Wildfire smoke is the air quality nightmare of our generation, eating away at previous gains made by cracking down on industrial emissions and tailpipe pollution. Constant exposure to smoke is becoming a chronic threat even in places that historically haven’t had many wildfires. …All that smoke is projected to lead to tens of thousands more premature deaths in the coming years, according to a pair of eye-opening research papers published today in the journal Nature. …“Increasing wildfire smoke is a lived experience now for most people around the US,” Marshall Burke, a professor at Stanford University and a co-author of one of the papers, said. “Growing wildfire smoke is a much larger health risk than we might have understood previously.” …This new study just adds to the mountains of research that shows climate change absolutely threatens public health. “Our results provide some of the strongest evidence that a warming climate endangers the health of US citizens,” Burke says.