Boston and Interplanetary Smoke

Here in New England, we got some serious smoke from the Canadian wildfires. How does it compare to other places?

Interplanetary Smoke

On 2026-Jul-15, smoke from some extensive Canadian wildfires blew down into the US, creating some surreal atmospheric color. (Also surreal: Trump, being an idiot, decided it was because Canadians didn’t properly rake leaves in their forests, and vowed to impose 50% punitive tariffs.)

Californians are used to such things, but in New England that much smoke is very much a bizarre and different experience. The sky took on a deep color, and the mid-afternoon light was an ominous, lowering yellow like a hurricane was about to pass through. Not weather, just smoke. For us, thankfully, it was mostly in the upper atmosphere and not down here on the ground.

This photo was taken by the Weekend Editrix in late afternoon. It shows the sun as a glaring red star, almost like we’re all suddenly in a Darkover novel. Darkover novels are no longer au courant in F/SF fandom due to the unfortunate facts revealed about their author after her death. But, many years ago, they struck a romantic chord in me. (Ok, some of them. Others were more cathartic than dramatic, possibly constituting self-therapy for the author.)

Of course, I was not the only person to note this!

Over on BlueSky, Paul Byrne’s post of this triptych of yellow-skied pictures definitely caught my eye. They are, respectively, photos from the surface of Venus by one of the Russian probes, the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan, and… Boston.

The average ambient surface temperatures are, of course, not comparable:

• Venus: +470°C
• Titan:   –180°C
• Earth (Boston, specifically): 11°C (though about 35°C on this particular day)

Alas, as pointed out by ‘Notorious RBMK’ (great name, RBMK being the class of Soviet nuclear reactors with a history of safety problems, including the Chernobyl meltdown) on BlueSky, the Venus image appears to have been ‘doctored up’ from real images and some imagination.

It turns out the Planetary Society has a collection of every picture from Venus, ever. (It also turns out there are only 6 of them, so you can examine each photo in detail, if you are of a mind to do so. Note to future photographic forgers: if there are only 6 known true photos, maybe your fake will be quickly detected?) The photo shown here appears to have started from the Venera 13 rear camera panorama, and then the rest was faked and added somehow. I’m deeply suspicious there was some AI slop going on here, added by one of the crappy LLMs with which we are all now afflicted.

Still… consider the point made: it was a very weird weather day.

If you need the point made more sharply, consider this video from someone who works as a train conductor & engineer in Canada. It shows his train in Ontario, driving through the fire, urging whatever’s ahead to get the heck out of they way so they can move:

Expect more of this, because it will take – optimistically – decades to decarbonize our societies and get greenhouse gas levels down slowly. If we don’t decarbonize, expect this to get rapidly worse, and lead to mass deaths in unexpected parts of the world.

The Weekend Conclusion

The more important point: we must stop burning fossil fuels – all of them, everywhere. Summer fires like this are going to be worse every year, for decades. And then the crop failures. And the migrating disease organisms. And the coastal inundations.

In the US, this will of course require a change in government, back to people who are at least occasionally rational and tell more truths than lies. Letting the billionaire tech-bros and the petro-oligarchs continue to run things will result in mass die-offs.

(Ceterum censeo, Trump incarceranda est!)

(Et ceterum censeo, index Epsteiniani divulganda est!)

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Notes & References

Nope.