Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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.
Hey, I have an idea: let's develop a series of competitive events dedicated to showing off the pinnacles of raw physical endurance and human health...
...and then host it in one of the world's most polluted cities!
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).
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
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.
Why is parent modded funny? It's an actual idea to combat global warming.
Probably not a good idea, but still.
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.
The better questions is, what happens when it's over 9000
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
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?
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.
...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.
Well, despite the DBZ reference. You do just kind of die.
And, because of the DBZ reference, he'd deserve it...
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
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.
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
Today, I heard a very interesting comment on an early-morning business/investment radio show that I listen to:
One of the hosts was talking about how the Chinese stock market has gone South lately because of this "Great Shutdown", but he was trying to give his listeners encouragement by telling them that as soon as the Olympics are over, China will go back to their polluting ways and then all will be well for the investment community that depends on China in so many ways.
It was a very clear window into a world where the business community absolutely prays for the bad things to happen to most of us, in order for the very very few to get rich. Honestly, there was a pause in the host's spiel during which it almost seemed as if he realized what he was saying, and the moral implications of wishing environmental disaster on a billion people so that he and his friends can offset their sub-prime losses.
It made me realize that there are worse things than a severe downturn in the stock market. It might even do some good, except for the fact that so many of us have been suckered into putting our retirement savings into that fool's game. Can you imagine what might have happened if we'd listened to Bush and McCain and had privatized Social Security?
Tell you what: China's economy is going to come on strong in the next few decades, and the US is thinking it's going to go along for the ride. The only problem is, once the Chinese figure out what this "economic boom" really means, they are going to be really really pissed.
You are welcome on my lawn.