You thought we’d start with something besides bad air and wildfires? 

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On the Front Range, summer has two sub-seasons: June and The Season of Looking Over Your Shoulder. We’re deep into that second half now, as scary wildfires send up new plumes seemingly on an hourly basis, from Jeffco this morning and from above Loveland and Lyons earlier this week.

Denver hit 100 degrees Tuesday and it’s turtles and 97s all the way down. Plus, after a promising spring, the entire West is way behind on precipitation to dampen fire threats. Here’s a look at the current drought monitor:

Watch out, Montana. Keep looking over your shoulders, and, as they say in “Fargo,” call it in.

The good news is that the satellites might have called it in first. Finally, an undeniably beneficial use of artificial intelligence beyond stealing everyone’s intellectual property. Not that we’re bitter. But if a NOAA satellite can call in an air tanker hours earlier for future fires, we’re all for it.

We’re packed with news of this and other climate and health news, so thanks for joining us and away we go.

TEMP CHECK

CLIMATE

How to keep up on air quality (Spoiler alert: It’s awful)

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“Where am I going to live?”

We were struck by that plaintive quote from patients treated by Colorado’s top pulmonary doctors in reporting a Q&A for today on how to handle the blast of ozone and wildfire smoke we’re feeling. Patients with chronic respiratory problems are telling their doctors they feel physically and mentally suffocated by more frequent bad air days and a relentless string of 90 degree-plus weather warnings.

Sometimes it helps to fight despair with information. So let’s review how to use a couple of places where you and your family can plan your smoky day.

The first is the EPA’s AirNow.gov, where you can plug in your ZIP code and get an easy-to-read gauge with the current air quality and a forecast of how bad things might get. The gauge combines several factors, not just ozone, to come up with the Air Quality Index number; above 100 is the orange zone considered unhealthy for vulnerable people, and above 150 is the red zone considered unhealthy for everybody.

Colorado’s public health air quality page goes into more detail about regional variances, gives an almanac of what happened the day before and provides longer text descriptions of their daily advisories.

Yes, we’ve got another bad air advisory for today through the afternoon at least.

And for the love of all coughing relatives and the safety of all hardworking firefighters, please, please avoid any potential fire-starting behavior. We watched a guy in our neighborhood yesterday take one last deep drag from a cigarette, drop it on the sidewalk with barely a touch of his foot and leave it smoldering near a dry garden.

Remember one of our phrases to live by here at Temperature headquarters: Don’t be that guy!

CLIMATE

Did AI help detect Front Range wildfires? Not yet, but NOAA’s new system is ready

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It didn’t take artificial intelligence to spot the dangerous Alexander Mountain fire challenging Colorado’s firefighting resources west of Loveland this week. Commuters, hikers, open space rangers and TV traffic helicopters can be early detectors for newly sparked wildfires over the heavily populated Front Range.

But the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is now armed and ready with AI-empowered, real-time satellite detection for the next, more remote wildfire. The Next Generation Fire System autonomously scans the observations of NOAA geostationary satellites and from a height of 22,000 miles can spot a fire as small as an acre.

A sophisticated communication system then warns land managers and fire forecasters about the hot spot.

The satellites update scans every few seconds and can detect sudden changes in heat on the ground.

The AI scans and communication tools perfected at NOAA’s Boulder test bed in June turn NOAA meteorologists into “scientific first responders,” said Todd Lindley, the National Weather Service science and operations officer for Norman, Oklahoma. “These tools will help us provide timely and life-saving warnings of particularly dangerous wildfires.”

Satellites manage to illustrate the very big alongside the very small.

We were astonished by videos and stills like the one above showing how California’s enormous Park fire is creating its own “pyrocumulonimbus” clouds of smoke and weather after blowing up last week. Started when a burning car was pushed into a ditch on July 24, the wildfire north of Sacramento exploded from 120,000 acres on the 25th to 239,000 acres a day later. It’s up to 386,000 acres as of this morning.

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MORE CLIMATE NEWS

• Some Steamboat residents see ruin in development of an exclusive land club. An Arizona-based operator with 35 private resorts worldwide is moving ahead with a proposal to turn a large portion of a modest, beloved community into Stagecoach Mountain Ranch, a lavish members-only ski and golf resort similar to the Yellowstone Club in Big Sky, Montana. Kari Dequine Harden reports one resident summed it up this way: “The whole thing is so overwhelming it keeps me up at night.”
  — The Colorado Sun
• Could an old idea reviled by green voters be revived for affordable housing? Under the Sagebrush Rebellion, Democrats and progressive Westerners blanched at the idea of conservatives turning over federal lands to state governments for sale to the highest bidder. Now, some old enemies may join forces to find developable land to address desperate needs for middle and lower-income housing.
  — High Country News
• Last stand for “affected persons” against an oil drilling plan. Neighbors of Aurora Reservoir and the proposed Lowry Ranch oil drilling plan have one more late-hours idea: Getting named “affected persons,” even if they don’t live technically within the boundary of that defined category. Mark Jaffe reports that a determined community effort to block the new wells has wrested some major concessions from the oil company, Civitas, but not enough to satisfy opponents. And it turns out, they were granted the status and can move forward.
  — The Colorado Sun
• Colorado water managers can “dream big” for water-saving projects. The ceiling for daydreaming about water conservation ideas in Colorado has been $300,000, Shannon Mullane reports. Now that’s the floor. Enormous new grants from the Biden administration to Western water resource managers promise to fund their biggest and best concepts for combating drought and climate change.
  — The Colorado Sun 

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HEALTH

Five questions with a Colorado doctor who shaped vaccine policy through the pandemic

When Dr. Matthew Daley began his term on a previously little-known advisory committee with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, he knew he had a bigger task before him than he had expected.

Daley is a pediatrician with Kaiser Permanente in Denver, but he also does research through KP’s Institute for Health Research. Daley’s work primarily focuses on vaccines — their safety and patients’ hesitancy to get them — and that had long made it a goal of his to serve on that obscure committee, known as the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP.

But while Daley waited for his chance, the COVID-19 pandemic swept into the nation. By the time Daley took his seat in January 2021, ACIP had become one of the most closely watched medical bodies in the country, responsible for reviewing safety and efficacy data on COVID vaccines and making recommendations about whether and how they should be given.

Daley’s term ended in June, and we recently caught up with him to talk about his experience. The following conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

The Temperature: How are you feeling now that your term has ended? Happy? Relieved?

Matthew Daley: I’m really going to miss it, so I’m kind of sad, frankly. It was such an incredible experience. It was so much more work than anybody anticipated, so now I can put back all that energy into my day job, which is being a pediatric health services researcher and a pediatrician. Certainly I’m excited to get back to the rest of my day job, but I’m going to miss it because it was such an interesting experience.

Temp: You joined the committee at such a tumultuous time for the nation’s health systems. Why did this volunteer job appeal to you?

Daley: I was really grateful to have an opportunity to serve. Often, we have the energy, we have the expertise, but we don’t always have the opportunity. If you remember early in the pandemic, we were under lockdown, everything was shut down. And kids could get quite sick from COVID, but it was just a whole lot less common versus adults. So as a practicing pediatrician, the first couple months of the pandemic were pretty quiet for us. It felt so odd to be a doctor in a public health crisis who was not very busy. So I really was grateful for the opportunity to serve in this very unusual and unprecedented circumstance.

Temp: There was, of course, a lot of public attention on your work, and there was also speculation about political pressure on institutions like ACIP. How did that feel from the inside?

Daley: The ACIP was allowed to independently follow its process for decision-making. We were aware of these different power centers, but I was never getting late-night calls from any of those groups saying, “This is what we need you to do,” or, “This is the decision we need you to make.” We adhered to our process, the process served us well, and we had independence to make vaccine policy decision-making. And so that was very encouraging to find because I think there was always suspicion out there that somebody had their finger on the scale. But really, the ACIP had a process, followed it and was independent.

Temp: But there was still some pretty intense criticism from parts of the public. Did that ever become uncomfortable?

Daley: Our emails are up on the ACIP website, and people could easily find our emails. So we would get emails from the public. And some of those were pretty negative. Some of those were pretty positive, you know, just thanks for the work that you’re doing. And sometimes it was a high volume, but what was interesting there was that it was sort of copied and pasted. So you get a bunch of emails, but it was verbatim from another email that you’d get. So it seemed like a small number of people who had an organized campaign. But, given the circumstances, it was totally understandable and just fine.

Temp: How did you incorporate that feedback?

Daley: I think it was helpful to hear what people were worried about. And to the extent I could, I would try to address that in the public meetings. I remember a meeting where there were some public commenters who were really worried about COVID vaccine side effects. And I remember saying, “We hear how great your concerns are about COVID vaccine side effects. We do factor that into our decision-making.” We know that no vaccine is 100% safe or effective. And then here’s what data we have about safety. We have good safety surveillance systems in the U.S. The safety monitoring was some of the most intensive — probably the most intensive — safety monitoring ever in the history of modern science in terms of how many eyes were on safety. And so I was reassured by that.

Watch ColoradoSun.com in the coming days for an expanded Q&A with Daley, including what non-COVID breakthrough he is most proud of.

MORE HEALTH NEWS

• Colorado expands testing for bird flu at dairy farms as state hits new peaks. It seems like we write this every week, but Colorado’s worst-in-the-nation outbreak of bird flu has gotten … worst-er. The state last week identified more human cases related to an outbreak at a poultry facility — a different one than the farm where six workers were infected earlier. Genetic analyses of viral samples from the workers continue to show encouraging results, though. Meanwhile, the state is up to 51 dairy herds affected by bird flu — nearly half the herds in the state — and agricultural officials have ordered mandatory testing at dairies to try to stop the virus there.
  — The Colorado Sun
• Phil Weiser is the only person in Colorado who has succeeded lately in selling a house, high interest rates be damned. We exaggerate, of course. It was actually the Attorney General’s Office that sold a house — well, a bank auctioned it and gave the proceeds to the state — and it was related to a lien the AG’s office placed on a woman wanted in an alleged Medicaid fraud scheme. An arrest warrant for the woman, Muluemebet Tasew, remains active. The house, which is in southeast Aurora, fetched $455,381.
  — Colorado AG’s Office
• The CU Med School is asking some students to go long with patients. A new educational model at the University of Colorado School of Medicine has doctors-in-training eschewing the typical rotation schedule to instead track patients as they move through their health journeys. The goal is to get new doctors thinking less about their own silos and more about patients as a whole.
  — The Denver Post🔑
• Kansas hospital sued for not providing abortion care. A woman has sued the University of Kansas Health System for failing to provide what she says was a medically necessary abortion. She contends that violates a federal law governing emergency treatment.
  — Reuters

CHART OF THE WEEK

Millions of extra summer travelers in, around and above Denver International Airport get an unusual sight, by car or plane: The ever-growing monument to Colorado consumption known as Republic Services’ Tower Landfill.

Is the garbage tomb a little taller since the last time you flew? Definitely. But what goes on behind the carefully placed caps of soil and methane venting? What could possibly stop all that refuse from causing chaos through leaks?

We’re not guaranteeing that won’t ever happen, but there is a careful design. First we looked for graphics of how the EPA would build the ideal landfill containment. Then we asked Republic Services for their version of how things work at Tower Road, and the concepts were all the same.

On the bottom, the liner gets layers of clay, sand, plastic and more sand. Each finished section of disposed garbage is capped as they go, a process that could last at least 20 more years. The final caps include more sand and clay, to keep rain and snow from penetrating and adding to the contaminated leachate developing inside the garbage mound.

Rotting garbage produces methane, which under modern methods is systematically collected by piping and sent to a gathering plant; the methane can be used in vehicle fueling or electrical turbine fuel. Leachate is also gathered, and pumped to tanks for treatment — 500,000 gallons a year at Tower, from 6,000 tons of waste added every day, Republic Services says.

It’s all designed to keep this decade’s landfill from becoming next decade’s Superfund site, as happened to the long-dormant Lowry Landfill. Will we find out otherwise in our lifetime? Hard to say. But there is a plan.

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Stay hydrated, wear a mask even before you smell smoke, take an indoor movie break in the afternoon with the kids, and kiss a firefighter. Or hand them a cool drink. Or whatever form of thanks and encouragement they prefer. We appreciate them, and you. It could be a looooong August.

— Michael & John

Corrections & Clarifications

Notice something wrong? The Colorado Sun has an ethical responsibility to fix all factual errors. Request a correction by emailing corrections@coloradosun.com.