Smoke. Last night my eyes were scratchy and my lungs hurt.

In the sixties, when I was an eleven year-old kid in Los Angeles, the smog would be so bad that my lungs would hurt after walking home from school.

Later, as a young adult I stupidly took up smoking.

I was up to a pack a day by the time I was 35 which was when I tossed out my final pack of Marlboros.

Some doctors say that after seven years our lungs can recover if we quit.

Other experts tell us that the chemicals in tobacco smoke damage the delicate lining of the lungs and can cause permanent damage that reduces the ability of the lungs to exchange air efficiently. This can ultimately lead to chronic pulmonary disease, including emphysema.

Last night I went to bed and my eyes were scratchy and my lungs hurt.

It brought back memories of my hurting lungs as a kid in L.A. and the days when I was a stupid smoker.

I’m in Chicago. I am far way from the worst of the smoke from the Canadian wildfires that have turned the skies New York and Philadelphia orange.

Schools have been forced to close.

My New York family has resturned to wearing N95 masks when they are outside.

This is all new to the east coast. My friends in California and other parts of the west have been dealing with wildfire smoke for a while. And there should be no question that these wildfires have gotten worse as a result of climate change.

Yet even the smoke from the wildfires has been turned into a right-wing wedge issue.

They are following the playbook from the Covid pandemic when they attacked all efforts for public safety including masks, vaccines and lockdowns.

Climate change deniers are at work again.

But there’s a fierce, and large, contingent of deniers of anthropogenic climate change, and a little thing like mass wildfires isn’t going to stop them. The main line from the Canadian right is that the burns are the work of criminals and firebugs, and that governments are simply “blaming the fires on ‘climate change’ and on the ‘climate crisis,’” as Toronto Sun columnist Joe Warmington wrote Wednesday. Others, like former NHL player-turned-conspiracy theorist Theo Fleury, have taken the idea a step further, alleging that progressives are weaponizing the fires to force “climate lockdowns” on the masses. Taking that idea even further, right-wing politician Maxime Bernier accused “green terrorism” for starting the fires.

The effect of wildfire smoke on our health is immediate and long-term.

‘We know that breathing in smoke when you are close to a fire is not good, but we have seen that over time it gets worse – up to four times more toxic a day down the road,’ said Prof. Nenes, referring to some of their experiment results. These results showed smoke samples taken from the air more than five hours after they were released from a fire were twice as toxic than when they were first released and as they aged further in the laboratory the toxicity increased to four times the original levels.

‘This means that even if you are far away from a fire, if the smoke is being blown towards you, it can have a significant impact on health,’ he said. ‘People might not even be aware they are breathing in the fumes from a faraway forest fire, but it will be affecting their health.’