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  • Currently in Portland — June 28, 2023: This week's trend continues: a few clouds in the sky and high temps reaching the 80s. Get your summer fun on.

Currently in Portland — June 28, 2023: This week's trend continues: a few clouds in the sky and high temps reaching the 80s. Get your summer fun on.

Plus, 'apocalyptic' wildfire smoke returns to the US Midwest.

Author

Eric Holthaus
June 27, 2023

The weather, currently.

This week's trend continues: a few clouds in the sky and high temps reaching the 80s. Get your summer fun on.

The rest of this week looks blissfully uneventful weather-wise and I am here for it. We're in the summertime sweet spot of highs reaching the mid-80s but overnight temps getting into the 50s—which also makes for cool evenings and mornings. This provides the opportunity to choose your favorite temperature for things like walks (with or without dogs), gardening, and other outdoor adventures. If you don't want to break a sweat, the mornings are downright cool. And if you want to feel the sun on your skin and a prickle of sweat, then the mid-afternoons are just what you need. Personally, it's getting warm enough that I'm avoiding the hottest parts of the day, or at least hiding in the shade if I time my gardening breaks wrong.

What you can do, currently.

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What you need to know, currently.

Smoke-filled skies shrouded the cities of the US Midwest on Tuesday, the latest in a chapter of the months-long public health fallout from the worst wildfires in Canada’s modern history.

At the peak of the smoke, Lake Michigan was invisible from downtown Milwaukee — just one-half mile away. Wisconsin has had more public health warnings for poor air quality in the past 10 weeks than in the past 10 years combined. At one point Tuesday morning, Chicago’s air quality ranked worst in the world.

Adam Mahoney of Chicago’s Capital B writes the effects of this particular part of the climate emergency go beyond physical health: “the visually apocalyptic nature of the recent wildfires, coupled with disruptions in day-to-day life, threaten to create mental health struggles”, particularly for Black folks and marginalized people.

Mahoney spoke with Vickie Mays, a professor at UCLA whose work focuses on racial disparities of physical and mental health. Here’s Mays:

In the Black community, we have to recognize that climate makes health disparities. So we can see this and say, wildfires are a big problem for us. So now we got to worry, and are we prepared? Are we going to be ensuring that those people who need a new mask have gotten them? Is it going to make us want to start addressing the climate disparities because it just reminds us of who’s the most vulnerable?

Vickie Mays

And of course, cities like New Delhi, Kathmandu, and Nairobi are plagued with poor air quality and routinely rank among the worst in the world. The chronic health effects from fossil fuel burning is one of the leading causes of death in the world, killing more than 9 million people every year. That deserves to be front page news every day.