Smoke-filled skies bring reality of the climate crisis home to millions of Americans

The unnerving sight of New York City's skies turning a dystopian orange from wildfire smoke is just the latest in a barrage of distress signals that life in the US is starting to fray under the relentless pressure of the climate crisis, experts have warned

- Oliver Milman

On Wednesday, New York held the dubious title of having the worst air quality in the world, with Detroit in second place, as plumes of smoke from hundreds of fires in the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec were carried south by a stiff breeze.

Toxic air warnings affected more than 110 million Americans across a dozen states as a sort of tangerine pall engulfed east coast cities, blotting out everything from the Empire State Building to the Lincoln Memorial.

A meteorologist with the US National Weather Service noted that his town in upstate New York "looks like Mars". It was the worst day for wildfire air pollution in recent US history and, as Joe Biden put it, "another stark reminder of the impacts of climate change".

New Yorkers are not unused to climate-driven disasters, but this felt disturbingly abnormal. Eric Adams, the city's mayor, said his first reaction to the Blade Runner-like skies was: "What the hell is this?" Playgrounds were shut down, Broadway theatre actors fled the stage, baseball games were called off and previously discarded pandemic masks were suddenly clamped back on to faces.

"There's no blueprint or playbook for these type of issues," Adams said.

"You want to be as prepared as possible. But there is no planning for an incident like this." The climate crisis's subversion of life's expected patterns has become a recent theme in the US, however, with the past two weeks showing that global heating is imposing some painful boundaries across the span of the North American continent.