First of all, I give my self one giant F– on keeping up with this whole blogging thing. I guess I lost my false sense of self-importance for a bit.
What brings me back today is the ongoing issue of air quality in Beijing. I frequent CBC.ca a fair amount (meaning many, many times a day), and being a bit of an Olympics junkie, I’ve been keeping up with the news leading up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. I came across this article about “blue sky days” in Beijing.
You may or may not know/care that CBC has added a feature somewhat recently that allows comments on all news articles. I would say that more often than not, the culprits of article comments are those with an inflated self-importance who don’t understand the issue but feel their point-of-view is both warranted and valuable (says the guy writing a public blog entry, but I digress). However, there are often very valid points. This article is no different. I particularly agree with the comments that a lot of the industrial activity that leads to increased air pollution in China is in not small part due to the thirst for cheap consumer goods in the west.
My “favourite” articles, however, tend to be written by people with screen names that are some version of the phrase “Reality Check.” The comment in question for this article brings up Toronto pollution to bring up the hypocrisy of questioning Beijing air quality. Myself, being the atmospheric chemist that I am, and loving to play devil’s advocate, disagreed.
My personal thoughts – and in the off chance that someone (a) reads this; and (b) knows more about the subject, please feel free to correct this – is that air pollution is still wholly misunderstood by the general public. It’s not so simple to assign haze as being due to fog or smog, as there isn’t a sharp dividing line between them. For instance, on humid days, the same amount of particulate matter (or the bits of crap in the air that cause poor visibility and one of the culprits of air pollution leading to adverse health effects) will cause poorer visibility than on dry days since particles will tend to take up water and swell in size, causing more light scattering. Ozone, another pollutant that leads to health problems, is a gas and therefore does not cause any aesthetic changes on a polluted day. Particles don’t even need to be directly emitted; they can be formed by oxidation of gaseous pollutants that subsequently condense into solid or liquid particles. To add to confusion, certain pollutants such as ozone can actually be increased under certain circumstances by a decrease in other pollutants, namely nitrogen oxides.
As well, air – and this may come as a shocker – moves. Pollution can be blown away from or blown into an area. Thus, local pollution controls can have a large or negligible effect depending on weather patterns. Getting back to my good friend, RealityCheck2008, the variances in Toronto’s pollution likely have less to do with whether or not our pollution is blown away, as RC ‘08 suggests, but where our air is coming from at a given time. I wouldn’t call Toronto the windiest city in the world, but more often than not there is a wind blowing here rather than air stagnating. The levels of pollution have a lot to do with whether the wind is blowing from the north, from over Lake Huron, cottage country, or some smaller cities like Barrie; or from the south, which is from the United States, and in particular the Ohio Valley and all the coal-fired power plants and such. Keep an eye on the wind direction during the summer – you’d be surprised at how often this holds.
Lastly, while Toronto really hasn’t earned any bragging rights in terms of air quality, our air pollution levels are not even in the same league as in more polluted cities, so there isn’t really any point in trying to compare. Even our most disgusting cities are pretty clean compared to the worst of the world.
I guess my point is this: air pollution issues aren’t as simple as taking cars of the road, or differentiating between smog and water droplets, or cutting back in consumption in the western world, or sitting back and accepting it. Like everything, there are a number of different factors to air pollution and it is counterproductive to try to figure out a single root cause. In the end, only massive lifestyle change on the planet is going to solve the issue for once and for all… but that’s another story, I guess.
