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India's New Delhi Now Most Polluted City on Earth, Air Quality Well Beyond 'Hazardous' Level (cnn.com)
New Delhi residents are suffocating only to find little to no relief. The city, as well as much of Northern India, home of over 400 million people, is blanketed by a thick layer of smog. The air quality has severely depreciated, hitting alarming 1,000 AQI PM2.5 level -- over 15 times of the safe limit. The air quality index hasn't gone down 400 reading, which is considered hazardous. From a report on CNN: Measurements taken at the US Embassy in Delhi put the city's Air Quality Index at 999 on Monday, off the standard chart, which finishes at the "hazardous" level of 500. By comparison, the highest AQI level recorded Monday in Baoding -- China's most polluted city -- was 298. Beijing was a pleasant 30, while India's next most polluted city, coal and industry-heavy Chandrapur, recorded levels of 824, according to the World Air Quality Index. Research released earlier this year found that air quality levels exceed World Health Organizations guidelines for 80% of those living in urban areas around the world.Though Delhi has been one of the most polluted cities for decades, burning of tens of millions of crop stubbles in the recent months and the Hindu festival of Diwali (which sees many people set off fireworks) have been held responsible for the severe air quality.
Story is too vague. What kind of crackers do they burn? Oyster crackers? Saltines?
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Thank you Donald. Don't you have a campaign to run?
It's a filthy, polluted hell hole, but their outsourcing services are cheap! So it is all good. God forbid they would raise their prices and improve their living standards.
What's a polluted city got to do with climate change again?
Go back to shooting squirrels little man.
Somewhat related, a fascinating set of images from a Chinese tourist trip to India.
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
By the time people die of these problems they have already reproduced.
I used to marvel at the brown smog that hung over Californian cities like the SF Bay and LA. You can only really see it from afar. Then I landed in New Delhi....
New Delhi is so bad you can't see down the length of a short street for the brown fog that seems to permanently hang over the place.
I got a bit of a sore throat too.
Would I go back to New Delhi?
In a heart beat. Lovely people, the Indians, food was superb and I had a few good nights out there.
The best thing about New Delhi is that it's an hour or two in a coach bus to Agra and the Taj Mahal as well as many other beautiful historical buildings.
I'd sooner spend a long weekend in New Delhi than the SF Bay or LA (you won't run into any DJT supporters in ND either)
http://www.albartlett.org/pres...
Either we choose from the list of ways to solve the population problem, or nature will choose for us. India is grossly overpopulated. Nature is running its course. You cannot build a society, a philosophy, a religion, a way of life that's built around reproducing as quickly and exponentially as possible while discovering new resources (land, energy) at a rate slower than exponential. The math doesn't work.
Their next strategy is to try and spill over into the other less-overpopulated parts of the world and make *those* places just as overpopulated as India, if not more. They just don't seem to get it.
china is where all the dirty factories are but they (gov) does a better job of covers stuff up.
A few years ago when people talked about air pollution, they talked about China. The AQI in Chinese cities was routinely over 400, and before the 2008 Olympics, they shut down hundreds of factories and banned half the cars from the road in an attempt to make the air temporarily cleaner. But now Chinese air seems to be much better - Beijing's AQI is said to be just 30 in this article (though it must vary substantially by day, like it does everywhere).
It seems China has passed the stage of building polluting heavy industry, and reached the stage where there is enough of a middle class to demand tolerable air. It seems India is just now reaching the first stage.
This story has nothing to do with greenhouse gas emissions. It is about particulate pollution: more specifically, PM2.5: that is, particles suspended in the air with diameter of 2.5 micrometres or less.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The crackers thing is BS. Delhi has the pollution that it does due to both the number of cars/buses/trucks/... as well as the factories. The crackers are 1, maybe 2 days in a year, which would do squat in terms of pollution. Not to mention that in India, a lot of people have been moving away from fireworks under the pretext of being more eco-friendly.
And, in fact, the actual story says that the problem is not Diwali fireworks:
"images published by NASA suggest that burning of crops in the neighboring states of Punjab and Haryana could be the biggest reason why the air quality in the world’s most polluted city refuses to clear."
With a link to a NYT article discussing it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11...
and to interesting satellite images on the NASA website
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The Ugly Indian The speaker makes the point of India can't expect to consider itself a world class country until it cleans itself up. He goes into the culture of "someone else will deal with it" so he organizes cleanup events that target the worst areas so that people see how nice an area can become and then start to take pride in keeping that way.
Besides, if there were 'DJT' supporters in LA or SF, CA would be in play, in which case, he'd have a much wider path to victory. Also, anywhere outside the US, you won't find many supporters of someone who wants to put 'America First', but that being said, one of his sons does have a joint venture in India w/ a politician from the ruling BJP. So GP may find more DJT supporters in ND than in LA or SF
What needs to be done is build more newer cities and job opportunities in them (cheaper outsourcing anyone?) so the infrastructure in the bigger cities gets a chance to catch up.
That's one way to do it. Another is to look at what's causing the emissions upwind and curb them. Could be power plants. Could be dirt roads. Could be the burning of all the litter/household trash. Could be two stroke engines. Now do two things: 1. implement (stricter) standards on pollutants for new equipment, and 2. work on retrofitting existing equipment to tighter emissions standards.
You don't need a new city to require motorcycles that pollute less or to improve the electric grid to burn less coal in central steam plants and less diesel fuel at local gensets.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
If half of what is shown in this show is true, it'll take some time to fix, but they're aware of it and working on it. Long story short, they use a lot of coal, but they are at the limits of what the grid can distribute so power goes out often (and burning more coal -- which they're doing -- only strains the grid more) and lots of places have diesel generators for backup.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
There is a prevalence of diesel generators and many run daily because of the instability of the power grid. Surely, this contributes quite a bit to particulate matter in the air.
"New Delhi residents are suffocating only to find little to no relief."
Sorry, but that sentence makes no sense at all.
No relief from what? It seems to imply that they were breathing okay, and then tried tried suffocating, expecting it to bring some relief. But from what?
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"The air quality index hasn't gone down 400 reading,"
So the air quality was reading (a book or something?), but then it didn't go down 400. 400 what? IQ points? Millimeters per hectare? Furlongs per fortnight?
Oh, you probably meant, "The air quality index hasn't gone down to a reading of 400..."
Editing, TRY IT.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Designated burning streets.
Circumcision is child abuse.
"It seems like the health issues from the air quality might help resolve the issues with overcrowding in India and overpopulation issues on Earth. Why would this be a bad thing?"
Think of it as evolution in action, you mean?
Narendra Modi has more in common w/ Ted Cruz than Trump. He is pious, very ideological (unlike Trump, who is transactional), and very much a (BJP) establishment figure. He was the longest serving Chief Minister of Gujarat before he became Prime Minister. His election would more resemble a Scott Walker or Mike Huckabee being elected President - both governors of their states multiple times, and enjoy wide establishment party support. The biggest beef that people who are not Liberals have against Trump is his lack of experience. Modi won in a landslide b'cos nobody questioned his experience: his main opposition came from people unhappy about his merely overseeing the Gujarat riots some 15 years ago. The only thing he has in common w/ Trump is that both are perceived to be anti-Muslim.
My comment was that places outside the megacities are emptier than Europe. This is because while Europe's population is spread across a large no of cities, India's is disproportionately concentrated in a few mega cities. 100 million+ in the top 8 cities. Take that out and the population density falls to France like levels. If you go 100 Km away from a major city you start reaching very idyllic countryside.
**Life is too short to be serious**
All "my goodies" being made and recycled in India doesn't force those people to dispose of their dead in the very same water they bathe in and drink from. Also it doesn't force them to consider their cows, apes and other animals to be so holy that these animals become a plague that spread their filth all over cities with nobody to stop them.
Well if it was really evolution , the Indians who survive would be immune to bad air and could run all the dirty factories they want and outcompete Americans. No one wants dirty air- its a function of the level of development. When the choice is between a working factory which gvies 100 people jobs which they can use to feed their families (400 people) and the pollution from the factory will give 50 of those people a breathing ailment the ruthless evolutionary decision is its better for 50 to get sick and die than for 400 to starve and die. When you develop past the work or die state of society you can start caring for things like clean air and water. India has no social security - you work or you die (especially for the poor). For the middle class you will see one persons salary supporting an entire bunch of unemployed sons, daughter, nephews and cousins. Underemloyment is endemic and unemployment is fatal. In such a situation jobs come before the environment.
**Life is too short to be serious**
Bring those cheap jobs they contracted out to the USA, watch our economy start to turn around. The tax rates in the USA are so punishing, corporations, wanting to make more with less, farm everything out to the cheapest around, thus firing a lot of IT people, and farming it out to call centers in India.
The concept is simple. Cows give milk which is essential for babies whose mothers are not able to produce milk so they are considered sacred as in mothers are sacred.
If you want the historical reasons behind it when the proto-Aryans first moved from the Iranian plateau into India and met up with the remnants of the Indus Valley Civilization (first civilization in world history to have cities with sewers which is ironic considering the state of sewers in India today) , they brought high yielding cows with them. However these cows did not take well to the heat of the subcontinent and had to be bred with local cattle to create a special breed which could survive and give enough milk in India. Hence cows became too valuable to be eating them and religious stricture came in making them sacred so that they are used only for milk.
All this does not justify cows roaming around in city streets. I am in favour of city governments catching any cow they find on a city street and taking it at least 100 Kms away and gifting it to a farmer or a milk cooperative.
**Life is too short to be serious**
las a few days ago indian religian occupired their festival "HOLI" then the festival new delhi full with poisonus gas. it is totaly follis job for indian people...http://einfon.com/top-15-best-social-networking-sites/