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Watching China Turn Off the Pollution
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Aug 11, 2008 02:47 PM
from the like-flipping-a-switch dept.
from the like-flipping-a-switch dept.
NewbieV points out coverage of the effort to assess Beijing's air pollution control efforts. Quote from one of the investigators: "This will be a very interesting experiment that can never happen again." Here's the main project scientist's site on the monitoring effort, and Newsweek coverage that brings out a paradoxical effect of reducing pollution on global warming. "Unmanned aerial vehicles are measuring emissions of soot and other forms of black carbon. The instruments are observing pollution transport patterns as Beijing enacts its 'great shutdown' for the Summer Olympic Games. Chinese officials have compelled reductions in industrial activity by as much as 30 percent and cuts in automobile use by half to safeguard the health of competing athletes immediately before and during the games."
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Scientists Fear Impact of Asian Pollutants On US 455 comments
During the Olympics we discussed the international monitoring effort as China shut down factories and curtailed automobile travel in an attempt to reduce pollution. Now reader Anti-Globalism sends in a story that reveals that monitoring effort to be ongoing, with a bigger mandate: assessing the impact of China's pollution on the US. In fact the problem is bigger still because, as one researcher put it, "It's one atmosphere." Scientists are finding that pollution from, for example, Europe can travel right around the globe in three weeks. "By some estimates more than 10 billion pounds of airborne pollutants from Asia — ranging from soot to mercury to carbon dioxide to ozone — reach the US annually. The problem is only expected to worsen: Some Chinese officials have warned that pollution in their country could quadruple in the next 15 years. While some scientists are less certain, others say the Asian pollution could destabilize weather patterns across the North Pacific, mask the effects of global warming, reduce rainfall in the American West and compromise efforts to meet air-pollution standards."
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Summary: (Score:5, Interesting)
Carbon Dioxide (and other greenhouse gases) increase heat retention. Soot (and other opaque particulate matter) reflect heat before it reaches us. The trick is determining the effect of each in isolation. The temporary reduction in soot emissions in Beijing gives us a chance to see the effect of soot in isolation (or close to it).
This isn't exactly new ground (we've previously observed the effect of increased particulate matter in the wake of large volcanic eruptions), but it's one of the few times we see it in reverse, triggered by human activity.
Re:Summary: (Score:5, Interesting)
It would seem to me, not that I understand this being a layman, but, it would seem, that the effect of the year of burning oil fires in Kuwait after Sadaam's people torched them at the end of Gulf 1 would have been the single greatest contributor to global warming, carbon footprint, or whatever the term du jours is. How does Bejing rank compared to that massive injection?
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Re:Summary: (Score:5, Informative)
According to the article, about 6 million barrels were burned a day at the disaster's peak, and it lasted about 8 months. Worldwide oil production is about 80 million barrels per day (don't know what it was in 1991). While the Kuwaiti fires were a local environmental disaster, and the poor burning quality produced a lot of soot, I think the global impact is still nowhere near the global impact of worldwide oil use.
I couldn't find good numbers for Beijing, but as someone else already pointed out, that Kuwaiti oil was going to get burned one way or another.
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Re:Summary: (Score:5, Informative)
This actually, isn't unprecedented. Some scientists actually reported a drastic change on 9/11/2001. With all the airplanes in North America grounded, there was an immense reduction in global dimming.
Check it: http://archives.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/08/07/contrails.climate/index.html [cnn.com]
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Re:In the wake of large volcanic eruptions (Score:5, Informative)
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Facts Tell a Different Story (Score:5, Interesting)
Why is it, when there are more important issues, this ONE, probably a lesser issue, gets all the "controversy" air-time?
Some reported facts and anecdotes:
As told to velonews, air pollution builds-up because Bejing sits on the edge of the Gobi desert. A good rain is required to clear the air that's trapped in Bejing. http://www.velonews.com/article/81199 [velonews.com]
As a former competitive cyclist living in Los Angeles, I can tell you from experience, you feel the pollution later, not really during the event.
What *would* affect most outdoor performances more than pollution is the heat/humidity combination.
Finally, the last olympics had major heat issues for road cyclists, so each location has issues. Smog is not a major one for Bejing.
Re:Facts Tell a Different Story (Score:5, Interesting)
Why is it, when there are more important issues, this ONE, probably a lesser issue, gets all the "controversy" air-time?
I, for one, would like to hear a little more coverage of how the Chinese got all of their 16 year old female gymnasts to all look between the ages of 8 and 12. We know they're all 16, though, because, according to the broadcast, their passports confirm it. What's the point of the new "16 and over" rule if the only way they check ages is by looking at government issued passports? Surely the government would have no reason to lie! Sort of like the East German women that were all drug-free in the '70s and '80s, despite the adams apples and mustaches.
The gymnastics events have always been sort of a joke as far as fairness is concerned, but the new incomprehensible scoring system and the apparently barely enforced 16 and over rule seems to have made things worse, not better.
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Re:Facts Tell a Different Story (Score:5, Interesting)
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what this is really telling us (Score:5, Interesting)
Chinese officials to citizens: We can move heaven and earth when we deem it sufficiently important; foreigners will enjoy proper breathing conditions. Once they are gone, you'll go back to sucking down the equivalent of a cigarette drag every time you breathe outdoors. STFU, coolies, and get back to work.
Everybody is talking about how this will be the Chinese century, rah-rah, all is grand. History doesn't always go along with the popular consensus. The communist revolution was supposed to occur in advanced, capitalist countries, not a semi-feudal backwards backwater like Imperial Russia. Everyone was convinced the Shah's Iran was a model of western influence in the region and a shining bulwark against religious radicals. Hardly anybody saw the Iranian revolution coming.
I'm not saying it will go one way or the other, I'm just proposing a scenario on how China could fail in a couple of broad brushstrokes.
1. Eroding faith in government. We already saw how bad their construction was after that recent quake. 20 year old buildings stood up to the shaking, more recent buildings fell down. Government regulation and enforcement has failed.
2. Shitty infrastructure. A lot of reports talk about how the Chinese are building a bunch of stuff but the quality has been poor. This is not infrastructure that will last for decades, this is just slapping stuff together as quickly as possible, Haliburton style. We already know Three Gorges Dam has a lot of problems, what happens when it fails during a quake? Go back to point 1, eroding faith in government.
3. The pollution is freaking out of control. What kind of collapses and failures environmentally can they look forward to? The Gobi is expanding rapidly. What happens if they have famine?
4. Economics. Right now they are holding an incredible amount of American debt but to what end? Is this an economic cudgel to use against us? What if they misjudge and the weapon turns out to do them more harm than us? If the US defaults on the loan, what next? Who are they going to sell their cheap shit to? Are their domestic markets ready to create demand and wealth?
5. Disproportionate share of prosperity. The oligarchs are making out fine, what about the rest of the people? Will class resentment grow too powerful?
6. Population time bomb. One Child per Family means there's a lot of boys and not many girls to go around. What are they going to do for wives when they grow up? And what of families who have lost their only sons in disasters like the quake. The Chinese put a huge premium on family, carrying on the line, etc. Could there be massive popular resentment against these policies when such disasters wipe out entire families such as we've seen?
It seems like the current Chinese leadership has learned from the errors of their predecessors -- isolationist thinking in a violent world makes China a conquered country. They're now going to be actively engaged on the world stage. It will remain conflict to be sure, but how much will be diplomatic, how much economic, and will military be resorted to when the other two have failed? Will China get itself involved in wars it cannot win? Could a major loss see the fall of the party? What would the successor states be like? Would we see a return to the warring states period?
Lots and lots of questions. I just think the whole "This is China's century" narrative is only one of several possible outcomes.
BBC pollution data available. (Score:5, Interesting)
The BBC is measuring pollution themselves [bbc.co.uk], much to the annoyance of the Chinese government. August 10 was a really bad day. August 11, not so bad.
The equestrian events are in Hong Kong, which also has high pollution, but the drastic control measures being used in Beijing aren't being applied to Hong Kong. That's a small-scale competition. Hong Kong's racing fans think dressage is boring, and more than half of the 10,000 spectators walked out yesterday.
9/11 was another oppurtunity (Score:5, Informative)
Nova had a nice show on this last week, well actually a repeat from 2006.
One fellow showed a pretty dramatic effect on weather in the US just from the lack of con trails (sp?) from jets being absent for 3 days following 9/11. Upshot claim was that Global Dimming accounts for masking roughly 50% of Global Warming's effect. Soot itself was not the chief reflector, but rather clouds with soot reflected much more sunlight than if the soot was not present, it changed the size of the drops and created many more locations for these small drops to accumulate.
The trouble I see with the argument of "Soot helps!", is that soot is temporary, eventually washing out of the air. CO2 is not. CO2 is rapidly saturating it's sinks and is steadily increasing in the atmosphere. So even if we tried to use lots of particulate matter to dim things, eventually the ever accumulating CO2 would swamp things out.
The other bit of warning from the Nova episode is that this cooling is localized to the downstream of the polluters. So by creating localized cooling you can really screw up historic weather patterns. They cited a simulation showing that if you looked at the pollution from the US in the 70's and 80's with the better understanding of the cooling, that it helps explain the long period of draught that screwed over Ethiopia. As our sooty emissions in the US got curtailed, Ethiopia's monsoons went back to a more typical pattern. We can change climate much faster than populations, species, forests, etc can adapt.
Though, if we flood New York and Florida, is that all bad?
Use a NASA model to see for yourself (Score:5, Interesting)
Disclaimer: I'm the project developer.
Re:Haha (Score:5, Insightful)
see how many China haters there are on Slashdot
No reasonable person hates "China"; China is a great place with a lot of fascinating history and culture. Maoist style communists, on the other hand, most reasonable people can agree to hate.
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Re:Haha (Score:5, Insightful)
No. I do not hate Maoist style communists. I do not like anyone that denies *reality* for propaganda purposes. Of course, this also includes the so called "communists" in China as well as some standing under Mission Accomplished banners on aircraft carrier.
Anyone that stands there proclaims fact A in-spite of the facts - I do not believe that person anymore.
But then maybe this makes me a "science hugger" or whatever term is coined for that. You know, people that look at facts as they are and can change their mind in light of new information? You know, people that *think*?
So no, I do not hate "Maoist style communists" because,
1. I do not know enough about them
2. I do not believe in extremist's propaganda vs. communists (they also hate Castro for some reason while they supported Batista - Castro cared and did a lot more for Cuba than Batista even cared to think)
3. China is rifled with corruption. So called "Maoist style communists" that people hate is probably more to do with that corruption than the actual economic ideology.
4. There is a lot worse abuses around the world than in China yet same people that so crazily *hate* the Chinese leaders do not exactly hate or care about the real atrocities.
5. Most reasonable people do not hate - hate is an irrational emotion. And if you can hate one thing, you can easily be manipulated to hate another, including your own mother.
6. China doesn't have "Maoist style communists" anymore. None that actually matter. All of them basically converted to nationalistic "china first - me second - rest way behind" type of people.
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Re:Smashing (Score:5, Insightful)
We should have more Olympic games. Every month, in each and every single country in the world.
The Olympics can only happen the way that they do because advertisers are willing to pay MegaBucks to the host city for the privilege of becoming an official sponsor, because tourists will flock in droves, and for a million other reasons that essentially center around the fact that the Olympics are a rather limited and exclusive event.
You hold it every month and you dilute the brand value.
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Re:Smashing (Score:5, Insightful)
Physical well-being? Its a freakshow of people who train hard everyday since childhood and many of whom are serious drug abusers.
Its the ultimate dirty competition where countries exploit little kids. Thats not even mentioning how dirty IOC is.
These people can no way compete monthly on this level. You would just have a batch of different winners every so often.
That's ignoring the flawed economics. Youre not sitting around watching this stuff monthly. You'll watch a little every 4 years. No way advertisers are paying those rates monthly.
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Re:Watching China (Score:5, Funny)
...and then host it in one of the world's most polluted cities!
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Re:Watching China (Score:5, Informative)
Why would the athletes need protection? It is not like the air quality has been worse than 12.1 times [ap.org] (Aug 10) the WHO limit of 50 micrograms/m^3. And it isn't like independent readings are tracking [bbc.co.uk].
It is all just 'mist.' Does anybody think that China would ever consider cooking the books (on Aug 10 AP measured 604 micrograms/m^3, the BBC measured 278 in another location, and Beijings Air Quality Index which is supposed to be the highest of many different readings measured 82).
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The good news: it IS just "mist". The bad news: (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Watching China (Score:5, Funny)
PSI levels above 400 may be life-threatening to ill and elderly persons. Healthy people may experience adverse symptoms that affect normal activity.
I wonder what they would write about levels above 550!
The air quality in Beijing is little better than being on the outskirts of a forest fire.
The better questions is, what happens when it's over 9000
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Re:Cue the rationalists.... (Score:5, Informative)
> It doesn't matter if global warming is true or not. We all want cleaner air.
That's true, but global warming isn't about cleaner air. Global warming is the y2k of this decade. It's about creating a problem/minor panic and a cause that can generate new markets and flow megabucks for things that just aren't worth it.
Carbon credits? Seriously? What's that got to do with cleaner air. I know someone who has a tree (hardwood) farm. But now, instead of just burning capitol for their upkeep, he can sell carbon credits to offset the emissions of Al Gore's private jet. And we've got all sorts of money flowing into this corn ethanol crap and all it's doing is raising food prices _and_ emissions because getting ethanol to break even is hard enough without using such a bad source. And how about nuclear power? If this was about cleaner air, than that would be a _fantastic_ way of cleaning up the air, at the cost of some difficulties of waste storage. (Which, I would point out, could be vastly reduced if we were to build some recycling plants, but one thing at a time.)
The list goes on. I _wish_ global warming was about cleaner air. I want cleaner air. What I don't want, however, is all this BS about trying to find some sort of magic bullet of greenness that will solve the "Global Warming Crisis".
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Re:Cue the rationalists.... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Cue the rationalists.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The science says definitively it is real and it is a problem - the melting icecaps will raise sea levels and flood a lot of coastal cities.
An interesting question though is whether it's a problem for us or the planet. Certainly the planet has been a lot warmer than it is now and the world didn't end. It's really our fixed infrastructure that will suffer if sea levels change.
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Re:Cue the rationalists.... (Score:5, Interesting)
If Global Warming is true, is it really a problem?
Well if you are just looking for the economic consequences of global warming the Stern review must be the most well known work. Nicholas Stern was the chief economist of the World Bank, 2000-2003. Here is the Wikipedia summery [wikipedia.org]:
Although not the first economic report on global warming, it is significant as the largest and most widely known and discussed report of its kind.
Its main conclusions are that one percent of global gross domestic product (GDP) per annum is required to be invested in order to avoid the worst effects of climate change, and that failure to do so could risk global GDP being up to twenty percent lower than it otherwise might be. Sternâ(TM)s report suggests that climate change threatens to be the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen, and it provides prescriptions including environmental taxes to minimize the economic and social disruptions. He states, "our actions over the coming few decades could create risks of major disruption to economic and social activity, later in this century and in the next, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century." In June 2008 Stern increased the estimate to 2% of GNP to account for faster than expected climate change.
The Stern Review has been criticized by some economists, saying that Stern did not consider costs past 2200, that he used an incorrect discount rate in his calculations, and that stopping or significantly slowing climate change will require deep emission cuts everywhere. Other economists have supported Stern's approach, or argued that Stern's conclusions are reasonable, even if the method by which he reached them is open to criticism.
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Re:Cue the rationalists.... (Score:5, Interesting)
It is about reducing "greenhouse gases", primarily CO2, which is an essential part of the atmosphere.
The incorrect implication being that we risk reducing CO2 too much, as it is 'essential.' It is unlikely that we even *could* do this, and we are certainly not at risk of doing so.
So, it does matter if "global warming" is true, because people like Al Gore are asking us to cripple our economies to reduce CO2 emissions, which are only a problem if global warming is a problem.
The cripple our economies claim is so non-sensical, I wonder if people actually believe it. Reducing carbon emissions != economic disaster. It will mean an adjustment that more accurately prices the use of carbon-heavy items (fossil fuels in particular) by accounting for the huge negative externalities they cause. So yes, oil will get more expensive, but cleaner technology will get cheaper. Capital investment will funnel towards greener technology at the cost of high-carbon-output technology. Rather than there being tons of profit in, say, mining coal, there will profit in, say, developing high efficiency refrigeration or higher temperature superconductors.
The crippling-the-economy baloney assumes that our economy can not change and adapt to a different set of value models, something that is just clearly not true.
If Global Warming is true, is it really a problem?
If you care to believe science, climate change is true. If you think adapting 6 billion people to new shorelines, climates, and weather patterns is not a problem, then no..it might not be such a big deal. Seems to me, though, it probably will be.
-Ted
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