When I stepped out of my front door yesterday morning, the sky wasn’t right.
It wasn’t the bright blue promise of a beautiful day. Nor was it the roiled gray of storm clouds, or the clean, edge-softening white coat of fog.
It wasโฆ brown, a pale muddy shade with a hint of yellow. It’s a color that I’ve never seen in the sky before. It reminded me of the opening line from William Gibson’s Neuromancer, “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
As the day wore on, the gloom settled and thickened. The sky turned ashy, and the light grew twilight-dimโso much so that streetlights snapped on early in the afternoon. Colors seemed muted and subdued, as if the world was made of pixels and the saturation had been turned all the way down. The temperature dropped to an unseasonable chill, and the breeze carried the smell of a campfire. The sun peeked through the murk like a red-hot copper disc, a fraction of its normal brightness.
Unnatural sky
That unnatural sky is the evidence of massive wildfires raging hundreds of miles away. Canada is facing an abnormally early and severe fire season, with the worst fires ever recorded blazing across Quebec and Nova Scotia. Smoke rising into the atmosphere drifts across the United States, shrouding cities in smog and tinting the sky those strange colors.
In Canada, the fires have forced thousands of people to flee their homes. Here in the U.S., meteorologists warned of air pollution reaching unhealthy levels in a broad band stretching from the Midwest to the East Coast. By some measurements, New York City had the worst air quality in the world for much of Tuesday and Wednesday.
As we all know, it’s bad for your lungs to breathe in smoke and combustion products, especially PM2.5 microparticles that travel deep into the alveoli. The pollution isn’t acutely hazardous for healthy people, but long-term exposure could lead to illness later on. And people with asthma and other breathing problems could be in more immediate distress.
If you live in the U.S., the EPA’s AirNow website tracks air-pollution levels in your community. If you have to be outside on a bad-air day and have N95 masks left over from the pandemic, this would be an excellent time to wear them. You might also consider getting a portable HEPA filter for your home, or making your own Corsi-Rosenthal box.
New England’s Dark Day
These fires, and the skies they create, are reminiscent of New England’s “Dark Day” on May 19, 1780.
On that day, the morning dawned a strange yellow color. Thick clouds blotted out the sun, and a heavy gloom descended. By noon, it was so dark that people had to light candles to see, and witnesses reported that night birds began to sing. Reports of the darkness spread from Maine as far south as Connecticut and New Jersey.
The Dark Day inspired superstitious terror among Puritans. They feared it was a sign of God’s wrath, like the plague of darkness in Egypt (Exodus 10:22-23), Jesus’ teachings of the tribulation (Matthew 24:29), or the sixth seal of the apocalypse that darkens the sun (Revelation 6:12). People crammed into churches, fearing that the end times had arrived.
Of course, the world didn’t end that day. Eventually, the sky cleared, the sun returned, and life returned to normal. Like every other apocalyptic fear in history, this one came to naught.
We now know that the Dark Day was caused by wildfires raging out of control in Canada, sending a pall of smoke into the atmosphere that blocked out the sun. Tree-ring data records the disaster two hundred and forty years later. (Even at the time, some clever natural philosophers correctly guessed this by observing a sooty smell during the darkness and ash and cinders that settled to earth with the next rain.)
Most of us no longer fear the end of the world when the skies are darkened by fire or eclipse. We know better, see farther than our ancestors did. We respect nature, but we’ve ceased to feel primitive terror at the manifestations of its power.
Even so, a sky that looks wrong makes us uneasy. It unsettles us at a deep level, tapping into some kind of primal instinct. It’s like we’re cavepeople again, fearfully pointing and muttering, “Bad sky. Gods angry.”
And maybe we should listen to that instinctive voice. We don’t need to cower from thunder and lightning anymore, but it’s still a valuable survival skill to know when the world is askew so we can do something about it.
Signs and portents
The fires and smoky skies, like California’s orange skies day in 2020, are ominous portents of a changing climate.
The Keeling curve, which tracks the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, hit another all-time high in May: 424 parts per million. As that number ticks up year by year, the world gets hotter, long-stable climate patterns shift, and chaotic, extreme weather becomes more common.
This year’s wildfires are a case in point. Canada has suffered an abnormally hot, dry spring, which ensured there was plenty of tinder to fuel devastating fires. It’s a sequel to the heat dome of 2021, which at the time was called a “once-in-a-millennium” event. Yet here we are again, just two years later.
As these destructive weather events happen more and more often, large swaths of America are becoming uninsurable. The risks of fire and flood are too great for insurers to have any hope of making a profit. That will eventually force people to migrate, as they can no longer afford to rebuild after a disaster.
For those who have ears to hear, the world is shouting at us. This isn’t because we’ve offended the sky gods, but it is because of choices we made. We pushed the planet out of balance, and now we’re paying the price.
The impact of climate change is already being felt; it’s too late to avert it. But it’s not too late to make better choices and keep the damage from getting worse. We don’t need to utter prayers or throw a human sacrifice into a volcano. Instead, we should channel that bad-sky anxiety into meaningful activism, like a current of water powering a turbine. We should vote, call our elected officials, join groups fighting to defend the climate, and use our purchasing power for good.