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Breathing Beijing's Air Is the Equivalent of Smoking Almost 40 Cigarettes a Day
iONiUM writes: The Economist has a story about how bad the air quality is in Beijing. Due to public outcry the Chinese government has created almost 1,000 air quality monitoring stations, and the findings aren't good. They report: "Pollution is sky-high everywhere in China. Some 83% of Chinese are exposed to air that, in America, would be deemed by the Environmental Protection Agency either to be unhealthy or unhealthy for sensitive groups. Almost half the population of China experiences levels of PM2.5 that are above America's highest threshold. That is even worse than the satellite data had suggested. Berkeley Earth's scientific director, Richard Muller, says breathing Beijing's air is the equivalent of smoking almost 40 cigarettes a day and calculates that air pollution causes 1.6m deaths a year in China, or 17% of the total. A previous estimate, based on a study of pollution in the Huai river basin (which lies between the Yellow and Yangzi rivers), put the toll at 1.2m deaths a year—still high."
First, If you ever seen pictures in china of the pollution sadly that number isn't a big surprise
What's that pipeloads of tobacco per semifortnight?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Democrats = outlaw smoking
Republicans = smoking is a personal choice
Stay on topic please.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Yet another article that assumes Beijing = China. Sigh. It's like there's only one city in China. Imagine if European journalists assumed New York City was all there was to know about the entire USA. And China is even bigger, and has four times the population! I think the problem is due to the fact that most Western journalists live in Beijing, and they are not really interested in reporting about anywhere else other than where they live. This is called closed-mindedness and provincialism if it occurs in rural people, but now it's suddenly acceptable?
If you want the real story, watch Chai Jing's documentary "Under the Dome" which tells you about all of China, not just the capital city. It was banned by the government so you know it's good. China has laws, but they're not enforced and the government regulators are either corrupt or falling down on the job. If they actually do crack down and take heavily polluting trucks off the road, they'll be accused of slaughtering the peasants with excessive regulations. Considering the history of the Communist Party in China, this accusation hurts badly and the CCP is anxious to bury this part of its Marxist past.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
How many cigarettes is that in a day? It bugs me when some people smoke near me. Argh!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Can we call it an 'invasion' or 'chemical warfare' and do our thing? If the borders can't stop the smog, why should they be able to stop us?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Seattle is ruled by Republicans, but they still banned smoking in parks. A few years ago they banned smoking in bars, and the DINO mayor is going after blacks that own private clubs that allow smoking. He hates minorities. He might not have an R by his name, but he sure as hell acts like one. You are wrong about Republicans. They don't believe in the right to smoke.
There's an exhibit called Bodies Revealed that showcases preserved human bodies - all of them from China - to show what our insides look like and just how big some of our organs are (they had one display that was just nerves, which was absolutely astounding). One of the exhibits shows off the lungs. I don't know if there are any pictures, but there are MASSIVE black spots on the lungs, the kind you'd expect to see in someone who smoked a lot. I remember the tour guide saying when someone asked that the black spots weren't from smoking, but from breathing in polluted air day after day. They weren't quite as bad as smoker's lungs, which get damaged over time from the heat of the cigarette smoke, but apart from that were identical in every way.
According to this report no Chinese city gets into the top 10 most polluted....
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/world...
According to this 1 Xi'an is the worst in the world. With Phoenix being the worst American city at 97th worst, LA is 107th, London 171st
http://www.numbeo.com/pollutio...
I've been to Beijing, and I didn't look anywhere near as cool as a two-pack-a-day smoker.
This article is from April, and their data collection was presumably from some time before that. However, if you check the following map (updated hourly), it looks like the air is still terrible, despite China making some attempts to solve this problem:
http://aqicn.org/map/china/
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
The progressives are responsible for making our air clean. The big cities in America used to look like China is now, but the EPA was created to do something about it, and has succeeded admirably. People rag about the government overreaching, but this is one shining example of the government solving a big problem. Unfortunately, the EPA has been hamstrung by the conservative Congress, which seems to think that keeping our air from becoming all polluted again is too much of a price for industry to pay. Assholes.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
I don't smoke Lucky Strikes, I smoke King Sized Camels.
When I lived in the Bay Area, there was a fire at a recycling plant that caused some reading to go 400, or 500 or something in Redwood City. It might have been particulates, not sure.
Yeah, that's a teensy bit down from Hiller. There was some suspicion of them not being able to handle the recycling load, and "accidentally" setting the materials on fire (the plant itself was untouched). Other theories included spontaneous combustion due to thermal rise during decomposition (only it was mostly paper).
It was particulates in the 76 or so today, due to smoke from the wild fires (which are actually pretty far away). Everyone got an emergency services robocall. Most places in China are about that, according to the monitoring mapping service (aqicn.org), but there are some that are running about double. Highest I saw was a 953 on the China/Kyrgystan border (kinda insane), and a couple real hotspots around Beijing.
I found it interesting that they shut down the San Francisco station (it must have been showing numbers that were unfavorable to San Francisco tourism). Worst in the U.S. is Medford Oregon; most other hot spots are in Washington State. There's a 229 in the Czech Republic. Russia has exactly one monitoring station; I'm going to guess it reports whatever Putin wants.
If you are interested in the world map (navigable Google Maps map), it's here (I left it centered on China):
http://aqicn.org/map/californi...
Cigarettes are quite expensive, so getting 40 a day for free is not that bad.
That being said, Beijing is located is a small depression and that results in all the heavier particles in the air hovering over the city instead of dispersing over a larger area.
This effect is strongest in the winter, as I experienced it when I visited the city about a decade ago. However, there are spontaneous "clearing events" when sudden winds blow away the smoke, and then the difference in the quality of the air is quite striking.
What if climate change were a big vegan tree-hugger leftist conspiracy but we cleaned up the planet anyway?
The US EPA was founded by the Nixon administration.
That's always been my position on climate change. Who cares if it's happening or why. Why can't we just clean up the environment to, you know, have a nice place to live...
http://www.businessinsider.com...
Unfortunately China has no concept of being good neighbors to ANYBODY in regards to the environment.
Achieved its goals?
Tell us, how did you travel from your alternative pollution free earth? Wormhole?
Two words. Delta Smelt. That is what happens when you have rabid environmental policies run amok.
Life is not for the lazy.
Beijing's air is probably still better than Tianjin's is right now
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
The progressives are responsible for making our air clean. The big cities in America used to look like China is now, but the EPA was created to do something about it, and has succeeded admirably.
Uhh...that depends. Maybe it has changed somewhat recently, but I'm quite sure it's far from perfect.
Ezekiel 23:20
I was in China back in late April / early May of this year.
I was walking with my Chinese friend / interpreter late at night next to the Yalu river in Dandong, across from North Korea. It was a nice, cool evening, very refreshing.
I woke up the next morning with what felt like a very bad chest cold. Another friend bought me some Chinese cough medicine, which seemed to help a little. But shortly after, I went to Beijing, and I really did feel like my lungs were on fire! We walked around the Summer Palace, which is a LOT of walking up and down hills and stairs. The next day, we went to Tiananmen Square, and we were running to get in line to visit the Illustrious Chairman, lying in stately repose in his mausoleum. The running made me feel like someone slugged me in the chest with a sledgehammer! I was constantly wheezing and coughing. My Chinese friends seemed amused, as if I was playing up the bad quality of the air... they said it was worse than Shanghai, but they didn't think it was as bad as I was making it out to be.
I spent ten days in China, then returned to Korea for another week (the air in Seoul felt like the fresh countryside by comparison). The cough didn't go away for almost a whole month.
Nixon was a moderate Republican. Just like Kennedy was a moderate Democrat. Neither could be nominated today by the batshit crazy extremists of left and right that rise up out of the fever swamp to infest the American political landscape.
>Environmentalism long ago turned from actually improving the environment, to being an anti-business tool wielded by extreme leftists.
LOL, no. You sound like a victim of hate radio, wingnut blogs, or Fox News.
"destroying your enemies with lawfare" Who are EPA's enemies? And can you please give specific examples of the EPA being used as an anti-business tool and show how the "extreme leftists" controlled it. Disband? How would that not cause environmental quality to revert?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
--zing
This is true. The Left always often the Right of moving far to the Right, which in some cases is true, Nixon would've been hung out to dry for talking to China in today's world; but they fail to acknowledge how far to the left things have also moved. The congress of the 1970s would never have considered touching the subject of gay marriage,or allowing illegal immigrants amnesty; if someone had said "son of a bitch" during prime time on TV, or shown the suggestive scenes that are so commonplace today (fine by me), they would've flipped their lids, so things have definitely loosened up. The truth is, we (the US anyway) are separating further and further apart, like oil and water, and the reasonable moderates in the middle are the losers; instead of seeing the common ground they can provide, everyone focuses on the where their differences lay.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Welcome to The Wasatch Front in Winter, where exceedingly high levels of PM 2.5 are known to increase all manner of disease, including:
asthma in children, heart disease and cancer in adults and early onset of dementia in the elderly.
Gentleman, start your engines!
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Seattle is ruled by Republicans...
O RLY? Since when?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Many countries undercut our labor rates by having substandard conditions, including pollution. We should tariff such countries until they meet basic standards.
It would encourage them to both clean up, and pay realistic wages, making our products more competitive, thus reducing the trade deficit.
Table-ized A.I.
I visited a major city in China several years ago, and when I stepped off the plane I looked nearly straight up and saw a copper-red moon. "Oh gee, a lunar eclipse, how cool!"
It was not an eclipse.
Table-ized A.I.
You are wrong about Republicans. They don't believe in the right to smoke.
Of course not, smoking is prole. They do however believe in the right to sell cigarettes.
He also proposed health care reform that looked a heck of a lot like Obamacare.
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
I recently read "Lost on Planet China", it's a good read if you want to know more about how bad the pollution in China is.
Perl Programmer for hire
The big cities in America used to look like China is now
I'm sure that's what your freshman sociology professor - who couldn't find China on a map if you spotted him Mongolia and Vietnam - told you. But as someone who actually breathed US city air in 1969 and Chinese city, hell, country air air in 2005, it was never that bad.