Scientists Fear Impact of Asian Pollutants On US 455
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."
Re:This surpises anyone? (Score:3, Informative)
co2 causes warming. Smog and other heavy pollutants still present in china (black smoke from coal,wood) but rare in the US causes cooling. But since the black stuff is bad looking we clear that up so we only get the warming effect of the co2.
Re:China (Score:4, Informative)
The USA should clean their own backyard first! (Score:2, Informative)
The eastern part of canada receives pollution from the United states. So before you start crying about how others can make your place more horrible, please consider that you too are making a part of the world less habitable. Not everyone likes acid rain you know?
http://www.epa.gov/airmarkets/progsregs/usca/index.htm [epa.gov]
Re:China (Score:1, Informative)
Nope US is still leading. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:CO2-by-country--1990-2025.png [wikipedia.org]
Talk about one sided reporting. But the China is an evil communist dictatorship where everything they do is evil and the US is perfect in comparison. Though with a name like Anti-Globalism we shouldnt really expect something other than xenophobia (yeahyeah strawman arguement but still)
Re:masks? really? (Score:5, Informative)
Or, alternatively, you could understand that different pollutants do different things. Just throwing that out there, you know. Sorta like CO2 absorbing EM waves in the IR band, and particles reflecting light back into space. Not that anyone would know anything about this.
Re:Course... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:China (Score:3, Informative)
Ok. That covers carbon dioxide. What about the other stuff? Soot? Mercury? Ozone?
Re:not just their pollutants (Score:5, Informative)
Unsafe cost-cutting isn't just a Chinese thing, you know.
It's not cost cutting, it's just ignoring externalities [wikipedia.org].
If you don't care about pollution, then pollution controls are unrelated to costs.
China & other developing countries literally don't care, though China may be coming around.
Re:Course... (Score:5, Informative)
That study had such crap methodology it should be dismissed offhand..
1) Not a year over study, they compared two three back to back to back 4 week periods (not year over)
2) The study covered the five counties around Atlanta which as a whole saw little change in traffic patterns not just the county in which traffic was actually effected.
3) It measured the decrease of 1.8 cases per day via medicade accounting not hospital records
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None of this is not to say that we don't pollute and that car pollution is noxious but to compare what goes on in Beijing to Atlanta is like comparing locking your kid is his basement with giving them a midnight curfew.
Re:This surpises anyone? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What we really need. (Score:3, Informative)
I find it prety ironic that we embargo trade with Cuba for far smaller offenses yet we do massive trade with China which is far worse. It must all depend on how many votes you can buy in Florida.
Re:not just their pollutants (Score:2, Informative)
China's burning a huge amount of coal, which is, believe it or not, even worse than petroleum.
Re:China (Score:3, Informative)
The US is still #1 in manufacturing BY FAR. China is only #3, having recently overtaken Germany. This despite a Chinese middle-class larger than the entire US population.
And as for SUVs, China has a seriously love affair with cars now. They're not far behind the US, and their cars don't have even the minimal basic pollution controls that have been around since the 70s.
So, the US produces more, and drives only slightly more. How does this make China better?
Re:This surpises anyone? (Score:3, Informative)
The masking effect comes from a sort of tug-of-war in what goes into the air.
CO2 increases the greenhouse effect and is generally considered to be a prime driver of global warming. But we all knew that already.
There's also a lot of particulates released into the air, however. These particulates block sunlight from reaching the surface, reducing the total incoming energy from the Sun, and thus acting to reduce global temperatures.
The trick is that particulates fall out of the atmosphere in months to years, and only persist if continually replaced. Whereas CO2 sticks around forever until it's absorbed somehow.
So when there's a big jump it pollution, you can get what appears to be a much smaller effect on global warming than what it will actually have in the long term. The "masking" effect is only temporary.
Re:This surpises anyone? (Score:3, Informative)
How come? Because the sun beams bounce off higher up in the atmosphere and get an easier way out?
One would expect black things to catch up more heat and warm the planet up more.
IIRC, much of the temporary cooling effect of coal pollution is due to sulfur dioxide emmisions, which turns into lots of reflective microscopic sulfuric acid droplets in the stratosphere.
Parent -1, Uninformative (Score:3, Informative)
It isn't.
It pretty much has never been.
Per person countries like Trinity & Tobago and the UAE pollute a LOT more. The US is something like #10-#30 per person.
Ever since the rise of Neo-Maoism (Stalin-communism hold the communism) the chinese have been ramping up to be the #1 polluters. I think in 2000-2004 they surpassed the US, or got very close.
Oh, the scary unit trick... (Score:5, Informative)
Here we go again, 10 billion POUNDS. I would say that I just farted, injecting nearly 10 gatrillion nano-ounces into the precious atmosphere.
But let's put 10 billion POUNDS into perspective. That's 20 million tons, or, roughly 2E7 / 5000 teratons or 2E7 / 5E15 or really 0.0000005% of the atmosphere.
It's NOTHING.
Re:not just their pollutants (Score:5, Informative)
First off, the US is the greatest polluter in the world
And lastly, they are not.
By far they are not.
Support your points, troll.
"By far"? We were only overtaken in Co2 emissions this year. Before that, we were "by far" the leader.
In other areas (there's more to pollution than Co2), we are still the leader.
Be my guest and look it up.
Hell, why not listen to George Bush? He seems pretty proud of us being the world's biggest polluter: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/2277298/President-George-Bush-'Goodbye-from-the-world's-biggest-polluter'.html [telegraph.co.uk]
Re:not just their pollutants (Score:2, Informative)
I am an American and I believe you are a complete total moron.
First of all, the US isn't the largest polluter. It hasn't been for a while. Second, we have done more to reduce certain emissions sooner then other countries. In fact, we cut most if not all our nitrates from commercial emissions well before the rest of the world, including Canada because it was causing acid rain in Canada. Imagine that, we stop a certain pollutant before the country complaining about it did.
Also, we have made more environmental decisions at earlier stages then the rest of the world has. That just plain old history. You call yourself an American and don't even know that. Third, even if your going to complain about Co2 as a pollutant which I'm not convinced it is, the numbers in the US only appear inflated when you don't consider the work behind it. The US's GDP is eoughly 13 times the size of all other countries meaning that the amount of productivity is 13 times other countries. When you look at carbon emissions, we are at best twice as bad as other countries with similar populations yet we are intrinsically more productive with those numbers. And when you look at stupid number like Co2 per population, Australia seems to be more polluting then America is and Canada seems to be less then one point behind us. That shows you how stupid those comparisons are. [carbonplanet.com]
Finally, it really takes a moron to think we knew then what we know now about nukes when we used them on Japan. Now every nuke capable country has used them in their own tests. America is the only country that has used them in a conflict of war. But using 2008 hind site on a fledgling technology that was used in 1945 that saved more lived then it destroyed is about stupid too. Of course if we knew then what we know now, we would have never used them. How do I know this? Because we knew what they would do and we have never used them since. This includes MacArthur's repeated requests to use them on North Korea.
Finally, even if the administration isn't signing onto the global warming scams that are so abundant, the great people of this nation are embracing the idea of reduction left and right and it is such a high demand that the private industry is leading the way in the US. But shit, isn't that what Bush said, let the markets do it and when people claimed they wanted it, they were able to get it? I mean we got Solar in most states that even allow you to sell some or all the energy back to the utilities. We got wind farms all around the country and the more it goes into operation, the more it becomes affordable, reliable, and redily availible. As for ethanol, Sure people are bitching that it is worse then gas, but it is getting better and is being developed to be more efficient as well as being able to be produced from wastes like silage and grasses that can be raised on scrub lands. Only with a free market does things like that come about. You don't see other countries working on that same.
So to recap, Sure the US pollutes more. That's because it does more. And no, we aren't blind to that fact and people are working every day without a government or UN mandate to reduce the impact. And your wanting to take the side of some ignorant basher just so you can remain intellectually lazy and not look at anything yourself. BTW, None of the countries in the Kyoto accord have been able to reduce their emissions. Germany has good numbers because of an almost negative population growth and an accounting error that inflates their 1990 objectives. So far, the EU countries have turned to exporting their pollution to India and China which is now the highest polluter in terms of tons released per day/year. Out of157 or so countries that signed onto the Kyoto, only 37 or 38 have limits and have to do anything about their emissions. the rest are nothing more then banks that other countries can either shove their industry into like India and China, or by credits from. And strangely enough, none of the countries with
Re:not just their pollutants (Score:3, Informative)
Vermont being the two states I know from experience has recycling available to them with even pick-up at the house
In the city and surrounding suburbs of Melbourne, Australia (I live near Moorabbin) the local councils provide us with two or three wheelie bins with colour-coded lids. Red is for garbage, yellow for recyclables, and green for garden waste. You can get jumbo-sized recycles or garden bins, but only one smaller size for garbage. (You can get cheap composting bins from the council as well, but that's another story). The wheelie bins are standardised (Nylex make them http://nylex.com.au/ [nylex.com.au]) and the trucks that collect them are special side-loaders with hydraulic lifting gadgets that pick up the bins, tip them in, and set them back down in place. Can't get much cheaper to operate, because the process is nearly automatic and takes very little time per bin. It took us absolutely no time to adapt when this scheme went in a few years back. The bins are all made out of recycled plastic themselves, are rugged and the whole process is very quiet. One of the local collection companies is http://www.visy.com.au/recycling/index.php/ [visy.com.au] so you can probably contact them for ideas if you're in the business. There's an image of one of the bins on their home page, the one on the right.
It isn't that hard to get recycling happening if you just apply a little bit of technology and standardise the collection and processing.
Anti-disclaimer -- I'm not affiliated with these good peeps
Re:US is exporting pollution (Score:3, Informative)
It is quite clear that China does fully understand the problem and know full well the consequences of their action. China has some of the highest standards in the world to limit the release of pollutants into the environment and well as providing healthy and save working environments for their workers. Unfortunately, well and truly unfourtunately, the level of corruption in China means that all those standards and completely and utterly ignored and all very sadly with government complicity. China's environmental and worker standards seem to be nothing but corporate marketing at it's worst.
Also in addition those pollutants brought in by environmental conditions, other countries are also directly importing pollutants, as you can not hope to produce clean and safe products in a heavily polluted environment. The most critical disaster is likely to be caused by the absence of effective controls on waste disposal facilities where highly toxic waste is mixed with regular waste. A fire at those kind of facilities could have a catastrophic impact on any nearby cities and, depending upon the nature of the exotic pollutants produced, possibly a global impact.
It is clear that the government of China is fully aware of the implications of the pollutants being produced as defined by their own legislated standards, they have simply allowed greed to overrule good judgement, something that they a clearly not unique in doing but, they have allowed corruption to take it to unprecedented levels.
Re:They're not that bad (Score:2, Informative)
Its already been done, at least in terms of the province of Ontario.
Hilariously, though, Elliot Spitzer's office sued the Federal Government for the polution over NYC.