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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."
Why would the athletes need protection? It is not like the air quality has been worse than 12.1 times (Aug 10) the WHO limit of 50 micrograms/m^3. And it isn't like independent readings are tracking.
It is all just 'mist.' Does anybody think that China would ever consider cooking the books (on Aug 10 AP measured 604 micrograms/m^3, the BBC measured 278 in another location, and Beijings Air Quality Index which is supposed to be the highest of many different readings measured 82).
About 3% of all cloud cover is caused by jet tails.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
After all, the air is not that bad.
I beg to differ. Look at how Hong Kong and Singapore warn about levels higher than 200! Singapore's standard writes:
PSI levels above 400 may be life-threatening to ill and elderly persons. Healthy people may experience adverse symptoms that affect normal activity.
I wonder what they would write about levels above 550!
The air quality in Beijing is little better than being on the outskirts of a forest fire.
Why is parent modded funny? It's an actual idea to combat global warming.
Probably not a good idea, but still.
Decreasing CO2 levels will have more benefits than a cooler climate, as many articles and studies will tell you. It would lower ocean acidification, for one thing.
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....
> It doesn't matter if global warming is true or not. We all want cleaner air.
That's true, but global warming isn't about cleaner air. Global warming is the y2k of this decade. It's about creating a problem/minor panic and a cause that can generate new markets and flow megabucks for things that just aren't worth it.
Carbon credits? Seriously? What's that got to do with cleaner air. I know someone who has a tree (hardwood) farm. But now, instead of just burning capitol for their upkeep, he can sell carbon credits to offset the emissions of Al Gore's private jet. And we've got all sorts of money flowing into this corn ethanol crap and all it's doing is raising food prices _and_ emissions because getting ethanol to break even is hard enough without using such a bad source. And how about nuclear power? If this was about cleaner air, than that would be a _fantastic_ way of cleaning up the air, at the cost of some difficulties of waste storage. (Which, I would point out, could be vastly reduced if we were to build some recycling plants, but one thing at a time.)
The list goes on. I _wish_ global warming was about cleaner air. I want cleaner air. What I don't want, however, is all this BS about trying to find some sort of magic bullet of greenness that will solve the "Global Warming Crisis".
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?
This actually, isn't unprecedented. Some scientists actually reported a drastic change on 9/11/2001. With all the airplanes in North America grounded, there was an immense reduction in global dimming.
Check it: http://archives.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/08/07/contrails.climate/index.html
A short description of the environmental problems associated with the Kuwaiti oil fires found here
According to the article, about 6 million barrels were burned a day at the disaster's peak, and it lasted about 8 months. Worldwide oil production is about 80 million barrels per day (don't know what it was in 1991). While the Kuwaiti fires were a local environmental disaster, and the poor burning quality produced a lot of soot, I think the global impact is still nowhere near the global impact of worldwide oil use.
I couldn't find good numbers for Beijing, but as someone else already pointed out, that Kuwaiti oil was going to get burned one way or another.
Which is a question that I rarely seen discussed. If Global Warming is true, is it really a problem?
It's not a problem for the Earth in general. It's been much warmer and much colder and it still sustains a multitude of life. But it's a problem for many of the current species on the planet, including humans.
The effects of global warming are truly complex and even the most informed scientists can't say for sure what will happen. If the arctic ice melts, oceans will rise, sure. But will the evaporation of the oceans create more cloud cover to cool the Earth? Or will that cloud cover trap more heat?
Our issues as humans is water supply. You'll notice more commercials for desalinization plants and such. Living in the Central Valley of California, I know that if we have a winter like the one two years ago, we're going to have problems from golf courses to agriculture. Last winter was good, but not great in terms of snow pack. Humans are putting a lot of hope into technology to continue our way of life.
Anyway, global warming won't take out the Earth, and it likely won't make it unlivable for humans. We'll kill each other off first vying for resources such as water, trees, meat, etc.
It wasn't the masks so much as the fact that they were black and the t-shirts the athletes were wearing at the time that pissed people off:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/livecoverage/2008/08/china_bloggers_to_us_cyclists_1.html
The method for burning it matters. Coal is burned to be efficient but also scrubbed in most newer plants to remove particulates. Oil is not burned RAW but instead burned after being distilled, processed and with additives including detergent and octane boosters. This is burned in a very precise mixture of fuel and air and then the exhaust gas is then run through a catalytic converter before being dumped into the environment. It is a completely different ball game here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkJUJ5-PL-0
Enjoy.