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Treat it at a source, instead of trying to contain the symptoms.

https://earthobservatory.nasa....

Put some political pressure on Cambodia, as well as at its own citizens and other nations around, to stop fucking doing this every year, instead of trying to simulate rainy season.. to appear as they are actually doing something.

At the time of writing this, the pm2.5 particles are at 180 Link .. so obviously this little PR stunt ain't cutting it.

Climate change is the least of your problems. I bet you you can find Poland on this map: https://aqicn.org/map/europe/ without even seeing the country borders.

"Somewhere" doesn't mean "87 days of smog in at least one place in at least one of the counties". When the air quality index is bad it tends to be bad over a large area, particularly in the inland valleys. Take a look at this map. On a typical day the coast (except SoCal) will be 'good' while the inland areas and SoCal will be 'moderate' or worse.

The town I live in in northern Italy was once famous for its "clean and healthy air". That was a century ago - nowadays, PM readings are published on the local newspapers and their websites only during the low-tourism months, and official sensor stations are placed in strategically less-interesting locations. A few weeks ago I bought a couple of SDS011 sensors, and I plan to place them on my balconies, hook them each up to a an Arduino with an RS485 module and have the data stored into my InfluxDB (which I already use to store energy consumption and other apartment-related data), but I haven't had the time yet to wire everything together.

The problem I see with collecting PM2.5/PM10 values from a drone or any moving vehicle: you only get readings for a given area for a specific point in time. Some of these readings could be exceptionally high or low for a variety of reasons (heavy wind? burning building?). In order to have some conclusive data you want to collect it from the same place over a period of time.

If one prefers an already complete solution with instructions and downloadable code: a group in Stuttgart, Germany, created the project Luftdaten (text in German and Polish, only). The website describes how to easily create your own (stationary) internet-connected sensor with a NodeMCU and SDS011 sensor, and hook it up with their (free) service. The data is collected and can be shown on a map. There are a number of sensors placed by individuals in Europe, and even a few in the USA. Even though the number of sensors is low at the moment, if this project gains some traction it could provide some interesting data.

No it isn't. I value air but I've never paid a cent for it. .

How much have you paid for clean air though, via taxes, regulation, and enforcement of those regulations?

Because when you don't pay for clean air in certain locations, you end up like Shanghai...

I have seen values for Germany up to 13 t CO2 per capita. While this sucks big time, one third is produced by traffic, another third is from heating

So what? France doesn't have road traffic and heating?

Have I implied that? Nope.

However, Germany is significant colder than France which requires more heating. France is more centralized which may result in less daily traffic. Usually in France they do not drive not so obsessive big cars as some Germans do (especially in the South).

http://www.weatheronline.co.uk...
http://www.weatheronline.co.uk...

One key source are the lignite coal plants, which could be switched off today.

FYI https://www.cleanenergywire.or...
It would be nice to have a similar source for France. However, I could not find one.

France has been generating 80-90% of it's electricity from low carbon sources since the 1990's and you expect kudos for thinking about maybe closing down some fucking lignite burning power plants at some undefined time between now and 2020.

I personally, would prefer to shut them down right now. They are only still a thing because the social democrats do not want to harm RWE which is a huge source of income in North Rhine-Westphalia. There is no disagreement on that topic. I do not like them. They suck. But nuclear is not the answer to the problem. It is just another problem.

Oh, fucking great, you're proud that they're going to close 13% of the lignite burning plants.

No I am not happy with that and you would have already noticed that when you would really try to understand anything I am saying, but you rather rattle about how mean I am because I do not support you nuclear is better idea.

Are we going to have more high particulate pollution days this summer when the wind happens to be blowing from Germany?

If the coal plants are still on? Very unlikely as it would require wind blowing from the north east to the south west. But you might want to observe the values
http://aqicn.org/city/paris/
http://aqicn.org/city/berlin/

Anyway, in summer Germany most likely requires less power from coal plants as we additionally will have more energy from solar power. Energy consumption is higher in winter.

How many people are being killed every year by the air pollution from your biomass and coal plants? 10's of Chernobyl's a year? 100's? 1000's?

Do you have any reliable figures? And still, I do not want coal plants. Coal sucks. I also do not want to have to cleanup the aftermath of a nuclear plant blowing up and storing the waste for thousands of years.

I have seen values for Germany up to 13 t CO2 per capita. While this sucks big time, one third is produced by traffic, another third is from heating

So what? France doesn't have road traffic and heating?

Have I implied that? Nope.

However, Germany is significant colder than France which requires more heating. France is more centralized which may result in less daily traffic. Usually in France they do not drive not so obsessive big cars as some Germans do (especially in the South).

http://www.weatheronline.co.uk...
http://www.weatheronline.co.uk...

One key source are the lignite coal plants, which could be switched off today.

FYI https://www.cleanenergywire.or...
It would be nice to have a similar source for France. However, I could not find one.

France has been generating 80-90% of it's electricity from low carbon sources since the 1990's and you expect kudos for thinking about maybe closing down some fucking lignite burning power plants at some undefined time between now and 2020.

I personally, would prefer to shut them down right now. They are only still a thing because the social democrats do not want to harm RWE which is a huge source of income in North Rhine-Westphalia. There is no disagreement on that topic. I do not like them. They suck. But nuclear is not the answer to the problem. It is just another problem.

Oh, fucking great, you're proud that they're going to close 13% of the lignite burning plants.

No I am not happy with that and you would have already noticed that when you would really try to understand anything I am saying, but you rather rattle about how mean I am because I do not support you nuclear is better idea.

Are we going to have more high particulate pollution days this summer when the wind happens to be blowing from Germany?

If the coal plants are still on? Very unlikely as it would require wind blowing from the north east to the south west. But you might want to observe the values
http://aqicn.org/city/paris/
http://aqicn.org/city/berlin/

Anyway, in summer Germany most likely requires less power from coal plants as we additionally will have more energy from solar power. Energy consumption is higher in winter.

How many people are being killed every year by the air pollution from your biomass and coal plants? 10's of Chernobyl's a year? 100's? 1000's?

Do you have any reliable figures? And still, I do not want coal plants. Coal sucks. I also do not want to have to cleanup the aftermath of a nuclear plant blowing up and storing the waste for thousands of years.

Yet another article that assumes Beijing = China. Sigh. It's like there's only one city in China. Imagine if European journalists assumed New York City was all there was to know about the entire USA. And China is even bigger, and has four times the population! I think the problem is due to the fact that most Western journalists live in Beijing, and they are not really interested in reporting about anywhere else other than where they live.

It's pretty bad in most areas of China where there are actually monitoring stations (which is where there are actually people). Here's a pointer to an interactive map which demonstrates it graphically

http://aqicn.org/map/californi...

One has to wonder what the hell is going on in Kashi and diqu zhan Hotan, which are near the Kyrgystan border, and have the highest and second highest (respectively) "bad" numbers of any reporting stations in the world.

This is called closed-mindedness and provincialism if it occurs in rural people, but now it's suddenly acceptable?

Actually, it's called "journalists are assigned "minders" and are only permitted to go wherever the heck the government lets them go, and nowhere else, so they only see what the government allows them to see". Welcome to China; new employee orientation for the state controlled media for foreign journalists is on alternate Tuesdays.

When I lived in the Bay Area, there was a fire at a recycling plant that caused some reading to go 400, or 500 or something in Redwood City. It might have been particulates, not sure.

Yeah, that's a teensy bit down from Hiller. There was some suspicion of them not being able to handle the recycling load, and "accidentally" setting the materials on fire (the plant itself was untouched). Other theories included spontaneous combustion due to thermal rise during decomposition (only it was mostly paper).

It was particulates in the 76 or so today, due to smoke from the wild fires (which are actually pretty far away). Everyone got an emergency services robocall. Most places in China are about that, according to the monitoring mapping service (aqicn.org), but there are some that are running about double. Highest I saw was a 953 on the China/Kyrgystan border (kinda insane), and a couple real hotspots around Beijing.

I found it interesting that they shut down the San Francisco station (it must have been showing numbers that were unfavorable to San Francisco tourism). Worst in the U.S. is Medford Oregon; most other hot spots are in Washington State. There's a 229 in the Czech Republic. Russia has exactly one monitoring station; I'm going to guess it reports whatever Putin wants.

If you are interested in the world map (navigable Google Maps map), it's here (I left it centered on China):
http://aqicn.org/map/californi...

This article is from April, and their data collection was presumably from some time before that. However, if you check the following map (updated hourly), it looks like the air is still terrible, despite China making some attempts to solve this problem:

http://aqicn.org/map/china/

There is a huge difference between making a law and applying a law, obviously. This is just standards, not what you will actually find when you measure.

But here you go:

Tell me about it - next to your air quality limits, here are the actual figures for High-tech zone, Shijiazhuang at http://aqicn.org/. China: SO2: 20ug/m^3 (60 in urban areas) - actual 60 NOx: 50ug/m^3 - actual 73 PM10: 40ug/m^3 (70 in urban areas) - actual 546!!!!!!! Ozone: 160 ug/m^3 - actual 3 CO: 10000 ug/m^3 - actual 0

Note that this is a point-in-time value. So, the laws are actually somewhat better than the US, but apparently nobody follows the law.

Not sure I believe this. I can't imagine how you get PM that high without a lot of CO too. The only way I can think of would be using a leafblower (an electric one) on a pile of dust.

There is a huge difference between making a law and applying a law, obviously. This is just standards, not what you will actually find when you measure.

But here you go:

Tell me about it - next to your air quality limits, here are the actual figures for High-tech zone, Shijiazhuang at http://aqicn.org/.
China:
SO2: 20ug/m^3 (60 in urban areas) - actual 60
NOx: 50ug/m^3 - actual 73
PM10: 40ug/m^3 (70 in urban areas) - actual 546!!!!!!!
Ozone: 160 ug/m^3 - actual 3
CO: 10000 ug/m^3 - actual 0

Note that this is a point-in-time value. So, the laws are actually somewhat better than the US, but apparently nobody follows the law.