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NASA Releases Orbital Photos of Beijing's Air Pollution
skade88 writes "This story should remind us all that air pollution controls are not just about addressing global warming. They also help us have cleaner air and fewer health problems resulting from smog and haze. Starting earlier this month, Beijing, China started having worse than normal air pollution issues. On January 14, 2013 the U.S. embassy's air pollution sensors in Beijing found the density of the most dangerous small air particles, PM 2.5, at 291 micrograms per cubic meter of air. The World Health Organization's guidelines for air pollution state that PM 2.5 above 25 micrograms per cubic meter of air is dangerous to a person's health. To put the problem into perspective, NASA has released two orbital photos of Beijing showing before-and-during images of the air pollution. The photo from January 4 shows parts of Beijing still visible from space. The photo from January 14 shows nothing but a huge, thick cloud of haze with no buildings visible."
What you meant to say is "Nothing to see here, move along."
In a rather Bender-esque way, the literal translation from Mandarin for its populi (the PM2.5 breathers) is "Meat vacuums", and not in a good way I might add.
H.
I remember from my youth that's what LA used to look like in the 70s. Those were back in the days we had to walk 5 miles to school each day in the dirty gray snow. Course once we realized it was not actually snow, but several inches of dusty sooty crud, we stopped wearing our parkas.
Go go gadget smokescreen!
Those Romans had a phrase for everything. This may be true, but I'm sure we're jumping to a conclusion.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
I'm sorry, which standards would those be?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Smog in some US cities was bad way back in the '70's but nowhere near what it's like in Beijing this month. When you call US environmental conditions "woeful" attached to an article about the pollution going on in China, it really lets your ignorance shine. The US environment isn't perfect, but yes, it is vastly superior.
So, no need to act on this too terribly quickly.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
on days like these, you can see it, smell it and... taste it.
Don't worry, soon they will be able to buy a bankrupt North American and use it for a garbage & pollutants dump.
So you should tell us what bliss feels like.
The EPA has actually made huge strides in the U.S. To the point that big cities which used to have smog constantly and you could see the air are now clear.
There is always room to approve...but if you think we are anywhere near China...you aren't really paying attention.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
penny wise and pound foolish.
give me 'teh shiney!' right now and I want it cheap. the rest be damned.
sadly, I don't think we'll learn our lesson or see the trend. half of the US is global-warming doubters or deniers and there is little sign of any of those people really wising up. most of them are older guys who DON'T CARE since they'll be dead in a decade or two, tops; and they think that they can stick it out this far on our destroyed earth.
the pessimist in me says that we will only realize what we've done once its too late. and then, well, it will be too late!
but KEEP BUYING and feeding landfills with your old electronics. that 2 yr old phone is 'not worth having' anymore so just chuck it. let it be someone else's problem, "later on".
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
China has been dragging its feet on global warming reforms. China has been emphatically objecting to any cut in its produce of green house gases (and other pollutants).
Now that Beijing (and surrounding cities in China) are being blanketed by the thick polluted and toxic fog, the Chinese leadership may be forced to alter their strategy and move away from pollution-generating industries.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
That is all.
PM 2.5 stands for particulate matter smaller than 2.5 micrometers.
According to the Wikipedia particles of this size cause a broad array of terrible consequences in the body.
Perhaps Americans should consider improving their own woeful environmental standards before throwing stones at other countries, as good as it may make them feel.
Aaaannndddd there it is.
I propose a new 'law', similar to Godwin and others.
Any discussion pointing out a countries problems will include, within the first 20 comments, a reference to how the USA is worse with regard to that particular problem.
We could call it the 'Dumbfuck Law'.
NPR has an article about this as well, apparently it's affecting more than 30 cities in China
Exactly!
It's always amazing when folks of the GPs ilk decry the US and it's environmental stance/views/policies/etc... and yet never once raise a finger or voice about China.
At the end of the day it just demonstrates that most of the most vocal environmentalists who spend so much time attacking the US aren’t so much pro-environment... as they are anti-America... ala the GP.
Nice try, but no. Beijing isn't that big of a manufacturing center (relatively speaking) - most of the pollution comes from IC engines and (especially important this time of year) the decentralized system of coal powered hot water plants that provides most of the cities heating.
Indeed, clean air and water will be hoarded by the "Al Gore sycophants".
I also like how representatives of other countries point to the issues the US had decades ago, in regards to manufacturing standards, health, labor laws, etc. Sure, there were growing pains, but should you not learn from them? The US was after all at the forefront of industrialization. Should you not vaccinate people, but instead wait until your own scientists learn about invisible bacterial, or about penicillin, or about carbon emissions?
That whole argument is very weak to me.
Landfill is a management issue, not a volume issue.
We could dig a hole a mile to a side, put all are garbage into it and it would be half full in about 700 years at our current rate of growth.
frankly I would have separate holes, for different material so we will have easy access when we figure out how to effectively recycle them.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
US environmental conditions are much better, especially since we decided to offshore our toxic manufacturing needs to China.
I'm from LA, too... I can't remember the last Smog Alert we had.... And when I was a kid, most of the summer was First Stage, with a few Second Stage alerts every year.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
US standards are PM2.5 of 15ppm annually and 35ppm over 24 hour average, and regions are considered "non-compliant" and have to take corrective action if they don't meet that. China hit 800ppm on 1/12/13. And you know who's fault that is? China's. Don't even pretend their government is somehow owned by US interests. It's getting closer to the other way around.
So, yes, the US is a HELL of a lot better environmentally. Please do the tiny bit of research it takes before saying stupid shit like that.
Here's a handy chart of Air Quality Index and a description of some of the more noxious substances:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/graphic/2013/jan/15/what-in-beijing-polluted-air
China has replaced their "One Child" program of population control with a new "One Lung" policy.If you can't get rid of the babies, at least you can weed out the weak, the old, and the heavy breathers.
nuf sed
Table-ized A.I.
The EPA has actually made huge strides in the U.S. To the point that big cities which used to have smog constantly and you could see the air are now clear.
So, naturally, Republicans want to end the EPA. Can't let the hippies win!
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
Perhaps Americans should consider improving their own woeful environmental standards before throwing stones at other countries
The US did that in the 70s. We've moved on.
The US government should mind its own business.
Why? When was the last general election for the Chinese head of state? It's an out of control, illegitimate government actively harming its citizens. If the free world just lets it fester, then one day, that might harm the rest of us as well (for example, by providing support for a global tyranny). I consider it good international hygiene to publicize the flaws and weaknesses in such a governments and to pressure it to change.
Someone just turned off the "Disable fog of war" cheat.
I'm from LA, too... I can't remember the last Smog Alert we had.... And when I was a kid, most of the summer was First Stage, with a few Second Stage alerts every year.
Outsourcing works both ways I guess. China might get the jobs but they also get stuck with the pollution.
It's easy to see why US environmental conditions should be better. China is a more dense country. There are more people/polluters per square area than in the US. A more meaningful comparison would be between countries or political units with approximate population densities and levels of development, say the US vs. Europe or China vs. India.
Relatively speaking?
Have you been outside the 5th ring road? Ive seen factories the likes id never seen in my life. Sprawls of smokestacks just chugging away. Not to mention the fact that DAMN NEAR EVERY RESTAURANT AND MANY HOMES STILL USE COAL.
During the Olympics in 08 they had all the factories shut down for a month prior and seeded the clouds for a week to wash the city and air. Worked wonderfully.
Cars are a problem - and a growing one to say the least - but dont be too quick to discount the manufacturing and a city of 16 million still using coal.
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
At what point do the particulates start to cause problems with Internal Combustion?
I can find plenty of information on what it does when humans breath that stuff in (hint: a coal miner is you!) but little on when the engines start to choke on their own output.
Diesel engines can operate on some pretty ridiculous fuel mixtures as long as there is enough oxygen. Considering how nasty oxides can be once mixed into water I'd expect something else in the power train (beyond the operator's lungs) would break down before the engine couldn't cycle on that mix of "air".
"You cannot have a General Will unless you have shared experiences. You cannot be fair to people you don't know."
The EPA budget for FY 2013 is $8.6 billion dollars (not including other funding sources like enforcement fines). Many view it as too damn costly for the benefit seen, considering that it overlaps heavily with State functions. It's very reasonable to question this spending when you consider this country is in heavy debt and needs to figure out what can be trimmed from the budget.
I'm from LA, too... I can't remember the last Smog Alert we had.... And when I was a kid, most of the summer was First Stage, with a few Second Stage alerts every year.
Outsourcing works both ways I guess. China might get the jobs but they also get stuck with the pollution.
I'm fairly sure it wont be long before they trick us into buying it off them.
Lets just thank god they're burning all that coal rather than risking the remote chance of an accident in some super evil Nuclear power plant.
This is a Chinese attempt to obfuscate their landscape from American spy satellites.
Who is "we"?
If it's the US, each person creates about 3.5 pounds of trash per day. Let's make the generous assumption that it compresses to 1kg/l, and feed it into GNU units:
So the total annual US volume is 0.04 cubic miles, and your cubic mile hole (which would be impossible to actually dig, BTW, and pointless too because where would you put the dirt?) would fill up in only 24 years, not 1400 years.
Read the news. The Sequester hits the EPA budget pretty hard.
http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2011/04/13/13greenwire-epa-budget-deal-slams-state-regional-programs-26003.html
Of course when you read the article all of a sudden you start wondering whether this was the right priority.
Many view it as too damn costly for the benefit seen,
Mostly tea party types. Considering that 8.6 billion is less than the cost of a single week of all Medicare benefits that those mostly tea party types collect, I'd say the EPA is a bargain.
Why don't we cut out tea party types' Medicare benefits in excess of what they paid in? Now that would really save money.
considering that it overlaps heavily with State functions.
So we could have yet another race to the bottom in standards as various states try to "create jobs" by luring short-sighted business owners from other states with promises of lax regulations.
I didn't necessarily think it should be a high priority, just that it was reasonable to look at their budget and nothing should be off-limits for scrutiny. In reality, the EPA budget makes up less than 1/10 of a percent of the overall federal budget. http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/total. Or about 1% of the total spending deficit. http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/breakdown. Really insignificant when you consider the total deficit is 17.5-trillion,
No politician is willing to commit political suicide by trying to tackle medicare and social security which are the major spending.
I wonder how much of that new-found clean air is actually due to the EPA's actions vs all of the formerly polluting industry moving to China. On the one hand good riddance, but on the other hand the loss of all that industry seems to be causing us other problems...
The US has 3.8E6 square miles of land surface. About 18% of that is arable leaving 3.11E6 square miles of potential landfill. Suppose we close the landfill once the depth is 200 ft. That leaves with a mere 124640 cu miles of capacity. At the current rate of consumption we have over 3 million years left.
The GP is right. Landfills are a political problem.
I'm from LA, too... I can't remember the last Smog Alert we had.... And when I was a kid, most of the summer was First Stage, with a few Second Stage alerts every year.
Outsourcing works both ways I guess. China might get the jobs but they also get stuck with the pollution.
I'm fairly sure it wont be long before they trick us into buying it off them.
You used to be able to buy LA smog by the can.
You really need to learn about what exactly bankruptcy entails.
Iceland went bankrupt a couple of years ago. The effects make a good case study.
We send manufacturing over there because it's cheaper. A major reason why it's cheaper is the lack of regulations. No need for smoke filters, no worries about dumping waste in waters. Then we take pictures and post it on the internet. And we feel good about our yard and complain about theirs.
The GP was not right. Being off by orders of magnitude is not something to brush off.
The problem may be largely political, but that doesn't mean it's not real. Each potential landfill site is surrounded by about a hundred of square miles of NIMBY, and rightfully so. Landfills stink, and looking at a mountain of garbage topped by swarming seagulls is downright creepy. Nobody wants to live anywhere near that, and they don't want their property values ruined. That's why they find it hard to open any new landfills.
Quoting theoretical volume numbers without real-world context is silly.
i forgot - TFA was penned by the US govt.
idiot.
You people in California are breathing some of that Beijing pollution.
I traveled to China (Beijing, Wuhan, and Guangzhou) in 2001 and I remember when we landed in Beijing how smoggy it was there. Pretty much the entire country (the parts we saw) were all like this. Of course, this is much worse, but I thought it was kinda bad even back then.
Not true. They may get the jobs, but we also get the pollution. The planet is a living thing, and things that happen in China don't stay in China.
Much of the particulate pollution over Los Angeles originates in China, according to the Journal of Geophysical Research.
China dust storms travel to California
Perhaps fill grand canyon? :-D
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
Didn't know that. Do now. Still, is it going to be that thick by the time it gets there?
X is worse than Y. Therefore, Y isn't bad.
Hypocrisy as an argument is great.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Sounds like something that idiot Michael Moore would say. I propose we call it Moore's Law. Oh wait...
No politician is willing to commit political suicide by trying to tackle medicare and social security which are the major spending.
That's not true, Paul Ryan has made a big issue of it. Whatever you may think of the man, he's quite impressive in that way.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
* It's communist
* Rampant pollution
* The kleptocracy that festers when communism fuses with capitalism
* One-child policy plus a society that devalues women means women are shrinking as a percentage of the population; translation, China is a sausage fest.
But, it's a capitalist's eutopia!
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
It was a standard Soviet rhetoric tactic, and earned the nickname of "whataboutism".
So because it doesnt matter, the US might as well not bother trying at all, is what you're saying, hm?
I wonder, how sick do you have to be to believe that Al Gore has anything at all to do with global climate change?
That is exceedingly sloppy thinking. Pollution is a problem of combined effects from multiple sources. Your claim that the USA, or Europe, or Japan reducing their respective pollution outputs "won't make a difference" isn't just an overstatement, it is false. EVERY bit makes a difference. The same logic you just used justifies every kind of petty offense in the world.
Collective problems require incremental solutions. Just because you cannot personally observe the effects of every increment doesn't mean it's irrelevant.
Reading that comment made all of us dumber.
You can't protest against China, because China doesn't give a damn about you or anything you say. If you're going to lobby for policy changes, it helps to lobby something you have an actual chance of changing.
They were also having factories inside the fourth or fifth ring road move outside of it according to the people I spoke to when I was there in 2005. This was to prepare for the Olympics.
Land not being arable != land for a potential landfill.
For an example just off the top of my head, how would you turn a mountainside into a landfill?
I'm sure that there are more examples like this...
And let's say, for argument's sake, you turn all non-arable land into landfill. Where do all of the people build their houses? On a landfill? What about the eco-system?
I know this might sound absurd, but if we care about the environment and want to make a statement to the world, how about we offer some sort of assistance (not necessarily financial) to Beijing to put them on the right track? All of our complaining and pointing fingers and we don't even care about the lives at stake. They have a problem, we should help them make it better however we can. It's lives as stake here!
A 10 minute walk outside is all it takes for a thin film of talc-like dust to settle all over your clothes/hair/skin. For someone exposed to it for a long time, I would imagine it's akin to working in an autobody shop spray painting cars without a respirator.
The stench of sulfur from burning coal is prevalent since many large housing complexes (and even individual homes) use coal fired boilers to create steam heat in the winter. The government hacks that are profiting handsomely from this situation don't care. Their children and their cash are safely stowed overseas.
I don't see any sign of improvement over the past 7 years other than the temporary cleanup for the Olympics in 2008.
Progress and "prosperity" mean a lot more to China than people's health. I have a feeling an entire city could drop dead and they still wouldn't do anything about their environmental problems. In fact, they'd probably just say that's how the problem solved itself.
That is exceedingly sloppy thinking. Pollution is a problem of combined effects from multiple sources. Your claim that the USA, or Europe, or Japan reducing their respective pollution outputs "won't make a difference" isn't just an overstatement, it is false. EVERY bit makes a difference. The same logic you just used justifies every kind of petty offense in the world.
Collective problems require incremental solutions. Just because you cannot personally observe the effects of every increment doesn't mean it's irrelevant.
No, he is saying that you should spend your money where you get the greatest affect. Asking for a 5% increase in US output for 5 trillion dollars is a waste if we can get a 80% increase in china for 50 billion. And with developing nations that do not even use basic scrubbers that 80% will account several times the clean up that we can eak out of our own country. So, create the equipment here export and maybe even help fund the process, but if we really care about pollution the US has to stop thinking its the center of the Universe and realize we are a world of Nations and we all need to help out.
Start with cleaning up the developing nations and as they catch up continue to improve our own efficiency or else the US will hit an asymptotic behavior nearing zero pollution and China, India, and Africa will have us all still choking to our deaths.
Momento Mori
China would care if we could get a backbone and actually stop buying all the cheap products which help produce this level of pollution. Plenty of other countries want to have strong industrial economies and we could work with the more reasonable governments to install EPA like restrictions from the get go. It wouldn't happen over night, but eventually China would be forced to clean up its act as they saw the numbers drop.
Momento Mori
FWIW, nearly every American state has its own EPA, and many of them were already in effect and making improvements before Nixon (yes, Republican Nixon) created the EPA. Most pollution tends to ignore state borders, though, so the existence of some federal agency is reasonable. But instead of acting as the arbiter between state EPAs, the EPA tends to override them and exerts an unconstitutional pressure directly on individual citizens.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
[citation needed]
Libertarian here who isn't collecting Medicare or any other entitlements, only ever collected a tiny fraction of the UC he paid into for decades, and actually sees the actions of the EPA against individual citizens as far more harmful that its cost.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
In logic, this is similar to the "ad hominem tu quoque"-- "you too"-- fallacy.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
If that pressure is unconstitutional, then we need to revise the constitution. I want "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" and EPA helps preserve two of the three. I think liberty should always be subject to restrictions when it effects the life of others.
Libertarian here who isn't collecting Medicare or any other entitlements
But almost certainly will when old enough, just as Ayn Rand did.
And based on actuarial statistics, will collect far more than was ever taxed.
I agree that's a problem, but that can be fixed by substantially raising the eligibility age to match current lifespans. Eliminating or privatizing Medicare is NOT the way to fix the problem.
and actually sees the actions of the EPA against individual citizens as far more harmful that its cost.
I see the actions of would-be polluters against individual citizens' lungs as far more costly than anything the EPA has ever done. After all, that was the point of this whole article about China.
I'm sorry. No matter what you may believe (and as a libertarian, your beliefs are probably highly resistant to actual reality, so I don't expect this to have any affect on you), you just simply don't have a right to ruin the environment for everyone else.
I stayed in Beijing for eight days in September 2012, and the air quality didn't seem significantly different from any Canadian or American cities that I've visited. I also don't recall seeing anyone wearing face masks.
YMMV.
That's what the one closest to me looks like *right now*.
You're probably talking about closed landfills. They don't close until after they've been in use for decades. Yes, there are city parks nearby here built on old closed landfills. Irrelevant.
Yes. Put the resources elsewhere. Where they will actually make a difference. FSM knows we have plenty of problems.
I would have thought this was the new anti-spy measure they implemented...
You don't get to argue against some straw man version of me from the future.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
The EPA now is mostly concerned with affecting the life of plant and animal species that are not even threatened (based on internationally accepted definitions), not other people.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Ok, but you don't get to claim moral superiority because you don't collect entitlements (yet).
Affecting plant and animal populations, even if it's not to the point of extinction can still have effects on the human population. Just look at the bees. There's been a lot of research into that situation, just to save the honey. Not sure if the EPA was ever involved, though.
So we are going to run a planetary scale experiment and guess what it may not have that great a result.
Disclaimer - I'm not an atmospheric scientist.
However, I suspect that this sort of pollution isn't really a global problem. This is soot - horrible for your lungs if you breathe it in, but it falls out in rain and such and won't just circulate all over the globe (at least not down in the troposphere). The acid rain might make it to California, but will be relatively mild and not nearly as bad as the soot, which will likely destroy lungs all over China.
CO2 is the bigger problem globally. The only fix for that are non-fossil-fuel power sources. However, the soot is just a matter of getting rid of all the coal-fired home furnaces and putting pollution controls on the factories and power plants.
Frontline did a show on this years ago. They attributed the biggest sources to the use of coal for home heating, and outdated car emission standards. The coal stoves that are ubiqutous are indeed pretty nasty - belching all kinds of soot into the air and EVERYBODY uses them. It is even dirty by coal standards - but REALLY cheap.
Imagine getting a hopper full of coal dumped at your house for $100 and just shoveling a little into stoves in each room from time to time and having it last all winter. The stacks would look like a locomotive from the 1800s. But, your house would be somewhat warm and it would be quite cheap. Oh, and you'd live to about the age of 50 and die of lung cancer.
As long as there is oxygen the soot is just more fuel. Air is 20% oxygen - that's 200,000 ppm. The soot is 800ppm and if they keep that up for any period of time the whole city will die from black lung. If they could actually put up enough soot to displace oxygen half the country would look like Pompeii after about 15 minutes.
Clogged air filters are a different matter. Soot doesn't inhibit combustion so much as gum up the works, which is basically what it does to your lungs.