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Up To a Quarter of California Smog Comes From China
wabrandsma writes "What goes around comes around – quite literally in the case of smog. The US has outsourced many of its production lines to China and, in return, global winds are exporting the Chinese factories' pollution right back to the U.S. From the article: '...the team combined their emissions data with atmospheric models that predict how winds shuttle particles around. These winds push Chinese smog over the Pacific and dump it on the western US, from Seattle to southern California. The modelling revealed that on any given day in 2006, goods made in China for the US market accounted for up to a quarter of the sulphate smog over the western U.S..'"
Nope, definitely low-level; it's a tropospheric transport model. Apparently it's a standard model (GEOS-Chem) that's pretty reliable, and it seems to incorporate interactions between particulates and the surface, including e.g. exchange of particulates between the troposphere and ocean/land.
http://www.pnas.org/content/ea...
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
If I am right USA is not interesting in "Kyoto protocol stuff".
Kyoto protocol covers greenhouse gasses, this study is about smog. I'm sure that there's some overlap, most chemicals do more than one thing; but "Pollution" isn't some sort of uniform, fungible, phenomenon. Different sources, different flavors, different regulatory mechanisms.
The New Scientist article has smudged a lot of things from the original text. Basically overall, they find that "EEE-related Chinese pollution contributed about 3–10% of the annual mean surface sulfate concentrations, 1–3% of BC, 2–3% of CO, and 0.5–1.5% of ozone over the western contiguous United States (west of 100W)." However the amount reaching the US was highly variable from day to day (is episodic) because the atmosphere is complicated. It can "save up" pollution and dump it en mass, and on those days, it could account for "12-24% of sulfate concentrations, 2–5% of ozone, 4–6% of CO, and up to 11% of BC over the western United States".
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
One's the average, one's the maximum day-to-day. It fluctuates. It's not the study that's "full of shit", it's that the New Scientist article is written unclearly. You can find the original PNAS at the bottom of the NS piece, can't tell if it's open-access because I've got a golden ticket:
http://www.pnas.org/content/ea...
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Well, it may seem like a wash because it's complicated. The EU only sets broad rules, which the individual countries then must implement.
Also, you can't always directly compare rules.
However, For instance for some directly possible comparison:
SO2 Annual mean is 20 microgram per m^3 in the EU, 79 in US.
NOx: 40 vs 100 ug/m^3
PM10: 40 vs 50 ug/m^3
Ozone: 120 vs 160 ug/m^3 (way of measurement differs slightly)
CO: same for both 10000 ug/m^3
These are *huge* differences. It may seem like a wash, but on the scales we are talking about, these are enormous differences.
Of course, some regulations may be stricter in the US than EU, I didn't do a full on study on this.
(these numbers may be a couple of years out of date, but I doubt there were many changes)
Having said that, my previous comment wasn't entirely meant to be serious. In fact, I'm all in favor of applying more pressure on countries to do things about pollution. Also, the EU regulation might be a bit over the top.