michigan was barely visible beneath the haze even as President Joe Biden arrived for a pre-scheduled visit landing at O'Hare Airport under an air quality warning I've never seen it like this Smoky or anything like even fog like I've never seen

that far too long communities have faced day in and day out the smoke is traveling thousands of kilometers from Canada were close to 500 wildfires are now burning in remote areas half of them out of control meanwhile further south a heat Dome is baking a massive area from Texas to Florida climate scientists say this is all enabled by the Earth's warming atmosphere one might ask themselves

is this normal is this the way summer usually starts off and the answer is not really I mean some of these events we could expect every year but yes having multiple events is creating a a different type of start to the summer in Washington DC the worst is yet to come with smoke forecast to drift Eastward toward here Philadelphia and New York in the days to

come and the reality is in this part of the world Wildfire season has only just begun Heidi Joe Castro Al Jazeera Washington well bill ulfeda is the executive director of The Nature Conservancy he blames climate change for the increasing number of wildfires and resulting air quality issues well the cause is climate change uh the Canadian forests are suffering from drought the fires are starting earlier they're

bigger they're more intense The Season's going to be longer at this point they're about 500 fires burning half of those are out of control and unmanaged and this is going to be going on all summer long so really what we've got to do is stop climate change and then of course what we need to do is find alternatives to fossil fuels more renewable energy public transit

all the things we can do to reduce the causes of climate change because it's really that heat and the drought that is driving these catastrophic Fires at this point right now it's the Midwest it's Chicago it's Detroit it's Pittsburgh you know earlier this month it was New York the the air quality in New York the aqi the air quality index was over 300. I mean that's

that's unprecedented it's unimaginable and and the worrisome thing is this is going to happen again and again like we knew when this happened three weeks ago it would probably happen again in a matter of days or probably weeks so the best thing people can do is pay attention to the warnings that government is giving you know if you can get an app on your phone that

gives you air quality updates that's an important thing to do when the air quality is bad follow the instructions like 0 to 50 that's great when you start getting over 100 air quality index it's worrisome but what we're seeing in the midwest right now is 200 and even in some instances low 300s that's where you really should stay indoors and protect yourselves and if you can

get an air purifier like that's a step we can all take to clean the air inside our homes when basically we have shelter in place