As smoke from Canadian wildfires descends on the Midwest and Northeast United States, visions of climate change catastrophe dance in activists’ heads. Reinforced with a dreaded “heat dome,” denizens of disaster may have found a new home from which to pester neighbors about the end of the world as we know it.

The summertime combination of warm and occasionally smoky air is not as unusual as some residents may think. The “lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer” was a common mantra of yesteryear. Even the “Gay Nineties” — that’s the happy 1890s — experienced some of the hottest days on record with only rudimentary ways of relief (hand fans and cold water, for example).