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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."
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?
I think I've heard that before... Something about bread and circuses.
Or maybe eating cake...
You should write your presidential candidate of choice, perhaps they can make it a campaign slogan.
You also noticed the oil price falling too. Watch what happens to that after the olympics.
Deleted
see how many China haters there are on Slashdot
No reasonable person hates "China"; China is a great place with a lot of fascinating history and culture. Maoist style communists, on the other hand, most reasonable people can agree to hate.
We should have more Olympic games. Every month, in each and every single country in the world.
The Olympics can only happen the way that they do because advertisers are willing to pay MegaBucks to the host city for the privilege of becoming an official sponsor, because tourists will flock in droves, and for a million other reasons that essentially center around the fact that the Olympics are a rather limited and exclusive event.
You hold it every month and you dilute the brand value.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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.
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.
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.
Between coal and all the other oil fields in the world (a great deal of the oil that gets pumped out of the ground eventually gets burned...), that event would probably be a blip locally, but hardly noticeable globally.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
No. I do not hate Maoist style communists. I do not like anyone that denies *reality* for propaganda purposes. Of course, this also includes the so called "communists" in China as well as some standing under Mission Accomplished banners on aircraft carrier.
Anyone that stands there proclaims fact A in-spite of the facts - I do not believe that person anymore.
But then maybe this makes me a "science hugger" or whatever term is coined for that. You know, people that look at facts as they are and can change their mind in light of new information? You know, people that *think*?
So no, I do not hate "Maoist style communists" because,
1. I do not know enough about them
2. I do not believe in extremist's propaganda vs. communists (they also hate Castro for some reason while they supported Batista - Castro cared and did a lot more for Cuba than Batista even cared to think)
3. China is rifled with corruption. So called "Maoist style communists" that people hate is probably more to do with that corruption than the actual economic ideology.
4. There is a lot worse abuses around the world than in China yet same people that so crazily *hate* the Chinese leaders do not exactly hate or care about the real atrocities.
5. Most reasonable people do not hate - hate is an irrational emotion. And if you can hate one thing, you can easily be manipulated to hate another, including your own mother.
6. China doesn't have "Maoist style communists" anymore. None that actually matter. All of them basically converted to nationalistic "china first - me second - rest way behind" type of people.
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.
Physical well-being? Its a freakshow of people who train hard everyday since childhood and many of whom are serious drug abusers.
Its the ultimate dirty competition where countries exploit little kids. Thats not even mentioning how dirty IOC is.
These people can no way compete monthly on this level. You would just have a batch of different winners every so often.
That's ignoring the flawed economics. Youre not sitting around watching this stuff monthly. You'll watch a little every 4 years. No way advertisers are paying those rates monthly.
It was all being burnt before there were oil fires. In fact, it's all still being burnt today. (Just check your tailpipe for proof).
No, the wells could only have increased emissions if the fires were removing oil from the ground faster than the operational, non-burning wells were.
Of course, you could always argue about catalytic converters and whether torching a barrel of oil is more or less harmful than burning the equivalent amount of gasoline, or what percentage of the oil is used to make plastic. But most of the carbon goes right into the air. The oil fires were just cutting out the middle-man, as it were.
Well,
I myzelf don't like wel ze parizian, which are ze most arrogant poeple on earth (with maybe ze exception of ze people of new-york).
As a matter of fact, if you go in France in a a non-so touristic area, people are more sympatical. If you go to paris, then most of the french you will meet are arrogant enough to think that even a french guy from another city (toulon in my case) is just a sucker. Try the countryside, people are more relaxed, landscape is nicer, food is better and cheaper... But no louvre unfortunately....
A trick for the rude part: just learn one sentence in french, then more parisian would try to speak back to you in english.
Didn't you ever hear of "Hate what is Evil and Love what is good"? Hate may be an emotional response but many times it is to a logical conclusion one reaches on the good/evil scale of measuring things. It helps if you don't subscribe to relativistic morality to understand this.
chinese women tend to look younger than they really are. Think of it as a plus.
think of the disgrace brought upon the chinese, the host country, if what you said is true and is exposed by some creditable source? gymnastics is one of the strongest program the chinese has. I don't think they would risk it.
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.
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
A trick for the rude part: just learn one sentence in french, then more parisian would try to speak back to you in english.
This actually works almost every time. Also useful in Quebec.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
There is a saying "Hate the sin, not the sinners".
Hating a person is very different from hating their sins. Usually, people who hate the sinners have difficult times forgiving them despite what the sinners have tried to do to redeem themselves. There is only so much one can do in his/her lifetime.
There is no such thing as evil. There is bad, and there is worse. And worse. But you will never ever have evil. It's a stupid concept, designed by visionaries, to keep shrimp brains in line.
A much better line would be: "Fight what is bad, aid what is good". It may appeal less to your gut, but it'll do a lot more good in the end.