As a 40-year resident of Florida I religiously follow the National Hurricane Center ( https://www.nhc.noaa.gov ) website, especially the storm track map. I’m still in shock from the 2004 hurricane season, starting with Charlie (category 4), then Frances (category 4), and then Jeanne (category 3). These were all in the span of nearly two months, from early August for Charlie to late September for Jeanne. I wasn’t prepared for the ferocity nor the frequency of major hurricanes that came across central Florida that year. Neither was anyone else; for example we were without power for weeks. My daughter almost didn’t make it up to her first freshman term at Florida State University because of the damage. In the end we left with the entire family just so we could rent a hotel room with air conditioning and hot water while we moved my oldest daughter into her dorm room. When we returned home I spent weeks cutting up and hauling off fallen trees around the neighborhood, as well as helping fix damage to every structure in our neighborhood. We all pitched in.

Now I’m watching this hurricane season open up with a bang as it were with Beryl, a category 4 hurricane charging across the souther Caribbean Sea on its way to the Yucatan Peninsula. Along the way it’s devistating island nations such as St Vincent and the Grenadines, Barbados, Grenada, and St Lucia. St Vincent and the Grenadines and Grenada are bearing the brunt of this storm; reports are in of complete power outage and thousands streaming into shelters to survive Beryl’s passage.

The only reason Beryl’s not making a beeline up to Florida and CONUS is because of another climate change induced disaster, a huge high pressure system sitting over the mid-West and mid-Atlantic areas, causing a baking heat dome over that part of the United States.

This the world we now have, caused by centuries of fossil fuel burning stretching back centuries to the Industrial Revolution. Out carbon output has only grown much worse during the period starting from the mid-Twentieth century, and even with all the heat waves across all the northern continents, we refuse to slow down, let alone stop.

How are we to justify how our actions with regards to fossil fuel usage amplifies such environmental destruction and even death, to people caught in the path of these destructive forces? We can’t.

Today is a bad air day over metro Orlando and central Florida in general.

It started yesterday. I first noticed it in the afternoon when I looked up overhead and thought the atmospheric color was a bit off. I checked the Apple weather app, and for once it was shockingly accurate; the entire central Florida area was under an air quality alert for sensitive groups, which I think includes me now that I’m nearly 70.

I dug a little deeper and discovered that Canadian wildfire smoke was being diverted south along the Atlantic seaboard and over central Florida. According to various news outlets, the smoke and haze are supposed to clear out by Wednesday, tomorrow.

If the people of Florida can’t accept this as another blunt sign that we’re in the middle of an environmental catastrophe, I don’t know what will. The Canadian wildfire smoke  affecting weather and health down in Florida is, as the Baptists like to say, a come-to-Jesus moment.