On a recent trip to Vancouver, a great yellow tongue of dirty air greeted us as the ferry surged into Georgia Strait. Stretching out from Vancouver, the tongue licked at the shores of Galiano and Mayne islands.

“We’re travelling right into it,” Nature Boy said. “Gotta love these temperature inversions.”

For much of January, warm air sat like a pot lid over the south coast, trapping cooler air in valleys and against the mountains. At higher elevations, the warm temperatures messed up the ski hills. Down below, in the Lower Mainland, people stewed in chill, polluted air.

And here, coiling out of the Fraser Valley, the corpse-coloured smog tongue demonstrated, on a small scale, pollution’s potential long reach. Wind, rain and pollution recognize no boundaries, and don’t stop at the shoreline, the farm gate or the border….

Read the rest of this editorial at the Victoria Times Colonist….