The Year Earth Broke

Climate change was so big we couldn’t see it — now, it’s everywhere we look.

A terrifying vision of climate change, yes, but a great sequel to “Eraserhead.” Photo by Dmitriy Ermakov on Unsplash

I woke up last night because my daughter was coughing in her sleep. She’s been doing it all week — long, deep, ugly coughs, with little gags in the middle, so loud I’m amazed the noise doesn’t wake her up. It woke me. She’s had coughs before, but this one is different: My daughter got tired at day care, she said, and being tired made her dizzy, and she fell down.

I don’t want to know what this is. I think I know what it is, though. I was in nearby Syracuse this June, when the smoke from the Canadian wildfires first hit — I had to go to the city for a doctor’s appointment. The sky went dark yellow. The whole town smelled like a campfire. Because I’d never encountered anything like it, I didn’t know how to respond, so I proceeded as normal. I walked to my doctor’s appointment, and then to a coffee shop, to wait for my ride home. I was outdoors for maybe thirty minutes. A few days after the smoke passed, I couldn’t stand up. I kept trying; I kept getting dizzy. My vision went black. I kept falling over.

The air pollution in downtown Syracuse was 460 on a scale of 500 on the day I was out — worse than New York City’s, which was historically bad. It was mostly fine particulate matter, which is known to cause heart and breathing…