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My children are enrolled in the San Francisco Unified School District. SFUSD closed schools, last Friday. I personally believe this was an over-reaction, more motivated by a desire to protect the school district from legal liability than it was by a desire to protect the children from particulate levels.

In discussions with my flatmate, a few hundred miles outside the Bay Area, he observed that, growing up in Southern California, he remembered days when, if your physical education class was scheduled in the afternoon, you were kept inside. So far, so good.

Without knowing more about the actual particulate levels that triggered these behaviors in Southern California, it's hard to make comparisons between these two policies.

In much of San Francisco there is a haze, and a smell of smoke ... but nothing worse.

The air quality index (buzzword: 'AQI') for the San Francisco Bay Area is calculated from nine counties. San Francisco is just one of the counties and it is located adjacent to the Pacific Ocean.

The website that provides the most concise information as far as I can tell is http://www.airnow.gov/ - some of the subpages include web cameras so that you can assess atmospheric clarity yourself.

Yesterday, for instance, when I visited this site, the sub-page for Mendocino County (100 miles north of the Golden Gate, directly underneath the smoke cloud shown in the satellite image URL, above), showed that the county was shrouded in a dark grey fog; as if it were about to snow - but it was much too warm to be that sort of fog.

My children have been brainwashed by SFUSD into believing that air quality is so bad that everyone needs to remain inside. I've been working to persuade them that they have been misinformed.

I make the argument that a person who goes to Ocean Beach and faces west is breathing air that has traveled more or less 8000 miles without interruption, across the Pacific Ocean.

Admittedly, satellite photos (https://sf.curbed.com/2018/11/9/18080346/satellite-photo-space-smoke-camp-butte-northern-california - note that this was at the BEGINNING of the fire, over a week ago) show some escape of particulates offshore, but it is not clear at what altitude this is happening, and it's clear that it is not going very far offshore.

I have made the case to my family that

a) people pay good money to vacation in regions where the scent of woodsmoke is a prominent feature, therefore, the smell of smoke, alone, cannot be seen as bad for your health; and

b) because of the humidity resulting in fog it is likely that smoke particulates are attaching to water droplets and making the water droplets larger, leading to a visible decrease of the atmospheric clarity ... but that is not smoke.

My take on this situation is that a bunch of anti-smoking Nazis who won elections, based on platforms that were opposed to smoking, then proceeded to cement their positions by passing laws making it illegal to smoke outside (it's illegal to smoke cigarettes in Golden Gate Park, as thousands of tourists learn, to their cost, every year - marijuana's OK, though).

Having eliminated cigarette smokers as a threat to the public, these assholes next outlawed beach fires. I kid you not - I was recently studying a sign, at Ocean Beach, and noted that, in order to start a fire on the beach, one needed to call an 800 number and verify that it was not a "Spare The Air" day.

(Imagine being a tourist in San Francisco. You're at the beach. You have hot dogs and coals you bought at Safeway, across the street. It's cold. The wind is blowing off the ocean. It's foggy. You start a fire, with your kids. All of a sudden, an asshole, in a uniform, drives up, hops out, and gives you an expensive ticket, while telling you, in a morally superior tone, that it's illegal to start fires on the beach today. Nice! Fortunately, there is a steady supply of tourists.)

Having eliminated all these pernicious sour

Especially when you consider some of the lunacy coming out of the Bay area...

We already city-level air quality indicies that let us do comparisons between cities - http://www.airnow.gov/

Anyway, it's not a hard problem to solve. Street View cars already revisit the same streets they've been to before, so eventually they'd collect enough data to be able to average out those sources of variability.

This looks more like it would be useful for comparing neighborhoods within a city. How much worse is the air in the industrial districts compared to the residential ones? What is the difference in air quality in each of San Francisco's microclimates?

But traffic is a large source of solution, so that would bias their data. It would be cool if they strapped these sensors onto the Street View backpacks that they use to map hiking trails, and get data on the air quality along walking paths in parks and other areas that can't be driven to.

I visited London in 1985. After just one day, my snot was black from all the soot. Was disconcerting to blow my nose and see a white tissue turn black. I hear that today, London is much cleaner.

That can happen if you take the Underground a lot in one day, as there's a lot of dust in the tunnels. Supposedly (I read the research, but don't care to try and find it again right now) it's safe, since the particles are mostly iron oxides from the steel wheels rubbing the steel rails, and are big enough that your nose filters them.

I wasn't born in 1985, and moved to London in 2004, so what I think is "bad" might be nothing compared to what it was. Certainly the pollution in London is less of a problem than in most large American cities I've visited, but worse than all other western/northern European cities.

See: http://www.airqualitynow.eu/comparing_home.php and http://airnow.gov/

In Beijing I felt sick because of the pollution, and it stung my throat. See http://bjair.info/

(Last time I checked I concluded that all these sites used the same numeric index, but the EU one's colours are different.)

I am sort of acting as the database manager for the Global Ozone Project, an organization that sends ozone monitors to schools around the world and has them upload their data to our database. We are currently in the process of working with AIRNow, the EPA's air quality organization, to see if our data can be included in their database. So far, we have spent about a month trying to get things set up and working. The vast majority of our problems have been related to timestamps on each ozone measurement. Because there was no way to guarantee that people had set the time on the ozone monitors right at all, we had to use the time that each point was uploaded to the server. This would be almost fine except for the fact that it was a Windows server and no one had bothered to change the default timezone, so it was using the local time and daylight savings was turned on. We ended up converting all of the times to GMT, but it still meant that when daylight savings goes away there is one hour where we have twice as much data as we should and the next hour has no data. In other words, I am fed up with dealing with timezones and daylight savings. Yes, it would be very hard for things to get adjusted, especially when it comes to things like the firmware in our ozone monitors, but I believe it would be worth it. And people? People can get used to things. I would find it better anyways.

http://www.airnow.gov/index.cfm?action=aqibasics.aqi#unh

If I recall correctly, the health indexes this summer in Boston (I live in Maine, and we had many of the same issues here) were linked to high ozone and a heat wave. However, we never got out of the "Unhealthy" range, and if I remember we only spent a couple of days in the "Unhealthy" range (151-200) and I don't think we got near the high end of that scale. We did have a generous handful of "Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups" (101-150) days. I'm not aware of ANY US incidents where we ever broke 200, and certainly not anywhere near that in Boston or surrounds this summer.

China considers anything under 250 to be "Moderately Polluted". Beijing starts canceling outdoor games warnings at 240. In other words, at the scale way beyond where the US is recommending everyone stay indoors and buy tarps and duct tape, Beijing is talking about maybe curtailing a few of the most exerting outdoor activities.

The scale the embassy is using ends at 500, or "Hazardous", because no one ever designed the scale with a pollutant level beyond 500 in real air in mind (though Maylasia has the dubious honor of having the highest-ever recorded index at 839 in 2007).

They need a new classification to describe something worse than "Hazardous". I'm thinking "soy sauce" would be good. Or "good luck finding oxygen in this shit". Or maybe just "At least we aren't in Maylasia".

Show me more than a handful of non-hybrid SULEV vehicles.

Fine. Show me a LEV diesel engine smaller than what you'd put in a school bus.

Besides, since diesels hardly sell in the US, there hasn't been a lot of point in developing the technology. SULEV is a US (not EU) standard, and diesels only account for a small percentage of passenger car sales. Most of the diesel vehicles are produced by EU companies and there is no reason SULEV cannot be achieved by diesel.

The modern "clean diesels" generally barely meet modern US emissions reqs. The Jetta TDI, for example, has an EPA Air Pollution Score of 1 out of 10, where 1 is the worst (the Prius gets an 8). You can't sell a car in the US that has worse emissions than the Jetta TDI.

By the way: all of New England is in a smog alert right now.

The reason diesels are popular in Europe is because gasoline is so heavily taxed in Europe that the 10-30% improvement in fuel economy diesels get adds up to real money. Furthermore as of this writing the EU and Japan have more stringent emissions standards than the US.

Almost every EU diesel would be illegal to sell in the US because they don't meet US emissions reqs.

It's almost 15% denser and releases correspondingly more CO2 per gallon

Even if that were true (and this study says you are wrong)

Huh? The densities of diesel versus gasoline are not up for debate. Even a sixth grader doing a science fair project can measure fuel densities. Diesel is denser, plain and simple. It's made of longer-chain hydrocarbons. That's what defines diesel. Hydrocarbon densities increase with average chain length, with methane as the least dense and your bitumen/tars as the densest.

diesel also uses 10-25% less fuel for the same power output thanks to that same energy density.

And divide that by the density difference....

The fact of the matter that all this doomsday shit has got to go. Yes, the United States was a major polluter, the worst at one point. But the air is cleaner today in America than what it was 50 years ago. Things ARE being done. Things have been improving for a long time. I'm not saying we should stop trying to make our air cleaner, but all of this crap that people spew about how the United States has such horrible air and the right wingers don't care and the sky is falling and blah blah blah... is just getting old.

here's some supporting links...that way I don't get modded troll... Historical Ozone Trend

and just in case you would like to see how your air quality is doing today...
Click Here

We need to always be mindful, but enough with all the alarmist bullshit already.

And if China doesn't want to play by the rules and its such a big deal, then put your money where your mouth is, buy from companies that operate in countries that you agree with.

I haven't been able to find an international index of air quality (I don't have my statistic search engines bookmarked at work, sorry), but AirNow has a list of individual international indices.

I'm not even sure there is an single international index, due to the different standards and technological possibilities. Okay, if we're just talking fine particulates, ozone, CO2, NOX, and SOX (no, not Sarbanes-Oxley) in major western cities, then you could find something. But I wouldn't place any money on the monitoring in Mumbai being as good as the monitoring in Munich.

The human body has a way of defending itself against all sorts of nasty stuff. Generally, things aren't bad for you unless you're exposed in excess. Apples contain cyanide, potatoes contain solanine, and cars emit carbon monoxide. Let's avoid all of them!