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Beijing Issues 'Red Alert' Over Smog (independent.co.uk)
An anonymous reader writes: The Chinese capital of Beijing has issued a "red alert" for air quality within the city, the first time the city has reached the level of caution where it's deemed "unhealthy" for all residents. Starting Tuesday morning, schools will be shut down, the production of smoke will be limited, and cars will be under an odd/even alternate day ban while the local government waits for air quality to improve. It's expected to last until mid-day on Thursday when the weather looks likely to blow it away. "Air pollution monitors showed that areas of Beijing had more than 256 micrograms per cubic metre of the poisonous particles. The World Health Organisation (WHO) says that anything over 25 micrograms is considered unsafe. The poisonous smog in Beijing is caused by the burning of coal for industry and heating, as well as huge amounts of dust from the city's many construction sites. The problem is being made yet worse by high humidity and low wind." The city has been in bad shape for a while now, and Greenpeace called for this very measure a week ago.
"Red Alert"...commies...heh!
Let this be a reminder to those enamored with politicians who claim "we can compete with China by relaxing our regulations".
I believe we should tariff goods from countries who don't adhere to basic labor, pollution, and safety standards.
For those who claim that prevents such countries from "advancing", the country can instead encourage more local consumption. Asian countries have been slow to do this, largely because governments are afraid it will make their population pop-culture addicts, like those found in the USA. They don't like "work hard, play hard". They only want the first.
But if you want the benefits of pop culture (sales & profits), you have to take the downsides also. We make it too easy for them to have the good sides of globalization without the bad. We should put our foot down. Why do we always trade on THEIR terms?
Table-ized A.I.
Why don't you and everyone else with this line of thought do the right thing then and kill yourself?
smog is not climate. you are a moron
I remember cresting the grapevine highway going into the LA valley in the the back of my parent's car. Sometimes, the air was PURPLE!
After the majority of it cars had catalytic converters, it greatly improved (although the air does sometimes have a kind of "gritty" feel to it even to this day.)
"Starting Tuesday morning, schools will be shut down, the production of smoke will be limited, and cars will be under an odd/even alternate day ban while the local government waits for air quality to improve"
At which point, it is presumed, the entire system will go back to what it was doing before the red alert. That strikes me as counterproductive - as if maybe, next time, all that pollution won't lead to smog.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
...or London in 1952?
http://history1900s.about.com/...
Well TFS did say:
the weather looks likely to blow it away
so you are not far off.
Um, so . . . where is it going to be blow away to . . . ? Maybe Shanghai . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
It is also influenced by geography, maybe they should just flatten all the mountains around Beijing to prevent this issue.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
When a billion people die of congestive lung failure all around the same period. Of course, given our current state of continuous war, combined with a ever growing lack of resources, we should lose a billion even sooner after we have fished the oceans dry. You can't feed 8 Billion with a drought and empty oceans at the same time.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Um, so . . . where is it going to be blow away to . . . ? Maybe Shanghai . . . ?
California!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Red alert! Red alert! Shields up, ready photon torpedoes!
Was only on the way to HK, but the air quality was so bad even in the airport that my daughter (who has situational asthma) was coughing ceaselessly and we had to use her nebulizer while in the lounge - luckily we were only laying over for 3h.
I had no interest in leaving the airport to visit the city proper even if I could.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Pollution has been around since the dawn of time.. This is just a naturally occurring cycle in our planets history, plus the data doesn't go back far enough to come to a conclusion. This is just a story by the main stream media to further the agenda of "Big Science".
It would be slightly cheaper to just hand out hazmat suits to everybody.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Probably caused by making all those solar panels for the western countries.
If you like "red alerts", get ready for the "the threat level is orange; the threat level has always been and will always be orange" 3.0: DHS just announced a new threat level alert system.
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us...
It's a total madhouse here! We're on red alert because of the smog. A klaxon keeps blaring, while red lights keep flashing at every street corner. In Tianamen Square, the large portrait of Mao Tse Tung, which has a speaker set behind the mouth for such occasions, keeps shouting out (translated from the Mandarin): "This is a red alert! This is a red alert! Stay in your homes! Stay in your homes! Long live the Glorious Revolution!"
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Is this 'Red Alert' pre-beard or post-beard Riker?
Yeah, as long as YOU are NOT one of the branches trimmed.
Table-ized A.I.
It was worse in Pittsburgh, PA around 1900.
The highest PM2.5 in Los Angeles is estimated (it wasn't measured back then) to have been about 100 ppm (from the LA times last year: http://www.latimes.com/world/a...). In recent times, the max was 79, and the daily average is 18 or so. That puts Beijing at 2.5x the worst LA has ever seen and about 15x worse than LA on any given day.
How about horse shit dust covering everything pre-awful-cars days?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
They also call for making it worse.
It is the persistent anti-nuclear campaigning of Greenpeace and other "environmental" organizations which has left the world with a dwindling complement of 1950s era reactors, and prevented the development and adoption of better nuclear technologies. If they hadn't killed the first nuclear renaissance, the world would be off of coal by now. Places like France, Sweden, and Ontario have proven that nuclear can eliminate coal use while providing clean energy on a large scale, even with old technology. Even so, the limited amounts of conventional nuclear remaining are responsible for a large majority of the clean energy produced today.
Meanwhile, those most vigorously pursuing Greenpeace's dear wind and solar have only demonstrated how ineffective those technologies are at displacing coal or other fossil fuels. Excepting the large contribution of biomass to renewable energy production reveals an even more hopeless situation. As if it weren't bad enough, the "green" solution to the intermittency of those technologies is to burn biomass or biofuels, which are worse yet than coal. At the end of the day, the rise of coal consumption continues unabated. Thanks!
Where are all those that kept saying China is leading the way in cleaning up pollution? These are the same people that doubted when I said by 9am there you can barely see across the street. GET OUT OF YOU BASEMENTS PALE WHITE VIRGINS!
"It's expected to last until mid-day on Thursday when the weather looks likely to blow it away." Just a reminder...when it comes to air pollution, there is no "away". It all stays here on planet earth, in the air we breathe all over the world. Just saying.
Why in the world is this modded +5 Insightful? Climate scientists have drawn a link between climate change and smog. And last I checked, "climate" referred to long term weather patterns. When the government has to issue several dozen smog alerts for a single city within a single year, that's climate.
How about going towards greener energy, greener manufacturing...?
Labour is so cheap I'm sure they can get a few million people peddling to generate power :)
As long as there's someone worse to compare yourself to, you're OK.
Almost ALL of this is caused by coal burning, both in large electrical generation stations, and locally by individuals cooking and heating.
China is at least building at an accelerated rate the largest number of nuclear reactors, and some of the most advanced ones at that, in a direct response, however it does take time. They are doing something about the situation, only they are a bit hogtied in the here in now.
How many nuclear reactors are being built or are planning to be built in the US? How quickly is the US realistically trying to get away from coal plants? I say realistically as a premeditated strike against the eventual posts that wind and solar will solve everything. The US corporations seem to have gone with natural gas as an alternative, with fracking, which has its own issues, but smog and clean air isn't really among them...
If you've been to L.A. then and to Beijing now, you can't see across the street most times after 9am and about only 2 stories up, sometimes less. Beijing would love to have it like L.A. was in the 70's
I grew up in Los Angeles and left, with my family, in 1980 because the air quality had been so consistently bad for 3+ years, the brown smog bank went as far inland as Palm Springs, 100 miles away.
I flew into Beijing in 2008 and again in 2011, and the smog is so bad there that it extends for 150 miles in any direction away from Beijing, and as the flights descend below 15,000 feet you can actually smell it despite the purifying.
I was offered an opportunity leading Microsoft's Research and Development efforts on the equivalent of a Star Trek Tricorder there in Beijing, and while 'scouting for apartments', I got to see that every apartment comes equipped with a refrigerator sized air purifier. Not an air conditioner that heats or cools, mind you, but an air purifier. The air IS really that bad.
I refused the opportunity for one reason: I had no desire to be around the air, it really was that bad.
Now don't get me wrong, I LOVE Beijing and thoroughly enjoy China, Hong Kong being my favorite city. But that air quality in Beijing is worse than Los Angeles ever was. In my opinion, China is going to have to undertake some major adjustments not just to their infrastructure, but to the health and welfare of it's citizens through not just monitoring simple things like particulate counts - but creating an agency which actually can reinforce government legislation.
But then again, we're talking about a Communism, right, where the health and welfare of the nation are secondary to the economy it serves.
Weird how some people can confuse socialism and communism.
There are cooling climate effects of aerosols(so pollution can have a cooling effect), but the main point worth making here is that there is an important distinction between pollution from coal and climate warming that people constantly overlook. China uses a lot of coal this produces a lot of carbon dioxide as well as a lot of pollution. They can fix the pollution (or alleviate it a lot) while still keeping using coal.
China has invested a huge amount in coal based power plants in the last 15 years, and they're going to keep using those new plants. By concentrating the use of coal into modern powerplants and eliminating it everywhere else they may well succeed in having much cleaner air. Coal powerplants can be made much cleaner, though at significant cost, with big installations that wash the pollution out of the air and into the river. The aim is to get the pollution in the air down to tolerable levels.
The challenge will be even higher for India as their economy grows because the quality of their coal is much much worse.
They are not serious about it.
A red alert is never serious, unless there's also a "Bridge Lurch, left" accompanying it.
I have lived in Shenyang for about two years.
I don't get this whole metric anymore, and the numbers seems to be either wrong or being manipulated, as well as their interpretation.
The numbers and conclusions are not consistent with the past history. My Android App is currently showing 310 for Beijing, and 267 for Shenyang. On November 10 this year there was an article on BBC News http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl... claiming that the 1400 measured in Shenyang were the worst one ever. But to be honest, the Halloween last year in Shenyang was even worse than this Nov 10. It is hard to give a number because above 1000 most measurement devices just refuse to report. But I currently live in Shenyang and you develop your own sense of estimating the pollution by looking for known buildings in the sky, by smelling, and by listening by to your lungs. Shenyang didn't shut down last year, where you couldn't even see past 50 meters (about 55 yards) due to the smog.
The government won't let you do measurements or post them in the wild. A colleague of mine made some measurements in the office using a state of the art device bought in Germany for PPM values. After recording bad numbers, he tried to convince management to upgrade the air filtering system in the building, they didn't accept these values, because they had to be done using a government-approved system. Same issue when we wanted to measure led content in the water at our residence compound: we were not allowed to do it in our lab, we had to do it through an approved third party company.
Now to be honest, I do understand the government. It would be very easy to spread terror and false information across the masses; and no offense, but many Chinese are not good in interpreting and digesting information. So the government is careful with that, and it is not an entirely bad thing. That said, you are never sure if you can trust official figures.
But that said, I still don't understand why now all of a sudden China and its air pollution is in the news. The air is crap, but it has always been crap. I don't think that this year is worse than last year (although it is still very very bad).
The thing is that most Chinese don't give a fuck. I work with Chinese engineer colleagues, and none of them has an air purifier at home, not even if they have small babies. So I see a combination of many things here: extremely bad air, a suspicious attempt to make the situation look worse than before, inaccurate or fake numbers, and a mass population that is either ignorant or just don't care.
My two cents.
Agreed. Humans have decimated Earth. Too late to fix. Saving Earth is more important than the human race. In fact, when humans have finally destroyed Earth, so will the human race.
No the smog around Beijing says exactly nothing about the earth's climate. Percent of CO2 in air and ocean, on the other hand, graphed over the last 250 years, would show a carbon pollution problem
Free public transportation can curb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Casteism
What if CHINDIA has technology to covertly "export" their https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Casteism