As climate change makes wildfires more intense, U.S. deaths from chronic inhalation of smoke could climb to 40,000 per year — that’s more than double the current number of 15,000 deaths per year, according to a recent study.
While the study’s co-author Jeff Pierce cautioned that more research must be done, he said the model shows “smoke concentrations will roughly double and this will counteract a lot of improvements gained from a reduction in emissions from human sources, such as power plants.”