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Southern California Sees Its Longest Streak of Bad Air In Decades (sfchronicle.com)
According to state monitoring data, Southern California violated federal smog standards for 87 consecutive days -- the longest stretch of bad air in at least 20 years. "The streak is the latest sign that Souther California's battle against smog is faltering after decades of dramatic improvement," reports San Francisco Chronicle. From the report: The ozone pollution spell began June 19 and continued through July and August, with every day exceeding the federal health standard of 70 parts per billion somewhere across Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties. It didn't relent until Sept. 14, when air pollution dipped to "moderate" levels within federal limits for ozone, the lung-damaging gas in smog that triggers asthma and other respiratory illnesses. It's not unusual for Southern California summers to go weeks without a break in the smog, especially in inland communities that have long suffered the nation's worst ozone levels. But environmentalists and health experts say the persistence of dirty air this year is a troubling sign that demands action. Regulators blame the dip in air quality in recent years on hotter weather and stronger, more persistent inversion layers that trap smog near the ground.
As the climate warms due to massive fossil emissions, fires become more frequent, larger, and harder to fight. So the choice is to stop dumping fossil fuel emissions into our saturated atmosphere and use renewables, or die.
And if Republican denialist faggots would rather die than stop polluting, we should accommodate their decision.
Nice try.
“We have 100 years of fire suppression that has led to this huge accumulation of fuel loads, just dead and downed debris from trees and plant material in our forests, and in our woodlands,” says Berleman. “As a result of that, our forests and woodlands are not healthy, and we’re getting more catastrophic fire behavior than we would otherwise.”
https://www.motherjones.com/en...
Jerry Brown would rather spend the money on a train to nowhere and banning plastic straws.
Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino? That's an area bigger than South Carolina, West Virginia, and 8 other States. For our European friends, that's an area larger than Belgium. So, SOMEWHERE in that area it was above the limits. Yeah, doesn't seem quite so bad now...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
From the article:
Regulators blame the dip in air quality in recent years on hotter weather and stronger, more persistent inversion layers that trap smog near the ground.
Yeah. And the fires.
Even here in Seattle, we had a week or so of horribly, smoggy air that was outside the "safe" levels, and that's pretty rare for this area. You could see the haze drifting over from the fires on satellite imagery.
One could argue that a warming and drier climate encouraged the development and spread of wildfires over a sustained period, but it's pretty odd to not even mention them as a major contributing factor for this season's bad air.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Not the ENTIRE area, just somewhere in that area.
I wish there was a way to concentrate it right at the Trump apologists.
The chemicals concerned (e.g. NOx, O3) have a low lifespan in the atmosphere and so are not going to make the trip across the Pacific. A more interesting question is how much of China's smog is as a result of USA manufacturers moving their production to China.
You liberal morons hate science when it talks about there actually being differences between genders, or that there actually are genders--or when it talks about differences in intelligence levels across populations (even populations of the same race, so leave that out of this). When science doesn't fit your narrative you don't just ignore it, you actively suppress it.
Also, the last time I checked, California is governed by not just liberals but actual total leftists and has been for quite some time. They have stricter regulations on just about everything imaginable and pretty much get their way on anything that gets proposed--and yet you still have this problem while other areas don't have that problem. Now why might that be? Geography certainly. As others have pointed out and you've roundly ignored, it's been proven (again, by science) that suppressing wildfires is bad for forests and leads to bigger and worse wildfires when they finally do break out. Nobody in California wants to hear that though because naturally occurring wildfires may be beneficial for forests and a part of the natural cycle of things but they are of course not good for real estate developers and other bigwigs who make up the top end of the "small class of wealthy people and huge underclass of poor and illegal aliens with no middle class" that your ill-conceived social experiments have wrought.
In other words, you mindless twerp, all of this really proves that leftists are total failures at governing, that their policies objectively and provably don't work because nature doesn't give a damn about your political opinion, and that leaves you with the only options leftists ever have open to them--suppress the message and, when you get in power, literally kill the messengers. It is you who are obsolete and since you're probably young and stupid, let me give you some advice: being obsolete before you even get started is a bad position to be in.
Now, for the rest of you, conservatives are scarcely perfect. Conservatives do favor big business too much, they have in the past allowed the few to get away with way too much and push the costs of their messes off on the public. Leftists may be off the handle about global warming causing specific things but pollution is bad and should be held to a minimum--and people who cause environmental disasters like dumping chemicals into rivers and such should be held criminally accountable and financially accountable for their mess. That's the problem with pollution--it doesn't cost anything. Sincere minded people who want it to cost something aren't wrong about that because that's using economics to solve a problem caused by economics. In other words, everyone needs to grow up and figure out how to make things work.
Nice try.
The forests are not substantially different after 100 years of fire suppression than they were after 90 years of fire suppression, but fires are much, much more severe than they were 10 years ago. That puts the lie to the notion that it's the built-up undergrowth responsible for the new severity of fires. They're getting fire tornadoes for the first time in built-up areas, not just in forests, which also has nothing to do with that undergrowth. You are in denial.
Jerry Brown would rather spend the money on a train to nowhere and banning plastic straws.
The train is meant to go everywhere, and without all the whiners and the corporate interests fighting it, it would. And it might anyway. Banning plastic straws costs almost nothing as government action is measured, and it has the potential to make a substantial difference in oceanic pollution. Like six-pack rings, plastic straws seem to have a disproportionate effect on marine life.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"