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Watching China Turn Off the Pollution
NewbieV points out coverage of the effort to assess Beijing's air pollution control efforts. Quote from one of the investigators: "This will be a very interesting experiment that can never happen again." Here's the main project scientist's site on the monitoring effort, and Newsweek coverage that brings out a paradoxical effect of reducing pollution on global warming. "Unmanned aerial vehicles are measuring emissions of soot and other forms of black carbon. The instruments are observing pollution transport patterns as Beijing enacts its 'great shutdown' for the Summer Olympic Games. Chinese officials have compelled reductions in industrial activity by as much as 30 percent and cuts in automobile use by half to safeguard the health of competing athletes immediately before and during the games."
Just like recycling...
What about the American athletes who got in trouble for wearing breathing masks due to the (still) poor quality of the air?
Is the Olympic Committee going to step up and make sure future governments who host the Olympics don't get to prevent the athletes from protecting themselves?
We should have more Olympic games. Every month, in each and every single country in the world.
Entertainment, physical well-being and saving the planet. Pick all three.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
just comment here, see how many China haters there are on Slashdot
Chinese officials have compelled reductions in industrial activity by as much as 30 percent and cuts in automobile use by half to safeguard the health of competing athletes immediately before and during the games.
Uh, what kind of compulsion are we talking here?
Carbon Dioxide (and other greenhouse gases) increase heat retention. Soot (and other opaque particulate matter) reflect heat before it reaches us. The trick is determining the effect of each in isolation. The temporary reduction in soot emissions in Beijing gives us a chance to see the effect of soot in isolation (or close to it).
This isn't exactly new ground (we've previously observed the effect of increased particulate matter in the wake of large volcanic eruptions), but it's one of the few times we see it in reverse, triggered by human activity.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
You also noticed the oil price falling too. Watch what happens to that after the olympics.
Deleted
So next time someone complaints about air pollution, we can just tell him that this is our fight against the global warming.
Let's all pollute the air, the Earth will cool down, then we can stop polluting I guess.
You can't handle the truth.
Cue the rationalists who will use this as yet another argument against the climatologists and environmental "whackjobs" who are trying to destroy capitalism in order to protct their "American" way of life.
To paraphrase my wife: "It doesn't matter if global warming is true or not. We all want cleaner air."
SHe was talking to right winger who was "educated" (told) by a talk radio host that global warming is a myth created by anti-capitalist environmental whackjobs.
Why is it, when there are more important issues, this ONE, probably a lesser issue, gets all the "controversy" air-time?
Some reported facts and anecdotes:
As told to velonews, air pollution builds-up because Bejing sits on the edge of the Gobi desert. A good rain is required to clear the air that's trapped in Bejing. http://www.velonews.com/article/81199
As a former competitive cyclist living in Los Angeles, I can tell you from experience, you feel the pollution later, not really during the event.
What *would* affect most outdoor performances more than pollution is the heat/humidity combination.
Finally, the last olympics had major heat issues for road cyclists, so each location has issues. Smog is not a major one for Bejing.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
It was also reported that there was a nice uptick in temps when the American airspace was shutdown during 9/11.
I'd explain this more but I have to go pick up The Land Before Time XIII: Littlefoot's Revenge for my daughter.
1)We have global warming which is from the greenhouse effect.
2)You have a shitload of sooty pollution it keeps the sun out from the ground level so it feels cooler.
3) The sun comes out after you clean up your disgusting air and you start to notice the global warming.
4) Global warming was always there.
Imagine all Chinese girls wear mini skirts (or better wear bikinis) everyday, there will be more fabric than needed for the poor and of course a lot more to ponder about. o(kX) when k is very large.
Chinese officials to citizens: We can move heaven and earth when we deem it sufficiently important; foreigners will enjoy proper breathing conditions. Once they are gone, you'll go back to sucking down the equivalent of a cigarette drag every time you breathe outdoors. STFU, coolies, and get back to work.
Everybody is talking about how this will be the Chinese century, rah-rah, all is grand. History doesn't always go along with the popular consensus. The communist revolution was supposed to occur in advanced, capitalist countries, not a semi-feudal backwards backwater like Imperial Russia. Everyone was convinced the Shah's Iran was a model of western influence in the region and a shining bulwark against religious radicals. Hardly anybody saw the Iranian revolution coming.
I'm not saying it will go one way or the other, I'm just proposing a scenario on how China could fail in a couple of broad brushstrokes.
1. Eroding faith in government. We already saw how bad their construction was after that recent quake. 20 year old buildings stood up to the shaking, more recent buildings fell down. Government regulation and enforcement has failed.
2. Shitty infrastructure. A lot of reports talk about how the Chinese are building a bunch of stuff but the quality has been poor. This is not infrastructure that will last for decades, this is just slapping stuff together as quickly as possible, Haliburton style. We already know Three Gorges Dam has a lot of problems, what happens when it fails during a quake? Go back to point 1, eroding faith in government.
3. The pollution is freaking out of control. What kind of collapses and failures environmentally can they look forward to? The Gobi is expanding rapidly. What happens if they have famine?
4. Economics. Right now they are holding an incredible amount of American debt but to what end? Is this an economic cudgel to use against us? What if they misjudge and the weapon turns out to do them more harm than us? If the US defaults on the loan, what next? Who are they going to sell their cheap shit to? Are their domestic markets ready to create demand and wealth?
5. Disproportionate share of prosperity. The oligarchs are making out fine, what about the rest of the people? Will class resentment grow too powerful?
6. Population time bomb. One Child per Family means there's a lot of boys and not many girls to go around. What are they going to do for wives when they grow up? And what of families who have lost their only sons in disasters like the quake. The Chinese put a huge premium on family, carrying on the line, etc. Could there be massive popular resentment against these policies when such disasters wipe out entire families such as we've seen?
It seems like the current Chinese leadership has learned from the errors of their predecessors -- isolationist thinking in a violent world makes China a conquered country. They're now going to be actively engaged on the world stage. It will remain conflict to be sure, but how much will be diplomatic, how much economic, and will military be resorted to when the other two have failed? Will China get itself involved in wars it cannot win? Could a major loss see the fall of the party? What would the successor states be like? Would we see a return to the warring states period?
Lots and lots of questions. I just think the whole "This is China's century" narrative is only one of several possible outcomes.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Considering that we've already grown our middle class and gotten all rich and post-industrial.
It is about the "Developing World's" way of life. And telling them not to do what we did. And who the hell is going to pay them not to do it the way we did.
The BBC is measuring pollution themselves, much to the annoyance of the Chinese government. August 10 was a really bad day. August 11, not so bad.
The equestrian events are in Hong Kong, which also has high pollution, but the drastic control measures being used in Beijing aren't being applied to Hong Kong. That's a small-scale competition. Hong Kong's racing fans think dressage is boring, and more than half of the 10,000 spectators walked out yesterday.
Now we have a wonderful rationale to implement a totalitarian world government because ONLY THEY have the ability to stop those dirty, pollution-making people with their freedoms and their poor personal choices. Finally!
-Styopa
Journalists have a strange way of muddying the waters of studies like this with regards to intent and theory, so I won't make any conclusions as to the validity of the study, but there are a few points that need to be made.
While this study will be informative as to the pathways pollution will take, I'd really like to know how a 1 month venture is going to address something like climate change. Climate change is something that happens over hundreds of years on a very broad scale. Even though Beijing is a very large city, the pollution there (or lack thereof) will have little (if any) measurable effect over a 1 month period.
The Newsweek article also posts some of the theories which are speculated by Scripps as scientific fact when they are to be determined by the article - which has the above problems. I can see validity to studying pollution effects on people and where the pollution goes after it leaves Beijing, but climate change is really a stretch.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
"Chinese officials have compelled reductions in industrial activity by as much as 30 percent and cuts in automobile use by half to safeguard the health of competing athletes immediately before and during the games."
If only they cared that much about their citizens
MG
I had heard that China had been spreading salt in the air in order to attempt to get it to rain to clean the air somewhat, and that now they're having trouble because of all the rain.
Tennis matches were delayed, that much I know, but I'm not so sure about the salt thing, it seems a bit farfetched.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
Just get the US government to reprint their passports with them wearing the breathing masks.
Then it'll be okay.
As a someone who was a horseman for 15 years (show and racehorses) I can say that the only people who do not think dressage is boring is the dressage people.
It is the equivalent of the technical section of an ice skating competition -exacting but boring -how perfect can you make a circle?
In the context of a three day event it is a little more interesting because you then have the cross country and stadium jumping events to see which horse and rider had the precision to do well in the dressage, the guts for the stadium jumping and the ballsout of the cross country course with the hills and water jumps, etc
I personally think that some of the cowhorse events like cutting and reining would be a lot more interesting to people, but they are too US-centric.
I'm just saying....
Nova had a nice show on this last week, well actually a repeat from 2006.
One fellow showed a pretty dramatic effect on weather in the US just from the lack of con trails (sp?) from jets being absent for 3 days following 9/11. Upshot claim was that Global Dimming accounts for masking roughly 50% of Global Warming's effect. Soot itself was not the chief reflector, but rather clouds with soot reflected much more sunlight than if the soot was not present, it changed the size of the drops and created many more locations for these small drops to accumulate.
The trouble I see with the argument of "Soot helps!", is that soot is temporary, eventually washing out of the air. CO2 is not. CO2 is rapidly saturating it's sinks and is steadily increasing in the atmosphere. So even if we tried to use lots of particulate matter to dim things, eventually the ever accumulating CO2 would swamp things out.
The other bit of warning from the Nova episode is that this cooling is localized to the downstream of the polluters. So by creating localized cooling you can really screw up historic weather patterns. They cited a simulation showing that if you looked at the pollution from the US in the 70's and 80's with the better understanding of the cooling, that it helps explain the long period of draught that screwed over Ethiopia. As our sooty emissions in the US got curtailed, Ethiopia's monsoons went back to a more typical pattern. We can change climate much faster than populations, species, forests, etc can adapt.
Though, if we flood New York and Florida, is that all bad?
They're probably not using sodium chloride for it, but it's perfectly plausible that they're using cloud seeding to try to control the pollution.
>What's up with this Georgian shit?
I'm waiting to hear about somebody in the Southern USA who believes that the Russians have invaded the State of Georgia while President Bush was in China.
This is actually the second time that I am aware of showing the paradoxical effect of reduced air pollution aiding in the progress of global warming.
The first time were those "flightless days" following the 9-11 attacks. Because there was a temporary halt on commercial air traffic, there was also a temporary halt on the pollution in the air that comes from commercial air travel. The results, as I recall, were QUITE remarkable and points the way to a solution that nobody wants to consider -- we need to pollute the air MORE to cool the planet... and yes, we need to reduce greenhouse gases as well, but blocking out the sun is an important part of global cooling efforts.
No reasonable person hates.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
but damn if a large number of the bigger pushers of carbon credits not heavily invested in those "credit industries" let alone massive abusers themselves.
The global warming as defined; feel free to pick your definition it seems the experts love to change it up a lot too; is not a hoax but a carefully planned wealth and power transfer. Did you ever wonder why the interest in it spiked even with proof we haven't warmed in years but actually may have cooled? Simple, many figured how to make money off of it and many realized how they could get power over other groups by crafting laws to give them oversight.
Its an eco system. I know we can influence it but when I see the results that show one Pacific volcano was measurable beyond doubt yet its passed over like how all the planets warmed too. Go figure, the fact is that the whackjobs lost their credibility when they kept moving the line. They then fell back on total scare tactics, TWENTY YEARS TILL DOOM, EIGHTEEN YEARS, TWELVE, hell some even go as low as TEN YEARS AND WERE DOOMED!
Sheesh, people lament religion here and fail to see the newest one.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
...they're speaking German.
If you'd like to replicate this experiment in a NASA climate simulation yourself, the EdGCM project has wrapped a NASA global climate model (GCM) in a GUI (OS X and Win). You can add CO2 or turn the sun down by a few percent all with a checkbox and a slider. Supercomputers and advanced FORTRAN programmers are no longer necessary to run your own GCM.
Disclaimer: I'm the project developer.
Space and Computers.
I live in georegia but i dont see rusia no where not even sound but they says theres tanks should i be worrie
http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:UgWOgw-udKEJ:answers.yahoo.com/question/index%3Fqid%3D20080808091149AA3VGTk+I+live+in+georegia+but+i+dont+see+rusia+no+where+not+even+sound+but+they+says+theres+tanks+should+i+be+worrie&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1
it's in my head
If state pollution control ends up not doing anything, does UCSD tell the truth and get banned from ever entering China again or do they lie about the results so they can still enter China?
I think the biggest opportunity that could be had here, besides the science, is that China's and specifically Beijing's residents will get to see what their city is like without much pollution. I hope that they come to the conclusion that they LIKE not having smog and pollution. There is the possibility, that the Chinese will demand that they want less pollution in their cities, and are willing to do what it takes to clean up their power plants, cars, and factories to do it. If only they we could do this once a year for all big countries. India, Brazil, Russia, China, the U.S., etc... We could get people really behind making positive changes.
Party at O'zorgnax's Pub! Buy me a Slurmtini aye?
One thing I didn't see addressed, they are monitoring pollution with UAV's flying around the city. Don't these things leave their own pollution???
If reducing pollution causes global warming, then how in the world can increasing pollution cause global warming? Or, is it possible that humans have no effect either way?
Heh - brilliant! Though I fear bilingual jokes are wasted on a community whose most common second language is probably C++ :)
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
Throughout my travels I saw a number of locals wearing masks in different places
As I understand it that is more of courtesy thing in Asia, particularly in China. Folks over there wear it to protect others/a., not so much themselves. I asked the same thing when I traveled through Shanghai, Chengdu and Hong Kong. The air quality is indeed terrible in places but they don't help much with that. I was in China right when the SARS epidemic was breaking out.
Well, the news media couldn't exactly pass up this opportunity to confuse people even more on the global climate change issue, could they?
How amazingly stupid could an editor be, to take what is a straightforward, well known aspect of local climate, and then title an article with a spurious question like "Is Health Air Bad?" The answer is, he'd have to be so amazingly stupid and ignorant, that it must be deliberate. It's a blessing that nobody mentioned to the reporter that the brownish-yellow particulate haze probably contains high levels of ozone. That would have been yet another opportunity to confound different issues and further muddy public understanding (along with the manufacturers of ozone generators).
For years there have been studies decrying Americans' scientific ignorance, Still, if anything it's amazing they aren't even more ignorant and apathetic than they are, given that their major news sources are, to all appearances, trying to make them more confused about science than they were.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Another situation that was used to look at air quality, though not many tried to tie it to climate change immediately: the widespread power outage in the US & Canada a few years ago: http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/8225/8225blackout.html (Chemical and Engineering News) Note: I can't find the article in Science about this ... maybe someone else can.
The short: the air cleared very quickly of many pollutants, allowing scientists to refine their models on both time and distance these are in the air.
Using Beijing as another example will help these kinds of models, but reporting on "results" now looks more like an article in the Onion http://www.theonion.com/content/video/diebold_accidentally_leaks than a real story.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkJUJ5-PL-0
Enjoy.
It's necessary to consider that the Kuwait oil fires were burning roughly 2/3rds of the daily US oil consumption (as of 2007) across a relatively small land mass. It's easy to point out the equivalency by claiming that burning the oil out of the ground is no different than burning it from the engine of a car, but I think that's grossly naive. Considering that Kuwait was still suffering from the 1991 fires as reported in 2003, I think you're overlooking the health effects of burning nearly a day's worth of US oil consumption in an area not much bigger than Connecticut--without first refining it.
There are some things a little worse than carbon dioxide, and I frankly wouldn't want to live next to an oil well that's been on fire for months on end.
He who has no
My second language is English, you insensitive clod!
Why would W be in China?
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
I only speak one language you insensitive clod
Invaders must die
The article itself is reasonably informative. Putting "Is Healthy Air Bad?" as the headline is what confuses the issue and turns what would be an informative piece, for practical purposes, into pro pollution propaganda. The scientist in the article doesn't think healthy air is bad, nor can anybody reasonably draw that conclusion from the facts presented in the article.
The lesson we ought to draw from this article is this: when you think about switching from one kind of polluting technology to another, you have to think about the specific effects of replacing one cocktail of pollution with different one. So, if your pollution plan calls to cut so many tons of CO2, and to reduce particulates from switching from coal to natural gas, you might have to come up with some extra tons of CO2 reduction to achieve the climate change impact you were hoping for.
Certainly, actually doing this is quite complex, but the important idea here isn't really that complicated. One thing is certain, if there were no pollution emissions, the air would be healthier and climate change would not be an issue.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Well....I got it =)
For those in the dark, "mist" is crap.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
My theory is that one day he decided to drive himself to the white house.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
#include
int main() {
printf("So do I\n");
return 0;
}
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
Dammit Slashdot ate my include. Oh well if you can't figure out what it's supposed to be you really don't belong here.
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/off-the-field/where-have-all-the-spectators-gone/2008/08/11/1218306724554.html
Lots of empty seats in Beijing...
Guess those sponsors are really getting their money's worth...
or ... they could marry Americans as I heard there are plenty of women over here... http://www.nationalatlas.gov/articles/people/a_gender.html and then there was adoption i hear there are plenty of Chinese babies waiting for adoption and newborns added every year
What do you call someone that speaks three languages?
Trilingual.
What do you call someone that speaks two languages?
Bilingual.
What do you call someone that speaks one language?
American.
the end of global warming is ice-age
And what do you call a person who repeats stupid stereotype jokes?
A bigot.
print 'My second language was Python ' + version + ', you insensitive clod!'
Well, perhaps not that exact version, but I didn't want it to just have a print statement. =(
Thank you.
From TFA:
But take one look at the map in the article and ... hey, wait a minute... Jeju/Cheju Island is located right smack in the middle of that blue blob in the lower middle of the photo!! And since the caption says "Areas in red depict the dimensions of the main aerosol mass emanating from Beijing", that means Jeju is exactly the WRONG place to gather data, since it's out of the aerosol stream.
This is a factual inconsistency in the article, as the map and the text contradict each other. Granted, most Americans couldn't find Jeju on the map, but that's still no excuse for poor attention to geography on the part of the article writers.
Which makes one wonder why these measurements aren't being taken in China. Oh wait, but of course they are. It's just that the measurements are being done by Chinese scientists ... and the fact that they aren't working in cooperation with the American scientists is just further evidence that there is a real information Great Wall between these countries...
Beyond awesome.
Let's just see, how bad air quality affects humans.... There there, we're here... Maybe we can survive harsher situations than we thought...
Don't you think...? Or don't you?
I can only program in managed languages, you insensitive clod.
Nah. White girls don't want asian guys; white guys want asian girls.