Yifang Zhu in The Philadelphia Inquirer: How climate change is fueling record-breaking California wildfires, heat and smog

In 2001, a team of international scientists projected that during the next 100 years, the planet’s inhabitants would witness higher maximum temperatures, more hot days and heat waves, an increase in the risk of forest fires and “substantially degraded air quality” in large metropolitan areas as a result of climate change. “When you add COVID, extreme heat, wildfires and air pollution all together, they’re all detrimental to public health, and it just makes things worse,” said Yifang Zhu, a professor of environmental health sciences at UCLA Fielding School of Public Health who studies air pollution and its effects. “These stressors are happening at the same time. So the impact is cumulative and maybe even synergistic to each other.”