Where is all the air pollution in the world?

Well, I've wondered to myself before, what nations are putting out the most or the worst air pollution? I would imagine the U.S. took that rather dubious prize for a good period of the 20th Century by sheer scale of activity and the nature of the activity.

So...is it the same today? Has it significantly changed?

Our very Fragile Earth needs it's air to be air. It's systems and sub-systems that we call environments and biomes depend on it being air. Not chemicals and filth with air working in as a shifting % on a statistical spreadsheet.

Well, a fellow member, Candlestick, was kind enough to share a very interesting resource with me and it effectively answers the questions above, and it does so in an ongoing daily basis. I took a few screen captures to illustrate just what kind of data this displays and how important the scene it depicts actually is.

This is the map Legend for color coding and the link at the bottom leads to the page with more details on those.


How about Europe to start with....


Well.. Not too bad. Not REAL good there guys, but hey, it is an industrial civilization. 0 pollution is fantasy without forsaking modern reality to achieve it. Some pollution can be absorbed, compensated for and dissipated in the environment, too. We don't live in a real glass house after all.

So what does America look like?


Okay.... tsk tsk California. Gotta get to looking into that orange and purple business. That just doesn't look good.

Last but not least, how about Asia?


Say HUH?! hey guys...I got a better look at that with a zoom for more detail. let's see...where is all that?


I don't think this requires too much commentary from me. This largely speaks for itself, in fact. So, I'll let it do just that.

It speaks as loudly as any lengthy OP I could ever write, in this case.

In terms of the source though? Here is that for more looking each can do on their own.

Real-time Air Quality Index Visual Map

Last but not least .......... oh, no Australia. The smog demographics are typical are they not ? that's what i'd expect to see.

Oh, what a bad bunny. My apologies to those down under. Here is your outlook for current pollution levels, and remember, this is updated daily on the site there, so it's a snapshot. Not an average.

I think it's the states with the tendency to drive big vehicles and the wide open spaces. Canada as well. The transportation in N.America compared to Europe is about a century behind. Nobody hops a train or a bus to travel here. Not likely to be something you would pay attention to if you drive a car. If you don't, it's best to live in Europe where you can leave the house. We have absolutely no way to get downtown to buy groceries etc unless a car is used. Too far to walk. What really gets me is you're expected to walk if you don't drive but they can't shell out for any sidewalks to walk on.

a reply to: Wrabbit2000 Thanks Wrabbs, I was just trying to do that myself, but you know how good I am with these things.

As we can see, we're not too bad here in TGSL. I'm north of Brisbane, no smog here, just a hell of a lot of decaying octarians

a reply to: Wrabbit2000

Maybe it's about time for the major nations to work with China, Japan, and South Korea in an unprecedented project to solve this problem. One of moon-landing proportions. With the air, water, and forests being assaulted like beaten dogs or black men walking near a police car for over 200 years now, humans should at least mature enough to combine forces to put some fixes in place. Thanks for a very well-written and presented OP.

a reply to: Aleister

I'd actually say you're right. I think that map and interactive nature of what it displays really shows the need for it.

It displays in a way it takes very little imagination to see, how interconnected we really are. It doesn't mean we all just pretend we're friends and sing Kumbaya. That won't be happening in my lifetime. However, you would think they could have mutual and non-political efforts on things of direct impact to the human species as a whole.

a reply to: Wrabbit2000
Numbers are not real enough to most people ,photos are more practical.

This one is Mordor...seem okay~

The source I can find is ,this is ~600 in Shanghai.


Both of these are higher then 300 in Beijing.

1000,Beijing.

I found Mordor is such clean.............

Air pollution ...

It's hardly a permanent thing. Bad when you're experiencing it ... granted.

I live in Seoul, South Korea. Back in the early '90s, you could blow your nose and see the evidence of really bad pollution. It's not all that anymore. We get the yellow dust (Hwangsah) out of China, not all the time, but quite frequently. It's not so bad that people are thinking about moving to get away from it. Sometimes the levels are five times 'the definition of safe'.

If air pollutants are heavier than air, they settle to the ground in short order. Lighter than air ... I dunno ... space pollution? When I was a kid, I saw all the gunk that fell outta the sky and settled on the surface of our lake. Pretty wretched stuff. That was 50 years ago. There's still fish in that lake and they're still normal.

I remember working out of Honolulu. Honolulu used to develop a smog dome just like LA. An hour after rush hour, and it had all blown out to sea.

Pollution is a fact of life. I'm glad to see people take notice and that they're concerned. Can't get behind what people want to do about it every time ... but I can tell you I'm happy when I blow my nose these days it's not black with soot.

a reply to: candlestick

Oh God... I wouldn't have guessed. They're just numbers on the map and particle counts that don't mean anything practical. You're right.

To see your pics and realize what those thresholds represent as they are crossed up the scale for real world impact? I'm more concerned than I was before, to be sure.

There is nothing like putting numbers to images, no kidding!

China is the worst, but why? Because we and many other countries like their cheap products, we want it cheap so our wholesalers and retailers can make money and we can buy more with our buck....so we don't care how much pollution they make or how much they poison their citizens.

But, if we ignore this and deny we are at fault, we can get away with blaming it on China. The USA causes the most air pollution but indirectly.

a reply to: rickymouse

Well, it's not as easy as that for what I'd suggest behind the causes. Sure, it's true that China is producing quite a bit for our consumer market. They are also slowly waking a giant far larger than us.

They're trying to do it in a controlled way, but that varies for success I think. However, we have 300 million citizens or potential consumers with something like 100 million households consuming 'stuff'. All manor of 'stuff'.

China has 4x's that at 1.4 billion, and over the past decade and a half they've been bringing that quality of life up with national rail networks, road networks and overall comforts of life available at levels simply not existent in times past.

So, while some of China's pollution is us, they are on track to far surpass us in many ways on sheer economy of scale and plan to do just that for their own abilities. That takes a MASSIVE amount of electrical power, which China has plenty of resources for...just like us....and it's coal ...just like us. The difference is, China is still in our early industrial revolution phase of CLEANING that coal exhaust/smoke.

You can barely SEE emissions from a U.S. plant today. My town has two of them within a few miles of the city limits. There is no visible or tangible pollution...and it's cost a fortune in development and deployment to achieve that.

Effort China isn't putting out or requiring their public/private business entities to do..and that makes for smog closer to fog, as the images show. That sure isn't the whole explanation either, but the constant addition of new coal plants isn't helping.

It gets bad in china at times .. and they are slowly working on ways to fix it .. then theres indonesia every year with its practice of burning large tracts of land to farm causing a severe haze that drifts up covering singapore .. malaysia thailand cambodia laos ..vietnam in recent years its reached as far up as southern china .. so far not much luck by surrounding governments of countries affected to get indonesia to put a stop to the practice ..
it gets bad already been a couple days this year the haze has reached out here where i am .. maybe one day people will stop destroying the world around them ...

Great visual: You and I have both mentioned is some of the Global warming/Global change/ Global disruption threads the main polluter of the world if man made aerosols is used as the yard stick is China. Coal fired power plants without scrubbers and open smoke stacks burning god knows what all contribute..

Interesting when looking at Cambodia where Nike has a very large shoe factory... index is not all that great in Phnom Penh but no doubt that is but a small contributor.

All in all S.E. Asia looks pretty good considering there is car manufacturing and all kinds of heavy industry.. I do know that Thailand has really cleaned up their act the last 40 or so years.(even in Bangkok (traffic jam of the world somedays) you can blow your nose and seldom get black buggers like the old days from the diesel trucks) .. Primarily because they are aware and do not like their farm land polluted or black buggers.

Not to long ago some company dumped something (black sludge looking stuff) in a ditch south of Bangkok.. The Thai's went after the drivers and the company big time.. Needless to say it was cleaned up..

Awareness of the population is about as good as anything when it comes to being responsible for the environment..(that and making them clean up their messes)

It appears China has a bit of a learning curve they need to master... Wonder what color their bu...never mind (yuk!)

S&F

Most of the pollution in China comes from Coal Power. Their industry is decades behind the western world, they don't have sophisticated filtering techniques. They also have coal mines, which are very dangerous to environment (and for workers, they explode very easily).

We have technology to make coal power free from emissions, by taking the CO2 from gases and storing it in mines and oil veins under the sea floor. Sadly these techniques are expensive and lower the plant's efficiency. To get same electricity production, they have to burn more coal to counter this inefficiency.

originally posted by: Wrabbit2000
To see your pics and realize what those thresholds represent as they are crossed up the scale for real world impact? I'm more concerned than I was before, to be sure.

There is nothing like putting numbers to images, no kidding!

Lead to Chinese like gold expensive stuff ?

No no no no ...^this is the reason,not the result.
A obvious result is Beijing lung cancer patients increased 60 %in last 10 years...(This is data form Chinese MSM)
Air Purifier and mask is very hot selling in China.
I believe lead to lack of light>plants can't grow well >crop failure>the government popularize GMO food.
The power of water cycle in earth is light ...there's less light ....well....

There's a urban legend about colliery in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region is with Uranium.But they think it's a trouble to refine them.So they just burn it directly .
Which means those pm 2.5 is radioactive.
Personally I believe this urban legend.

a reply to: Wrabbit2000

Very true. We should have retrofitted those factories here instead of sending the jobs to China though. The more people working here, the more secure our economy is. Now we have a consumer based society and you have to work in that instead of creating stuff. The GNP is based on dollars, so it artificially shows that imports are just a small part of it since these imports cost so little. Now our GNP would be higher than every country if we were to make our own. We need jobs for people who aren't that intelligent, not everyone can run some of the industrial technology we have.

That was a little off topic. We could have made the factories a little more efficient here and still have been competitive in our society if we had not signed a free trade agreement with China and some other countries. We did not attach any Ecological stipulations when we signed these agreements. China has been starting to clean up their act recently, the cost of lost labor from illness is increasing there. They can create this pollution technology for a fifth of what we can here in this country because of their structure. Here, the consumer based society raises our prices too high and the technical labor costs are too high.

There I go again, getting off topic. That is what happens when I get tired from making wood....There I go again

a reply to: candlestick

I hate to say it there my friend, but this is likely more than urban legend from a quick moments searching.

CNNC Inner Mongolia Mining Industry LLC based in Baotou is responsible for overseeing natural uranium geological prospecting, scientific research and project management in the middle and western parts of Inner Mongolia. Its Mining Business Division is focused mainly evaluating the Nalinggou and Bayanwula projects by the end of 2015. The Division is also setting up regional headquarters in Inner Mongolia, Jiangxi, Guangdong and Xinjiang.

Some northern uranium mineralization is interbedded with coal deposits, giving rise to concerns about mining efficiently, and about the amount of radioactivity in coal as burned in some northern power stations. The uranium deposit in the Daying area of Inner Mongolia is possibly in this category.

In March 2013 CNNC signed an agreement with China Petroleum & Chemical Corp. (SINOPEC) to set up the joint venture of CNNC and SINOPEC Uranium Resources Co. Ltd to accelerate the exploration for uranium resources, starting with the Chaideng area of Inner Mongolia. The Chaideng prospecting region of Dongsheng Coal Field is in the northeast of the Ordos Basin.

Source

I bet you could write a book in the gap between the 2nd and 3rd paragraph within that quote. At least a book.

a reply to: Wrabbit2000



Use ^this to replace give you a star.
It should be say it's a"urban legend" in China,people in China usually believe this is a urban legend...(And want to believe it just a "urban legend")
And most of them they love to "debunk" this "urban legend".

Elites established a system the fight with "urban legend" long long time ago.It's very active is here also.

What's the content of the book?