One people, one planet, one pollution
Posted: January 25, 2013 Filed under: Environment, just because | Tags: air pollution, Airpocalypse, California, China 13 CommentsI was hiking yesterday (23rd) and looked out to sea. This is what I saw.
An orange-brown band of dust? smog? all of the above? stretching over the whole horizon. There’s a larger composite picture here that shows more of the extent. (In the foreground, you can make out the Navy Seabees target practice range. That’s Anacapa Island shrouded in the distance.)
I’ve lived here for years and never seen anything like it. Ordinary Los Angeles pollution looks like this:
It’s more purple-colored, much fainter, and bigger toward LA, petering out toward the ocean. (The picture is from an old post where I was puzzling about wind direction.)
When I mentioned it at home, I found out that Beijing had an Airpocalypse around January 12th and the next few days, an immense pollution event that drowned the city in choking dusty smog.
View of Beijing smog. From aworldchaos.wordpress.com.
NASA regularly tracks Chinese pollution across the Pacific, but it wasn’t usually still as thick as soup by the time it got here.
Well, it is now. I’m fairly sure that’s what I was seeing. Dirt pushed across the whole Pacific ahead of a huge storm system that also brought us rain later on. One to two weeks is how long it takes to get here from China.
This is not good.
Crossposted from Acid Test
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Holy Hannah! Not good is an understatement.
The “world chaos” site seems to be a right wing Xtian place.
Bah. I found the picture using Goog images, and I like to give credit. Unfortunately, that site doesn’t, so even though I’m rather sure it’s not their photo, I cited them. If anyone knows whose pic that is, I’ll be more than glad to fix it!
From The Reg. link:
Holy Smokes (sorry couldn’t help it ) I never heard of The Great Smog before. It’s unbelievable how deep in denial Republicans are, isn’t it? How many events for how long before they admit it’s a problem? At some point you have to conclude they know but don’t care.
I remember when Atlanta used to be a nice place to live (been here since 1967). Over the past 13 years or so I’ve worked in a high-rise and can look out and see the smog layer just get worse and worse. We even have summer weather patterns produced by the car emissions – sunny all week and rain on weekends. That was before the never-ending drought, of course.
Thankfully I work at home now, although the air is the same or worse even out here in Hooterville.
We used to drive to visit my grandparents in Laguna Hills in the 1970s before Nixon’s EPA. We’d come over the mountains and you could never see LA. It was always covered up by these nasty orangey brown clouds. It also smelled very bad there.
I remember L.A. in the late 60’s. The smog was terrible. There were days when we couldn’t go out and play. My brother had asthma and it was especially hard on him.
I, too, remember landing at LAX in 1970 through stratified layers of smog – it was horrible. The Hollywood Hills disappeared every day.
It is bad. Thank you for this post. We need to be talking about this. Right now Salt Lake City has the most polluted air in the country. I saw this story on CBS.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505269_162-57565791/salt-lake-city-being-smothered-by-smog-what-it-could-mean-for-city/
I wonder if the smog from Beijing also contributed to this in addition to the causes cited in the article.
My understanding is that there is an inversion occurring in that there is warm air aloft and cold air underneath. The warm air is hold the cold air in place along with the pollution from the city. The suggestion was mad to make public transportation free in order to encourage people to stop driving and possibly shutting down some factories in the city.
I also feel really sorry for the kids today. My neighbor’s daughter has asthma and of course that is rampant and getting worse all the time.
I didn’t realize pollution was so bad even back in the 50’s. I grew up on the ocean and we had clean air. These kids today don’t know what that is.
dakinikat: “LA… was always covered up by this nasty orangey brown clouds.”
Every time I go over a pass to Los Angeles, I think “Imagine if they used all electric vehicles and trams. The air would be clear as a bell and you’d see all the mountains right up to the (sometimes) snow on the peaks and the ocean glinting in the distance.”
It looks like that sometimes at 5:30 AM after a rain. That’s what gets me. This is one case where the crap we do would go away in a day if we started doing things right.
Instead, now you look down onto a purplish gray soup through which you can make out some of the bigger buildings. It doesn’t stink, but it doesn’t smell like real air either. That’s the secret: just enough pollution control so that our sensible animal Eewwww reflexes aren’t triggered.