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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?
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
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.
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
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.
I'm unsure if your pick of XIII for the title was supposed to be a joke, because there actually IS a XIII. I think you should have gone with XIV.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1139111/
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
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
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.
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.
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.
Why is parent modded funny? It's an actual idea to combat global warming.
Probably not a good idea, but still.
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.
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.
...they're speaking German.
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.
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.
High thin clouds have a different effect from low thick clouds with respect to surface temperature.
High thin clouds reflect/reradiate more infrared energy downwards while low thick clouds reflect more incoming visible band radiation back to space. The infrared band energy radiated by the surface is heading out to space to balance the incoming (from the sun) higher frequency radiation. The result is that high clouds may warm the surface while low clouds cool it.
Neat eh?
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
My theory is that one day he decided to drive himself to the white house.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
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...