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A friend in Brooklyn DMed me on Sunday: “Skies here in Brooklyn have been milky and the air a pale haze for days from Canadian smoke plumes.”
“I hope it doesn’t go to orange,’ I wrote back. “That’s when things really start feeling weird—otherworldly.”
“So far no orange,” he wrote. “I’ve only seen photos of that.”
Yesterday, he wrote again: “Orange skies today.”
Welcome to our weird new world. Out west, orange skies have become a feature of fire season from L.A. to Anchorage. Over the past few years, most west coast cities have earned the title: worst urban air quality in the world, beating out the usual suspects in Asia. Now it’s New York’s turn, and Boston’s, and New Haven’s. We feel your pain, and we dread that smell. This particulate-laden smoke is truly unhealthy; it gets in your eyes and nose, but what is most damaging is what it does to your head: your home, the world you thought you knew, is no longer quite the same. You feel a new precarity, and a creeping fear: what if it doesn’t go away?
There is a theme running through the weather-related disasters now traumatizing communities around the globe in all seasons, and it is the theme of dissonance. It’s not just our infrastructure that’s built for a different time, it’s our mindset. Whether it’s the depth of the snow, the volume of the rainfall, or the speed of the flames, when it comes to extreme weather, our heads are still in the 20th century.
There is actually a name for this phenomenon: the Lucretius Problem. Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus) was a Roman poet and philosopher who identified this cognitive disconnect more than 2000 years ago. Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, paraphrases Lucretius this way: “The fool believes the tallest mountain in the world will be equal to the tallest he has observed.” In essence, the Lucretius Problem is rooted in the difficulty humans have imagining and assimilating things outside their own personal experience.
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James' World 2 
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