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Smog Alert: Dirty Air Kills 30,000 Americans Each Year, New Study Claims
Smog Alert: Dirty Air Kills 30,000 Americans Each Year, New Study Claims
New findings from the Imperial College London estimate that air pollution causes heart attacks, strokes, and lung disease that kill over 30,000 Americans each year, which is about the same number of deaths from car accidents each year.
The study, published last week in the journal PLOS Medicine, found a connection between cardio-respiratory and excess particulate matter pollution, known as PM2.5, is about 30 times smaller than the width of a human hair — comes from automotive, power generation, and industrial engines.
Millions of Americans are inhaling PM2.5 daily, which build up in small blood vessels in the lungs, and over an extended period, can cause lung disease. These dangerous particles also are absorbed into the bloodstream that can increase the risk of heart disease, the researchers suggested.
Researchers noted that PM2.5 levels have dropped in the last two decades, but in some areas around the country – the levels remain seriously high.
Los Angeles remained one of the worst cities for PM2.5 along with several regions in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Alabama.
Inner cities deemed low-income areas across the US also had dangerous levels of PM2.5.
Researchers said this “inequality in mortality burden” occurred because of the low-income population was already prone to higher rates of preexisting medical conditions.
“I think the big conclusion is that lowering the limits of air pollution could delay in the US, all together, tens of thousands of deaths each year,” Majid Ezzati, the study’s lead author and a professor of global environmental health told CNN.
Air quality data between 1999 and 2015 at over 750 monitoring stations across the US were cross-referenced with death records for cardiovascular-related diseases to determine the dangers of PM2.5, the researchers noted.
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Half A Million Square Kilometers Of Heavy Smog Force Beijing To Issue “Orange Alert”, Close Factories
Half A Million Square Kilometers Of Heavy Smog Force Beijing To Issue “Orange Alert”, Close Factories
Xinhua reports that the municipal weather center said humidity and a lack of wind would mean the smog will linger for another two days, before a cold front arrives on Wednesday.
On Sunday, the reading for PM2.5, airborne particles smaller than 2.5 microns in diameter, hit 274 micrograms per cubic meter in most parts of the capital. Indicatively, the World Health Organization (WHO) considers only 25 micrograms to be a safe level.
Beijing has recommended that residents minimize outdoor activities and urged people with respiratory diseases as well as the elderly to stay at home.
It wasn’t just Beijing: moments ago Shanghai joined China’s capital in issuing an orange fog alert. The local government asked for heightened management of airports, highways and ferry terminals as heavy fog covered western and southern parts of the city, according to a website run by the Shanghai Meteorological Service said. Visibility is limiting visibility to 200 meters in Minhang, Songjiang, Qingpu, Baoshan, Jiading and Chongming areas, the website said. Orange is the 2nd-highest of 4-alert levels
In March, four types of pollution alerts – blue, yellow, orange and red – were introduced by Beijing’s Environmental Protection Bureau. All factories are to be shut down during orange alerts. Heavy vehicles, such as construction trucks, are also completely banned during orange and red alerts. Furthermore, construction sites should stop the transportation of materials and waste while heavy-duty trucks are banned from the roads.
In other words, the local economy shuts down.
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More warming will bring a more polluted future
More warming will bring a more polluted future
Global warming wil increase airborne aerosols and cause more atmospheric pollution, scientists say.
LONDON, 15 November, 2015 – The future is slightly obscured. The outlook is less than clear. For once, such phrases are not metaphorical.
A world of global warming could mean a growing haze of solid and liquid aerosols – tiny specks of salt, fine dust, sulphates, black carbon and other particles in the atmosphere, according to new research.
Robert Allen, an earth scientist at the University of California, Riverside and colleagues report in Nature Climate Change that as the planet warms because of greater concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, driven by ever greater human burning of fossil fuels, so too the air could become more murky.
Aerosols happen naturally and because of human activity. They are exquisitely small blobs of liquid or solid afloat in the atmosphere, the product of dust storms, plant pollen, wildfires, kitchen fires, smoke from factory chimneys and vehicle exhausts, volatile discharges from forests and so on. They may make humans cough or choke, and they exact a long-term toll on human health, but they also affect the climate.
Increase inevitable
These aerosols both scatter sunlight and absorb it, and climate scientists who try to model the future must also calculate the impact of aerosols on global warming: will these reflect or screen out solar radiation to slow down the process, or accelerate it?
Dr Allen and his colleagues turned the question around: what will increasing average levels of planetary temperature do for aerosols? The latest and most up-to-date climate computer simulations delivered the answer. Warmer means more haze.
“Our work on the models shows that nearly all aerosol species will increase under greenhouse gas-induced climate change,” Dr Allen said. “This includes natural aerosols like dust and sea salt, and also anthropogenic aerosols like sulphate, black carbon and primary organic matter.
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This Is The Chinese Documentary That Got Over 30 Million Views In One Day
This Is The Chinese Documentary That Got Over 30 Million Views In One Day
While the citizenry of America remains transfixed by the ever-changing color of some Scottish wedding dress; this weekend saw an even more massively viral social media phenomenon as tens of millions of Chinese watched, gripped and outraged, a 104-minute video entitled “Under The Dome” exposing the ugly truth about Chinese air pollution. What is perhaps most stunning – aside from the fact that something so ‘important’ can go viral without Kim Kardashian’s ass all over it – is that the Chinese government, so far, has not shut off the documentary, and recently appointed minister of environmental protection, Chen Jining, even praised the video; suggesting a growing conflict between Beijing and the Chinese industrial complex.
As The NY Times reports, the documentary, funded and narrated by a former Chinese TV reporter, recounts her journey of discovery, hunting for the sources of China’s bad air and inquiring why repeated government promises have done so little to clear it up, while coping with a daughter born with a tumor…
[In 2013], she did not pay much attention to the smog engulfing much of China and affecting 600 million people, even as she traveled for work from place to place where the air was acrid with fumes and dust.“But,” Ms. Chai says with a pause, “when I returned to Beijing, I learned that I was pregnant.”
Since its online debut on Saturday, Ms. Chai’s documentary, “Under the Dome,” has inspired an unusually passionate eruption of public and mass media discussion. Many messages were from Chinese parents identifying with Ms. Chai’s fears that pollution has imperiled their children’s health.
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