This past week I’ve began preparing a blog entry on the numbers of stars we can see with smart telescopes, but I had to stop and postpone finishing it — all because of the smoke! Wildfire smoke from Canada has made Chicago area observing impossible and even being outside painful to breath. Currently the air is labeled, “very unhealthy.” Don’t worry about me, because in my office, which I call the “observatorium” I have a serious HEPA plus activated Carbon filter because I also paint. So, I’m fine while inside.
The picture above is one I took of a recent sunset over Green Bay west of Door County while on holiday. The smoke was bad then too. The colors of the setting Sun were frankly, a bit horrifying. But, in my usual way, I began to think astronomically. The smoke from the burning wildfires that is clogging the atmosphere is really a lot like an interstellar cloud.
It’s like a dark interstellar galactic cloud for two reasons. First because of the soot in the smoke. The particles in a wood burning fire are about 400-700 nanometers in size and made principally of tangled random carbon molecules. This overall grain sizes are in the range of the wavelengths of visible light and that explains why they scatter light so well. Interstellar grains that have been found in meteorites span a wider range from 2 nanometers up to 20,000 nanometers. We can easily detect interstellar grains because they redden and attenuate starlight. If there are enough along our line of sight then their cloud appears black in visible light.
Interstellar clouds are primarily gas. Just a couple percent of their mass is dust but it's easy to detect. The grains in these clouds consists mostly of silicates like sand and small carbon grains of soot. The effect of interstellar grains can also be seen when a nearby star’s light is reflected by the grains. A good example is the reflection nebula near M20, the Trifid Nebula. (If you haven’t observed it yet, you should put it high on your list this summer.) And the winter time’s Rosette Nebula shown on the header for these blogs contains a number of small dark interstellar clouds called Bok Globules. So, we can easily detect interstellar clouds by the dust. But, most of the clouds’ mass is in molecular gas. That’s another thing in earthly smoke that we detect in space.
This second parallel with astronomy is in the molecular chemistry. What makes smoke from fires deadly is first the soot, but then the dangerous chemicals that are by products of the burning. Major earthly wood fire constituents are also found in interstellar clouds. They include: aldehydes like Formaldehyde and Thioformaldehyde; acid gases like Hydrogen sulfide and Carbon dioxide; Sulfur dioxide; Nitrogen oxides; Benzene; and my favorite class of interstellar molecules, PAH’s, which stands for polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
So, although most people think they need to put on a mask or get inside when out walking the dog now, I stand there, take a whiff, gaze at our reddened Sun and think, “So this is what it’s like to be in an interstellar cloud. Neat!” You have to understand I’ve always wanted to visit one. My thesis research was on modeling dense interstellar clouds near the Orion nebula. I had to use computer models to simulate the cloud conditions that created the emission lines I was detecting. I often wished to get inside the cloud to do some real chemical testing. Well, now I am… cough, cough, cough!
Seriously, I’d prefer being 1,300 light years away now. Some 211 Interstellar molecular species have been discovered in dense, dark space clouds. Many of them are toxic. The chemistry has always fascinated me. But, I guess my reaction to the Earth haze clouds should be more akin to what happened in Fred Hoyle’s famous science fiction novel, The Black Cloud.
In Hoyle’s book an “intelligent” interstellar cloud enshrouds the Solar System causing chaos and climate catastrophes. It continues until the heroic astronomers make radio contact with it and tell it to please spare us. That’s of course a plot that would work well for a movie.
But in the real scientific world, I’m afraid Pogo* had the right picture when he said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” The frequency and magnitude of smoke producing forest fires is increasing because of climate change. This is well documented and researched. A recent NOAA statement, which is for the USA, but applies to other forested regions summarizes what we know is going on:
Climate change, including increased heat, extended drought, and a thirsty atmosphere, has been a key driver in increasing the risk and extent of wildfires in the western United States during the last two decades. Wildfires require the alignment of a number of factors, including temperature, humidity, and the lack of moisture in fuels, such as trees, shrubs, grasses, and forest debris. All these factors have strong direct or indirect ties to climate variability and climate change. A 2016 study found enhanced the drying of organic matter and doubled the number of large fires between 1984 and 2015 in the western United States. A 2021 study supported by NOAA concluded that climate change has been the main driver of the increase in fire weather in the western United States.
I should mention that I am an original member of the Climate Reality Project and have delivered many talks based upon the movie, An Inconvenient Truth. I been with Al Gore twice. I’m a leader and mentor in that group and now include climate content in all my discussions of planetary climates in my astronomy classes too. I’m also not naive and know that there are some in the amateur astronomical community that could be labeled anthropogenic climate change deniers (ACCDs). I honestly don’t know why they would go against the solid scientific consensus.
But, hey, Fred Hoyle of Black Cloud authorship was a celebrated theoretical astrophysicist, but also a Big Bang denier too. In fact he coined the term because he thought it was derogative. He preferred that the expansion of the universe was eternal with no beginning or ending in time or center to space — he called it the Steady State Universe. Fred had reasons to question that the universe began in a hot, expanding fireball back in the 1950s, but were he alive today he would have acquiesced to the overwhelming evidence that has accumulated between the 1960s and 90s.
What is only slightly less puzzling to me than ACCDs are those who would suggest a solution to our ills on Earth would be to have us leave live on Mars, asteroids, space ships or even nearby exoplanets like Kepler 22B. Some martian advocates talk about terraforming our neighboring planet. Honestly, I feel these migratory/geoengineering solutions to be astonishingly unaffordable, truly unrealistic, and not really solutions at all. I’ve stayed for weeks in Antarctica and know that Mars will be three orders of magnitude more hostile. And as for spaceflight, I’ve worked on exhibitions on the topic and have actually spent quality time with Neil Armstrong enough to know that few will have the right stuff for the accommodations. None will be able to withstand the radiation field beyond Earth’s magnetic field for years and years. And who would seriously want to book a ride on Elon Musk’s bloated, unstable Starship? The real universe is really much more hostile than science fiction would have us believe. Sorry, but there really is no planet B.
Then there are the geo-engineers who are more rational terrestrial equivalents of the terra-formers. I will admit that their science is probably okay, but it’s the engineering and faith that we don’t screw things up worse up is what I’m afraid of. They propose injecting sulfate or alumina aerosols into the upper atmosphere to increase Earth’s albedo, reflecting more sunlight back into space. Saturated blue skies would become permanently white too. I can only imagine astronomical transparency would be as bad as the recent fire smoke. I’m afraid I understand we can geo-engineer, because we’re doing it indirectly now, but I don’t trust that we could do it in a stable way, even if we tried too. It would be like driving and controlling our speed by continuing to press the accelerator while applying the brakes more and more. Really?
I wore my science reality fears during an march here in Chicago a few years ago:
But what can we really do? Should we panic? I’ve come to think the answer is, No. I tell myself that now and think, Don’t Panic. Here’s why…. (Fair warning, it does involve thinking the way an astronomer does when we reflect on the time frames of processes.)
What are the time frames involved in climate change solutions? Well, they’re decades to centuries and even longer. So, although I might try hard to reduce my personal carbon footprint or avoid air travel, its effect will seem short term. And I don’t feel much leverage from that approach.
The relevant time scales are intergenerational. So, logically the best way to make a difference is to work to educate future generations — not only on what can be done to improve the CO2 levels in the atmosphere, but to also educate them about how my generation and the one before has largely blown it. They need to know.
Long term changes can come from governmental policies too. Those can take time and there are mighty struggles going on continually I’ve found. Although science points to the truth, I believe, powerful moneyed interests and other political groups continue to work hard to foil climate sensible policies. I’m not a wide eyed idealist and tend to be realistic like Vaclav Smil, but I do think we could tamp down climate warming for all our children and grand children. Surely the ACCDs must have grand children too.
If you are interested in helping, I’ve also found that specializing helps too. That’s because the overall challenge is enormous and the suite of problems that need to be solve is huge. Besides my basic educational activities I also follow and support the adoption of electric vehicles and providing more charging stations. Here are some links to groups you might want to consider joining:
In conclusion…. I know my fascination with wildfire smoke by identifying it with interstellar clouds is maybe a weird perspective. But, consider this additional cosmic chemistry fact. My research group in graduate school discovered interstellar ethanol alcohol in a cloud near the galactic center. Ethanol is, as I'm sure you know, the active ingredient in Scotch whiskey. When we ran the numbers we realized that there was the equivalent of a billion times a billion fifths of whiskey there! I’m sure it’s not kept in barrels, but it is, after all billions of years old. Now that’s something I’d like to sip!
Until next time.... Here’s hoping your skies clear up and stay clear!
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* I’m dating myself by quoting Pogo Possum. He was my all time favorite newspaper cartoon character. See more about him and his crew here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogo_(comic_strip)
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P.S. For those who do want links about the climate/fires connections, here are a couple possibilities..
NOAA statement on the wildfire climate connection:
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Reference on western fires: Zhuang, et al: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2111875118#executive-summary-abstract
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