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The World's 10 Dirtiest Cities
neever writes "You may already know about the pollution plight of Linfen, China. But how about the heavy metals Pittsburghers breathe in on a daily basis? Or the incomparable smog Milanesi put up with? PopSci has culled an eye-opening selection of some of the world's most problematic cities. From the painfully high cancer rates in Sumgayit, Azerbaijan to the acid rain destroying La Oroya, Peru, writer Jason Daley walks readers through the lowest of the low; and explains why, despite it all, there's still hope for these places."
Portland, Oregon.
Highest percapita strip club concentration, and legalized live sex shows. And while not all the ladies shave, pretty much all of them are down.
I was staying outside of LA in a high rise hotel a few years ago, and you could see the buildings of LA on the horizon, and they looked like they were covered by a slightly yellow dome of smog. It was very discernible, and seemed to have a solid line differentiating it from the clear air above.
The boundary you saw between the smog and clean air above is from an inversion layer
Sorry to be replying myself. I made a mistake in the link above.
Correct one: http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1661031_1661028_1661016,00.html
Also, here's a very different list,
http://www.forbes.com/2008/02/24/pollution-baku-oil-biz-logistics-cx_tl_0226dirtycities_slide_26.html?thisSpeed=30000
using the Mercer Health and Sanitation Index Score as the ranking value.
The first five are:
- Baku, Azerbaijan
- Dhaka, Bangladesh
- Antananarivo, Madagascar
- Port au Prince, Haiti
- Mexico City, Mexico
Slashdot. Unreadable news to annoy nerds. - wonkey_monkey
Forbes rated it (Pittsburgh) in the top ten cleanest cities:
:/
http://www.forbes.com/2007/04/16/worlds-cleanest-cities-biz-logistics-cx_rm_0416cleanest_slide_16.html?thisSpeed=30000
I hope this link works for you guys
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Ay! I've just signed myself up for four years of university in Pittsburgh. Anyone know a good method of limiting heavy metal exposure in such an environment.... Wait... Why would I want that?.. I'll be IRON MAN!
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Pittsburgh is a very different city than many Americans picture. There's only a small part of the city that actually has the pollution levels cited in the study. Steel and coke works have given way to robotics and medical research. Disclosure: I am finishing a graduate degree at Pitt right now. I may be biased, but I do hope a new study is done that covers the city as a whole.
Phoenix gets this too in the winter. The cold air caps the warm (nasty) air underneath. But then again both Phoenix and LA are build in valleys. In winter nights here the sky turns a nice red color (the same color as northern "snow sky"), from all the light pollution bouncing off the smog layer. Though Phoenix has some of the most beautiful sunsets in the world, thanks to the brown cloud, and the huge amounts of desert dust in the air.
LA, of course, is much worse. But then again, I try to avoid that place like the plague. It takes 8 hours just to pass through town.
Dersert+Valley= an idiotic place to build a city, generally.
From what I here from my friends who spend time in the megalopolis' of China, though, LA and Phoenix has NOTHING on them. Pictures of Beijing and Shanghai that I've seen, are absolutely VILE. Not only is it high-rises to the horizon, but the sky is this awesome color of brown that only LA can dream of. It is almost opaque.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
The boundary you saw between the smog and clean air above is from an inversion layer.
No, it's called the West Side. That small sliver of land that runs along the coast of the Pacific Ocean where the rich, the famous, and the wanna be rich and famous live and enjoy cool ocean breezes and the California experience, while the rest of us grind out our existence in what's left, a semi-arid, hot, dirty and treeless environment where, during the days, cars swarm like locusts, but at night, disappear, leaving those endless miles of pavement open for the crack whores and gang kids to conduct their business or make that late night trip to their local 7-11. If it wasn't for the streetlights, twinkling like jewels in the night sky for everyone fortunate to live above us, you'd think no one lived here at all.
Not a comprehensive list, but it does include some of the cities you mentioned.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/15/news/pollute.php
"The dirtiest of the major cities, ranked by micrograms of particles of pollution dust per cubic meter, was Beijing, at 142. By comparison, Paris averages around 22 micrograms, London 24 and New York 27. The WHO guideline is 20."
Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
Dzerzhinsk FTW!
:(
Dioxin and phenol levels 7 orders of magnitude above the safe limit, an annual death rate exceeding the birth rate by 260% (life expectancies: M=42, F=47) and generally more soviet era chem-weapons-chem than you can shake a mutant-whatever at.
The wiki doesn't really do it justice...I saw the BBC doco once, and it was appalling. There's a `pond' so choked with chemicals that it appears to have a consistency closer to foam rubber than water, and a huge pit in the ground with hundreds of barrels of toxic waste spilling out the top of it. It's hard to believe that people actually live there. Truly tragic.
I don't think it's so much about the high buildings as it is simply the air quality itself. I was in Shanghai less than a year ago, and while waiting for my flight to start boarding, I watched another take off. It seemed barely a mile away when it became completely obscured by the brown-yellow haze of smog.
When I found myself in Minneapolis about 16 hours later, it was amazing and refreshing that I could watch that plane fly away until it was so small as to be unrecognizable.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.