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Is smoke not considered a pollutant? The list is just a ranking of current PM2.5 AQI levels.

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Generally when people are talking about pollutants they're talking about man made pollutants.

WHO includes smoke in their overview page on air pollution as does Wikipedia.

- https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution#Sources

Most smoke that is air pollution is caused by farmers burning crops.

You can include smoke in air pollution numbers, while not considering wild fires to be pollution.

As climate change was a key driver of these fires and those in Australia earlier this year, then I feel like it's perfectly reasonable to say this is man made pollution.

Coal and oil are also a "natural" fuels, but we burn those too and we say it's man made pollution.

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