We had wildfire smoke from western Canada covering the sky this evening. So we had an unusual sunset. The sun was actually a bit redder than depicted but, still, this was an unusual sky.  Below is a smoke density map and you can see the smoke was quite thick (denoted by red over northern Kansas) at the time of the photo. 

It was the East Coast last week and, now, we have Canadian smoke moving south in the central third of the nation.  The forecast for 8am tomorrow has the thicker smoke (colored) moving into the Great Lakes region. 

Conditions in NYC are so bad that "ground stops" are in effect at LaGuardia and Newark International this afternoon causing major  flight delays. That may spread south to Philadelphia during the afternoon. The lights in Time Square have illuminated as if it were night. The amount of smoke is off the chart with today and yesterday's values in red.  The health conditions are literally off the chart.  For those unfamiliar with the usual midday appearance of NYC, below are images of a typical day and from a little while ago. The usual suspects are, of course, blaming this on global warming. My thoughts are here . There is one indirect way climate change (human or natural variability) climate change could have affected the fires and that pertains to the ones that were started by lightning. Lightning seems to be more frequent at the latitude of northern Quebec than it used to be. Because of the remote area and the scale of the fires, humans cannot extinguish them. They will hav...