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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.)
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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'm a bit surprised not to see that many red blobs above US and the strange one is on the east of Russia.
That's the "Red menace", we've known about that since the '50s
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on the east side of Russian is called "China."
note how the red areas are somewhat similar to the light areas on the nasa night map
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
It's here. Sorry for the bad link, should have checked it in the preview.
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Um, no, that's largely China and maybe the Korean peninsula, although it does extend far enough to the North to encompass Vladivostok I think. Still, I suppose they have a better excuse than we do here Europe... That big red blob is mainly over the lowlands of Holland and surrounding areas, so it's either tulips or the output from the "coffee" shops of Amsterdam. I'm thinking it's probably not the tulips. ;)
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
I have a Coral cache of the pollution image map.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
China has prohibitted the burning of wood by anybody, and has undertaken a massive reforestation project across the nation. Wood fires produce incredible amounts of pollutants, especially open cooking fires. By reforesting wherever they can, various types of pollution will be reduced. Of course, all this takes time, but it is a good step.
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.
This looks like a relatively professional study: the maps on the website are a composite of 18 months worth of data. This is good methodology to ensure that anomalies are removed (unusual smog days, lightnings storms, etc).
This map is a measure of the vertical density of NO2 in a given column (represented by the area of each pixel on the original image, which is dependant on the camera).
One misleading thing: There is no mention of the climatological effects of the world's mountain ranges, and thus the prevailing winds. This is clearly illustrated along the Himilayas in India and the Andes mountains in South America. The topography is clearly causing bottlenecks in the distribution and dispersion of air. Thus, the map is not necessarily an indicator of where the actual pollution was produced. Naturally, in locations where airflow is reduced, the vertical profile of ANY gas concentration will be higher.
I'd predict you'll even see some similar patterns in global precipitation maps if you were to overlay the two.
(disclaimer: yes I am a prefessional geographer)
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
Notice that NO2 leads to the production of ozone in the TROPOSPHERE.
The ozone layer is in the stratosphere.
Ozone in the troposphere is not all that great, since it causes a lot of problems in respiration. Ozone in the stratosphere is good since it cannot be inhaled (too far away from us) and keeps that UV radiation from hurting us.
With ozone, it's all about where it is.
-Jellisky
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
I'm always surprised at how people manage to interpret things the way they want, despite obvious proof on the contrary.
:)
;)
:)
:) 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.
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