On Broadway, ten minutes into her solo performance, an actor coughs. Then she holds her throat. "I can't breathe," Jodie Comer cries out, before being hurried offstage and replaced by her understudy.

Outside, yellow fog creeps in like a nuclear winter. On the street, throats are burning, eyes are itching, and passers-by squint through the thick, murky gloom trying to find their way home.

New Yorkers have entered a new dystopianRelating to an imagined society where there is great suffering or injustice.  reality. Wildfires in Canada sent sickly smoke down the East Coast, swallowing skylines and halting travel.

More than 100 million US citizens were alerted to the "very unhealthy" or even "hazardous" air quality in several major cities.

Amid code red alerts, cancelled school days and urgent warnings to stay home and only venture outside with a mask on, many are left harrowed by this brutal awakening to the dangers of climate change.

It is a dark signature of our past - the industrial 19th Century, for example, when Charles DickensThe Victorian novelist is credited with inventing Christmas as we know it today through the warm descriptions of it in his books. wrote that "animate London, with smarting eyes and irritated lungs, was blinking, wheezing and choking; inanimate London was a sooty spectre, divided in purpose between being visible and invisible, and so being wholly neither."

But experts say it is also a prophecy of our future. As one writer put it: "We are going to be burning for this entire century." And though the number of wildfires is not increasing, they are becoming less predictable, and therefore less manageable, as a result of climate change.¹

To make it even more frightening, we know more about the dangers posed by air pollutionThe presence in the air of harmful or poisonous substances. Air pollution can cause many health problems. now. It is thought to be responsible for 10 million deaths annually.

Hellish bushfires in Australia, forest fires in Siberia and Bolivia, raging summer fires in Serbia - the 21st Century has offered up a rich array of catastrophes.

Some think that this is the new reality. In highly polluted cities like Shanghai and Beijing, a wealthy elite pays for fresh air to be shipped from the British or Canadian countryside; meanwhile, poorer people swelter under masks.

But others urge us to recognise that we still have a choice. Halting or even reversing global warming is the only way we can mitigate these polluting wildfires.

Yes: Climate change has already created devastating conditions for us that may be irreversible. Clean air will be one of the first things to go - the process has already started.

No: The smogA kind of toxic fog caused by high levels of air pollution. is expected to migrate within a few days, and everything will go back to normal. It is ridiculous to speculate that none of us will have clean air from this incident alone.

Or... Fire is a part of nature - many creatures and even whole ecosystems rely on it to build their habitats. So air pollution has also always been a part of the way we live.