Watching China Turn Off the Pollution 427
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."
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).
Re:Depends on the Intelligence of Your Audience (Score:3, Informative)
I'm unsure if your pick of XIII for the title was supposed to be a joke, because there actually IS a XIII. I think you should have gone with XIV.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1139111/ [imdb.com]
Re:In the wake of large volcanic eruptions (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Watching China (Score:3, Informative)
After all, the air is not that bad.
I beg to differ [wikipedia.org]. Look at how Hong Kong and Singapore warn about [wikipedia.org] levels higher than 200! Singapore's standard writes:
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.
Re:Excellent (Score:4, Informative)
Why is parent modded funny? It's an actual idea to combat global warming [nsf.gov].
Probably not a good idea, but still.
Re:Cue the rationalists.... (Score:5, Informative)
equestian events (Score:3, Informative)
As a someone who was a horseman for 15 years (show and racehorses) I can say that the only people who do not think dressage is boring is the dressage people.
It is the equivalent of the technical section of an ice skating competition -exacting but boring -how perfect can you make a circle?
In the context of a three day event it is a little more interesting because you then have the cross country and stadium jumping events to see which horse and rider had the precision to do well in the dressage, the guts for the stadium jumping and the ballsout of the cross country course with the hills and water jumps, etc
I personally think that some of the cowhorse events like cutting and reining would be a lot more interesting to people, but they are too US-centric.
I'm just saying....
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".
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?
Probably not sodium chloride (Score:3, Informative)
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]
Re:Summary: (Score:3, Informative)
A recent episode of Nova Science Now on PBS covered studies done while there was no US air traffic immediately after the 9/11 attack. As it turns out, the vapor trails from planes do contribute significantly enough to cloud cover to cause a reduction in sunlight hitting the ground.
There also were some studies relating to the evaporation of water. As it turns out, evaporation rates are not only affected by such things as ambient temperature and wind, but also by photons hitting the water surface. At some point they concluded that pollution is reducing the energy hitting the surface by about 10%. Because day to day and year over year temperatures often vary considerably, the measurements after 9/11 were looking at the difference between high and low temperatures instead of the daily highs. The spread increased.
I didn't have time to find citations for all this, but I believe podcasts of the program are available from the PBS website and through iTunes.
I think the overall conclusion is that the models used for global warming have been in error on the conservative side. The actual effect of greenhouse gases is apparently even greater than we've been believing, but it has been partly masked by fine-particle pollution causing reduced sunlight at the ground. These things are also behind weather shifts with the fine-particles having a cloud-seeding effect boosting precipitation in some areas, while the reduced evaporation (from reduced sunlight) is contributing to drought in other areas. It's not a pretty picture.
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.
Re:what this is really telling us (Score:3, Informative)
unfortunately the best i can do relates to a foreign city http://www.walk.com.au/pedestriancouncil/Page.asp?PageID=186 [walk.com.au]
i heard this 'anecdote' from my case manager, and as such was struggling to try to find information about how bad pollution is for the lungs. http://www.cancer.org/docroot/PED/content/PED_11_1_Pollution_Versus_Tobacco.asp [cancer.org] suggests that cancer risk is higher with tobacco than with pollution, but that "Dirty air does contribute to lung cancer risk, but has a greater impact on heart disease, asthma, and chronic bronchitis"
so you could suffer a heart attack just from jogging in smog, or develop asthma just from living in NYC.
Re:Cue the rationalists.... (Score:4, Informative)
Which is a question that I rarely seen discussed. If Global Warming is true, is it really a problem?
It's not a problem for the Earth in general. It's been much warmer and much colder and it still sustains a multitude of life. But it's a problem for many of the current species on the planet, including humans.
The effects of global warming are truly complex and even the most informed scientists can't say for sure what will happen. If the arctic ice melts, oceans will rise, sure. But will the evaporation of the oceans create more cloud cover to cool the Earth? Or will that cloud cover trap more heat?
Our issues as humans is water supply. You'll notice more commercials for desalinization plants and such. Living in the Central Valley of California, I know that if we have a winter like the one two years ago, we're going to have problems from golf courses to agriculture. Last winter was good, but not great in terms of snow pack. Humans are putting a lot of hope into technology to continue our way of life.
Anyway, global warming won't take out the Earth, and it likely won't make it unlivable for humans. We'll kill each other off first vying for resources such as water, trees, meat, etc.
Re:Watching China (Score:5, Informative)
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/livecoverage/2008/08/china_bloggers_to_us_cyclists_1.html [washingtonpost.com]
Re:Summary: (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Summary: (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Facts Tell a Different Story (Score:3, Informative)
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.
From what I saw, the only female gymnast from any country who looked like she might be 16 years old was in fact 24.
Maybe you're not aware of what years of non-stop training starting before and continuing through puberty does to a girl's body, but suffice to say that teenage gymnasts looking pre-pubescent is not at all worrying (from the standpoint of cheating, not the larger issues). Yes it is possible China has broken the rules. No a gymnast looking like a 10 year old isn't proof.
BBC on YouTube: "Global Dimming" (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkJUJ5-PL-0 [youtube.com]
Enjoy.
Re:Summary: (Score:3, Informative)
That may be true, but it is not related to carbon dioxide or global warming at all, which is what the GP was talking about. Colorful sunsets are due to other pollution, especially particulate matter, but possibly also emissions of nitrogen oxides and other gases.
Re:Summary: (Score:3, Informative)
There was no emphasis on IR mentioned, they just said something to the effect that the photons hitting the surface turned out to be an important variable affecting evaporation rates. I too was kinda shocked to hear that.
A quick search found an article on global dimming [theolivepress.es] with a similar statement:
"In the 1990s, Graham Farquhar and Michael Roderick of the Australian National University were puzzling over an apparently illogical set of results: the rate at which water evaporated all around the world had declined over the last 30 years despite the warmer climate.
Farquhar and Roderick were measuring something called the Pan Evaporation Rate. What's that? Well, as Farquhar puts it with commendable Aussie directness: "It's called the Pan Evaporation Rate because it's the evaporation rate from a pan. But there's an apparent paradox here - the evaporation rate is going down, but the temperature is going up."
Surely, higher temperatures should evaporate water faster, like turning up the heat on a stove? Not so, says Roderick: "It turns out that the dominant force in evaporation is the energy of sunlight itself - photons hitting the surface of the water and tearing away water molecules, not the air temperature."
Re:Watching China (Score:2, Informative)
They wore masks because they had a cold or flu, and didn't want to spread the germs to other people.
Re:Watching China (Score:3, Informative)
It is all just 'mist.'
What you actually see probably is mist. I've been seeing a lot of western commentators looking at Beijing cityscapes and saying "look at that smog!"
Anyone who's been to any part of Asia in summer will tell you about the humidity. It's nothing that anyone in most western countries can understand. You can see the air, even in completely rural areas. (Walking through it is like walking through pea soup.) My wife's family lives on a rice paddy in rural Japan and the air looks exactly the same as it does in Beijing all summer long.
That doesn't mean Beijing isn't polluted, but I don't know what the Chinese official was actually responding to when he said "that's just mist." It's possible some dumb reporter asked him to look at the sky and see how polluted it was. The point is when the humidity level is that high, you can't tell visually how polluted a city is.
Re:Cue the rationalists.... (Score:3, Informative)
How much would melting all the world's ice raise ocean levels? I've seen figures as low as a few INCHES.
Melting the world's sea ice would do little, but that's not what people worry about. It's the land ice. Melting all that would raise ocean levels a couple hundred meters. Of course, that's not going to happen, but the point is that sea ice is not what matters to sea level.
How much would be offset by the fact that when it's warmer, more water evaporates? That's going to come down as rain somewhere, and some of it in areas where it won't become immediate runoff.
Right, there would be an overall net increase in precipitation. Unfortunately, that's just the net, and some already-arid areas are likely to get screwed. Worse, we can't predict regional precipitation very well, so we don't know who gets screwed, although we can make some educated guesses. In the presence of uncertainty, it's better to keep things from changing too much, if you don't know if they're going to change for better or worse. The status quo is the safest choice. Also, net is not the whole story, you also care about variance. Even in places that get more total precipitation over the course of a year, they (somewhat paradoxically) are often predicted to get longer droughts as well as heavier floods, because the precipitation becomes more variable too.
Re:Cue the rationalists.... (Score:3, Informative)
What I worry about, is that in this rush to "counteract global warming" (conveniently forgetting that a few decades ago, the paranoia was about "global cooling"!)
That wasn't really a fear among the scientific community; unlike global warming, global cooling was something that you saw in the media but didn't really see in the literature. This [confex.com] is a nice historical review.
we'll both disrupt and accelerate the normal cycles
Merely reducing CO2 levels back to pre-industrial levels is not likely to worsen the natural cycles compared to letting them increase without constraint. Unmitigated CO2 potentially could disrupt the ice age cycle.
Geoengineering efforts like the pollution being discussed here could make things worse, but given its short residence time in the atmosphere, probably doesn't matter on long time scales. But it could cause problems on a sub-annual time scale just as you fear. If you stop doing it, the air clears up all you get hit by a whole bunch of global warming all at once.
Considering how little we understand long-term weather and climate, I'd say it's smarter to keep our hands off the controls, lest we crash the planet BY our efforts at course corrections.
Emitting CO2 at increasing rates is keeping hands ON the controls. Reducing them back to more natural levels isn't going to hurt. CO2 levels don't respond quickly in the atmosphere given the speed of the carbon cycles.
Our unintentional contributions to the atmosphere haven't caused any huge changes on a millennial scale.
Even if we stopped emitting CO2 today, a lot of that CO2 will indeed be around on millennial scale, and that's only going to get worse.
Re:what this is really telling us (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2008-05-14-3651640224_x.htm [usatoday.com]
Ok, according to this source they say that not all the older ones held up but the newer buildings certainly fared worse than expected.
DUJIANGYAN, China -- Modern apartment buildings and schools crumbled, smoothly paved highways buckled and bridges collapsed -- their flimsy construction no match for the awesome forces of nature.
As the death toll soars from the powerful earthquake that ravaged central China's Sichuan province, the scale of the devastation is raising questions about the quality of China's recent construction boom.
"This building is just a piece of junk," one newly homeless resident of Dujiangyan yelled Wednesday, her body quivering with rage. Her family salvaged clothing and mementos from their wrecked apartment, built when their older home was razed 10 years ago.
"The government tricked us. It told us this building was well constructed. But look at the homes all around us, they're still standing," said the woman, who would give only her surname, Chen.