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Global Air Pollution, From Above
neutron_p writes "Based on satellite observations, the high-resolution global atmospheric map of nitrogen dioxide pollution makes clear just how human activities impact air quality. I'm a bit surprised not to see that many red blobs above US and the strange one is on the east of Russia."
Take note everyone, the biggest red blob is over China (insert communist jokes here). For all the whining and complaining about how the US should have joined the Kyoto accord, it's very easy to see that China is the #1 offender, and that Europe is not doing so hot itself. What good would Kyoto have done if it exempted the country who needs it most?
That being said, China is still developing. Pollution should be a big concern for them, but it's an unfortunate fact of life for now. As their technology improves, the pollution levels should drop. With one caveat, that is:
Many modernized countries have sent their manufacturing to China. Thus placing restrictions on countries to reduce their emissions will do little good when we've already sent the real pollution over there. I'm not sure how we can respond to the situation, but it's important to pay attention to it.
The blob over Canada is actually a bit surprising, but I'm guessing that's related to the earlier article on the odd increases in pollution levels. I do have a thought on why North America sees less pollution than Europe, however. Since the North America has a massive amount of farmland and forest land, a good deal of the pollution is sapped up by these massive carbon sinks. This doesn't actually impact NO2 levels, but it does explain some of the pollution reduction.
FWIW, it seems that NO2 is primary produced by cars. Moving to the hydrogen vehicles of the future may help stop almost all NO2 production.
(P.S. I know slashdotters have a penchant for insulting people, but please try to keep your replies civil. I don't know everything, so correct me in a polite manner. Thank you.)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The submitter is suprised, but I'm not. Wealthy nations can AFFORD the luxury of enviromentalism, unlike poor ones like the former Soviet block and the third world. The solution is obvious, encourage more nations to become wealthy by helping them become free.
No serious student of current events can escape the reality that political freedom and economic prosperity are linked. The old soviet empire attempted to foster economic openness to gain it's productivity benefits while keeping political freedom in the hands of the Party. They failed. China is making the same attempt and the signs are they are also going to fail. Freedom is the natural state of affairs and you can't supress it in one sphere while keeping it in the others.
Rising standards of living solve most of the pressing problems facing the world today. Birth rates are lowest in the free/wealthy nations and highest in the poor/oppressed ones. Wealthy/Free nations don't tend to make war on each other. Wealthy nations don't tend to produce terrorists either.
Democrat delenda est
I see Johannesburg is the bright spot in Africa - probably has much to do with Sasol oil-from-coal.
(And alternative fuels won't be the only way to release ourselves from oil dependence. One would hope that we'd continue to heavily research nuclear, including fusion, options; plans for complete nuclear non-proliferation completely kill any significant efforts in these areas, even for energy means.)
Are nuclear options not alternatives to fossil fuels?
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
But since when is pollutions of this kind (along with acid rains) that localized? For example acid rains and excess nitrogen in the northern part of europe is mostly caused by industry in the southern and eastern part of europe. So I wouldn't go as far to start blaming the countries that have red blobs over them... And absolutley not a justification for the US' lack of ratification of the Kyoto protocol.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
One of the biggest reasons why global warmning proponents have had issues in third world countries is not because their facts are inherently in err, but because the developers cannot understand why "Americans want us to make them a building" and "Other Americans want us to make it the 'wrong way'". They know how to make a building, the same way they always have, yet some foreigner comes in and says they are doing it 'wrong'. It's like telling them, "You're not doing it the way God wants you to".
You can't tell someone that the world is dying when it is right in front of them, unchanged for years. They are trying to make a living, they get offered an opportunity to improve their environment, and don't change. Yet for some reason, even with *this* atmospheric data you can see who the "big offenders" supposedly are.
Why then, do global warmning advocates expend so much time and effort making third world countries try to adhere to restrictions even the US and China don't want to?
With or without Kyoto, China would be pumping pollution into the air. But with Kyoto, the rest of us would be pumping less, so that alone is reason enough to comply. The other, more subtle, reason is diplomatic. It's impossible for the US to pressure China into even minimal Kyoto compliance when the US hasn't signed it. Signing it would help us pressure them. Kyoto is a good start, which is better than nothing. The perfect is the enemy of the merely good. Even humans have to take baby steps towards big changes, walking before we run. Giant polluting countries are even more disposed towards incremental progress.
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make install -not war
In Alaska, we often see a hazy sky, caused by pollution from Siberia and points east.
For the long term, we should probably be more worried about the Soviet nuclear waste the Soviets and now the Russians have accumulated in the Arctic and Pacific Oceans. Then there's the nuclear plants, two of them in Siberia, that we're down wind of. They were built by the same government which brought us Chernobyl.
If you're looking for things to worry about, you'll never run out.
See what I've been reading.
The article's maps show an example of how "human activities impact air quality". But of course Greenhouse deniers will whine that there's no evidence that puny humans can affect the big, wide world. There's ample evidence that we are locked in a vital interaction with our atmosphere, affecting it for better or worse with our industrial activities. When you hear people denying even the possibilities that are demonstrated simply and graphically as this, you can discredit any further comments. Or let them draw you into their denial to your mutual detriment.
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make install -not war
I'm sorry but I don't believe anything scientists say about the climate.
/ it's quite obvious climatologists have no idea what the hell they're talking about as almost every article contains something about "this new information radically changes the way scientists think about xyz."
If you read http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/environment
Don't get me wrong, we do need to stop burning fossil fuels, stop driving SUVs and shoot trash into the sun. Climatologist is still synonymous with quack in my book.
Yes, I am a smart ass; it's better than the alternative.
Among the larger nations, the US has the highest per-capita emissions in many things. But I think there's something more complex here. For example:
How many nations produce automobiles? US vehicles are used around the world.
How many nations produce aluminum? This is an extremely power-intensive procedure. (Anyone know what fraction of the US grid goes to these plants?)
I'm not sure about worldwide aluminum production, so I may be off there, but it's something to consider.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Not quite. Uranium is still a limited resource; the idea of "electricity too cheap to meter" is (like a lot of pro-fission thinking) is a product of Gernsbackian imagination.
:).
The idea of "electricity too cheap to meter" is a fantasy because you still need a bigarsed steam-powered generator no matter what the heat source, not because of fuel concerns. The quantity of fuel used is so vastly lower than the amount of coal and oil burned in fossil fuel plants that the cost of mining really isn't that much, even given the relative scarcity of the element itself.
It won't run out any time soon either if you reprocess spent fuel and also breed fissile materials from thorium, but both of those have materials-handling and security problems (not unsolvable, but enough that the US doesn't use them).
Electric heat, no; very inefficient. Ground source heat-pumps, yes.
Electric heating is as efficient as gas heating; in both cases, you're turning virtually all of the available energy into heat. A heat pump is more efficient than either because it draws heat from the surrounding area (at such a relatively small temperature difference, it costs less to do this than to just dump heat into the house). The reason we use gas heating instead of electric is that electrical energy is more expensive to produce, joule for joule, than the equivalent amount of natural gas. This is a production issue, as opposed to a point-of-use issue.
In short, while I agree with your positions, I disagree with the reasons
How many nations produce automobiles? US vehicles are used around the world.
They are also produced around the world. You surely don't think every Ford or Chrysler was built in Michigan?
What does improving air quality mean? This is a vague and unmeasurable statement(Yes I heard him say it too). My hunch is that this is referring to particulates, sulfur dioxide, or something of this sort, which likely have improved. Certainly it is not talking about reduced CO2 emissions, and most other greenhouse gases, which have worsened signifigantly under Bush.
People keep pointing out that we didn't join Kyoto because the developing countries, ie China, didn't have strict limits. Thats true. Yes joining would put us at an economic disadvantage. However, when it comes to preventing a global catastrophe, I think its time to stop talking about who's playing fair, and take action. Whats more important, giving your grandchildren a chance to live in a world similar to the one you were given, or your stocks going up a couple points?
As to the thinning and forest management, this was a gift to the timber industries, and is much more than is required to prevent forest fires.
If you want to compare Bush's record to other presidents, have a look at the total amount of land reserved for preservation. His doesn't even compare to other presidents.
How *about* a different Kyoto? Where is it? If we give Bush 4 more years, will his "better Kyoto" be just around the corner? Even Kyoto took time, and it's already the law in many countries. How about complying with Kyoto, while we spend the time producing this next step? The workable, though flawed, is what is known in international negotiations as the "good enough for a start". Those fundamental flaws are the motivators to come up with something better. While doing nothing is drowning us in our own pollution, as we can easily see in this new map.
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make install -not war
Eastern Russia is definitely not the problem. If the article poster had any sense of geography, he would have noted that the "red blob" is over China, specifically Beijing, Harbin, Xian and other immense northern Chinese industrial cities.
1. You didn't know that air quality in the U.S. has been improving continuously over the last several decades, even during the big bad Bush administration?
2. You didn't realize that color coded pictures of gases says nothing about the source of a gas, even if you were to blame it on humans based on someone's unchecked assertion.
The most intersting thing of note is the concentration scale -1 to 6. Nothing on the units. Without the units that picture means exactly zero. Those units could be ppb (parts per billion), or ppm(per million). Almost any cool picture of pollution can be generated to show these results if the scale is small enough.
So while the study produced an interesting picture that shows something, maybe, by not scaling it properly, the entire thing useless.
NO2 by the way only means that nitrogen and oxygen were mixed at high temperature. Cars are the most common source of NO2 pollution. Industrial pollution is much better measured by different chemicals.
Actually tailings are really really nasty; there are lots of problems with water contamination.
Quantities will still be far less than the wastes (and other environmental disruption) caused by coal mining and oil drilling and shipping of both substances. I agree that with any form of mining, you have a negative environmental impact; it's just that I rarely see people appreciating exactly how much less material is needed.
I'm also amused by listing sodium chloride as a contaminant. While it will cause problems with the local environment, calling it "salt" would put things like its relative toxicity in perspective.
Not if you consider the small percentage of the heat energy at the power plant being converted to electricity.
Apparently I should have put the sentences about production of electricity causing it to cost more per delivered joule in bold caps, because you're the third person who seems to have missed it.
I'm always surprised at how people manage to interpret things the way they want, despite obvious proof on the contrary.
:)
;)
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:) Perfectly sound reasoning. *grin*
First, I don't see how anyone can look at that map and claim Europe has more pollution than the US. C'mon, are you... visually deaf? Use a ruler if it needs be, but please take a close look. I understand that the 1st map being zoomed in can play a role in there, but please, just put it in perspective. The blob just above Italy is about 1/6 size of the one above the US, while the other large blob in Europe is about 1/5th that of the north american one. I mean... c'mon...
Second, bear in mind that NO2 is by far not the only polluting agent that human activity sends into the atmosphere - and it's not the only one that is nocious. It does cause O3 to build up, which would be a good thing in the upper layers of the atmosphere but deadly and poisonous at human-reachable levels (ever noticed there are pool-cleaning systems that use O3 (ozone) instead of clorum?
I urge the 1st poster to really go and revisit that link and read the whole article, and actually examine the map in comparable zoom factors. And yes, that's China and not Russia, like another not-so-geographically-challenged reader pointed out.
I did like that comment about industry from more advanced countries fleeing to China where regulations are not as harsh - food for thought. I suppose it's ok if we go and poison other countries to protect our way of life.
"I don't mind God, it's his fan club I can't stand!" E8
You're missing my point.
Lots of pollution over the US. Lots over Europe. Lots over Japan. Less over less-developed nations. How much of that is because the industries are located there, and not in the other nations? Some of these industries require a lot of electricity, and so are difficult to place in other countries. Those areas export to the less-developed nations. Rich providing goods for poor. Now do you get my point?
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
the idea of "electricity too cheap to meter" is (like a lot of pro-fission thinking) is a product of Gernsbackian imagination.
Who said anything about it being too cheap to meter? We're talking about feasably replacing gasoline and coal with nuclear, not making energy free. Indeed it could be cheaper, but it wouldn't be free.
Electric heat, no; very inefficient. Ground source heat-pumps, yes.
Inefficient, yes, but better than burning oil or natural gas in every house? Debatable. It certainly less poluting and almost certainly less expensive than coal or gas in the long term. It's also likely better than trucking hydrogen around as the parent to my comment suggested.
Too many people look to still-developing technologies to solve our energy problems. The problem with that is that there's always something better on the horizon so you're continually chasing a moving target, and using technology that isn't ready taints the public's perception of that technology in the future. Solar is a perfect example of this. Lots of people added solar to their houses in the '80s and now they, and anybody that knows them, wouldn't touch solar with a 10 foot pole (not to mention the fact that 20 years later it's still not quite ready). Nuclear technology is mature and ready to solve our current energy problems *today* with practically no additional development. In 20 years when the technology that seems promising now, but it a little bit out of reach is mature we can switch if it's enough of an improvement.
"I'm a bit surprised not to see that many red blobs above US and the strange one is on the east of Russia"
The reason you don't see more blobs over the US is because we have the most stringent atmospheric pollution laws on the planet. Cars in the US are held to the strictest standards in the world for NOx emissions, as are most newer industrial installations. You see a bunch of crap over the northeast because this is where the industrial revolution started, and there are STILL old plants there that are not covered by the new laws - and it's amazing how far companies will go to keep those plants going to avoid having to comply with the new laws (which are very expensive). In fact, the entire northern half of New Jersey, quite possibly the smelliest, dirtiest place on the planet, is home to some of the oldest industrial plants in the country.
Why are you surprised to see a red blob almost completely covering the populated regions of China? China has no emissions laws, and no environmental policy to speak of (or human rights, or IP rights, or any other rights for that matter), so it shouldn't be surprising to see pollution there.