Overlooked climate-change danger: Wildfire smoke
Health Overlooked climate-change danger: Wildfire smoke Max Larkin Harvard Staff Writer July 21, 2025 7 min read Researchers rush to get hands around multiple serious health risks as blazes mount — and get bigger Loretta Mickley first started thinking about smoke in the summer of 2002. “I was on vacation in Western Massachusetts, and on that day, there was something kind of sparkly about the air,” Mickley recalled. “I’d never seen anything like it, and I said to my husband, ‘What’s going on?’ I’m an atmospheric chemist — I should know, right?” The shimmering agent was soot, kicked up by a wildfire in Quebec and borne hundreds of miles down the eastern seaboard. Twenty-three years later, smoke has become an almost-exclusive focus for Mickley, a senior research fellow at the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. But it took years for the work by Mickley and others to begin in earnest — and widen across disciplines — as...