Slashdot Mirror
Pollution From Asia Affects US Climate
sciencehabit writes "China and India are some of the world's top polluters, with countless cars, factories, and households belching more than 2 million metric tons of carbon soot and other dark pollutants into the air every year. The pall hanging over the region has come to be known as 'the Asian brown cloud.' These pollutants aren't just bad news for the countries themselves. A new study reveals that they can affect climate thousands of kilometers away, warming the United States by up to 0.4C by 2024, while cooling other regions (abstract)."
I'm European, but living long-time in Asia. I can't but laugh at USA and EU worrying about little things and having mundane pollution and trashing laws when I look around myself. Everything is packed in plastic (often multiple times), cars and mopeds fart tons of black gas and factories just dump their waste where they want.
Interestingly, while everyone trashes, places do tend to stay really clean, as people make money by collecting all the trash from streets and bringing it to recycling.
And all the pollutants created in the USA gets dispersed on the wind to other places - as does the pollution from Europe and everywhere else on the planet. It's not that america is therefore suffering unduly - it's just that we should recgonise the world is a closed system and it's not a good idea to crap on each others doorsteps.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Rather pollution from US consumption affect the global climate.
Whatever it's pollution or animal slaughter it is the consumer who make the demand and got the power to choose.
The people in the US (and hence you could say the US) is the biggest polluters by far. And it make no sense to compare countries with differences in population size (I'm from Sweden so we never have to worry about pollution because we're such a small nation anyway?) but rather per capita.
If the Chinese and Indian people would live as the average person in the US I assume we would more than doubled the pollution? But they don't. And why should they who are far behind restrict themselves then people in the US doesn't?
I hate these kind of posts. The US consumers are the filthiest and they are the one who order all (well, not all..) that crap from China for instance. Stop complaining on people in China and India damnit.
You don't want global warming, pollution, ecological disasters and what not? Consume less. (Or rather just what nature provides on a local scale and take care about how you do it.)
There's always a misconception from people in the U.S. that China and India are the polluters of the world. Please understand that they are the ONLY countries left that can manufacture all the stuff we need at bargain basement price. They are the reason why we can have a RC car for $24.99 or $5 for a 4GB USB flash drive. The majority of the factories and cars in these countries are used to make stuff and deliver for us. The average citizen of these countries use about 1/10 of the energy and resources of any developed countries. If only that the rest of the world stops consumerism and start paying more, please don't bitch about the pollution. We made it happen.
Just like it wasn't forseeable that trading with China (read: getting cheap labor in exchange for IP and quasi-building up their infrastructure closer to 1st world standards) would mean we're just making our own competent competitors for resources and business in the next generation.
Next up: Captain Obvious Reports that Invading Iraq has not been a cost effective means to reducing terrorism.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/env_pol_car_dio_per_cap-pollution-carbon-dioxide-per-capita
Per person, the USA is the worst country in the world for air pollution, whereas China and India are among the best. Even if you ignore population and compare absolutely, the USA produces 5x the pollution of India and roughly equivalent to the pollution of China.
If there is a smog cloud over North America, I would be looking much closer to home to find the source...
How do you defeat oil indistry propaganda that climate change isn't real for the faux news set?
Appeal to their nationalism and xenophobia:" China is forcing climate change on you and your beautiful country"
Now there is no question climate change is real: it's a dastardly Chinese Communist plot to destroy Amurrica!
The power of low IQ tribal paranoia.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2174rank.html U.S.A! #1
If, by any criteria, US does not top such charts, it's only because of outsourcing of manufacturing. Meaning - most of second-hand "smoke" is because of US consumption too.
Also, see this. Just for example, additional llustration:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/44781282/World_s_Most_Polluted_Countries
http://opencm3.net, http://www.nongnu.org/gm2/
Nope, China has that honor. They surpassed US carbon dioxide emissions years ago and in many other categories they are also the top polluting nation. The USA still exceeds them in per-capita carbon dioxide emissions.
And its a gift to the rest of the world. Our emissions are actually quite clean; I"ll bet first world car exhaust is safer to breathe than 3rd world standard air.
Did you just literally say that your shit smells like roses?
The US is in the top bracket of polluting countries! Check this out...
Taking just CO2, the US is four times higher per capita, but China's higher overall. Same story with Sulphur... Here, the US is about 3 times as much as China.
In both cases, India is far behind both the US and China.
Again, let me repeat that our country is so clean that our piddly bit of pollution is cleaner than daily life in these countries.
Its a blessing to them to get our exhaust gasses. Its like manna from the gods.
The highest per-capita emissions, and the second highest totals - that's some pretty interesting mana you gods are giving us!
And now don't switch tactics and try to claim that it's necessary for your standard of living; just look at the UK and Germany with far lower levels of both CO2 and Sulphur per capita. It's possible, as long as you give your SUVs up.
This is not Wikipedia. If you want a citation just ask for one. Before you do that you are expected to do a bit of searching. However, since you are probably just going to go on whining, here's your citation. I'm not a qualified climate scientist so I can't tell you if it's true or not. However the same is certainly true of all the people who are going to come running in to tell us how it is completely made up.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
The Ethiopian Famine ran from 1983-1985, and was mainly caused by a civil war that ran for 17 years, and by disastrous government food policies in the wake of the "Red Terror" of the late 1970s and the construction of a Marxist state that poured all of its resources into its military. Sort of like a much less extreme version famine-prone North Korea. Wikipedia has a fairly weak article on the famine. It's worth noting that the famine began in 1983, but the major drought started in 1984. With a stable society and a reasonable government there would have been food shortages in 1984, but no more, and there definitely wouldn't have been mass starvation before the crops started failing.
Listen, I'm a bleeding heart environmentalist and sympathetic to the idea that the US has historically shit in its own bed, and continues to do so in certain ways. But citing any old thing as caused by US pollution makes environmentalists look like kooks. It's very bad for the cause.
Every time you deniers "call us on it", we link again and again and again to the real science. You ask for the data, the data is available. You cast aspersions on the data, and it's independently verified. You fund studies meant to show that there's no warming, the study shows that there really is warming.
When we "call you on it", you disappear into the woods.