Tag Archives: energy

There’s no “warming pause” — trade winds are burying heat in the Pacific

by Natalia3007 Posted on February 11, 2014

There’s no “warming pause” — trade winds are burying heat in the Pacific

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Global average land temperatures have not increased as quickly as many scientists had expected over the past 10 or 15 years, leading some climate skeptics to latch onto the bogus idea of a “global warming pause.” Last year researchers reported that much of the “missing heat” was not in fact missing but rather was being sucked up by the oceans.

Now new research helps explain why excess heat is being absorbed into the sea: big-ass winds.

A paper published in the journal Nature Climate Change suggests that the slowdown in surface warming and the acceleration in ocean warming has been largely driven by a phase in a natural ocean cycle called the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO). That’s a frightfully cumbersome name, but it’s easy to break down: It’s a swing (“oscillation”) in Pacific Ocean weather that takes decades (“interdecadal”) to shift from one phase to another. Instead of switching every few years, like El Niño and La Niña, an IPO can last 20 to 30 years before flipping from one extreme to the other.

“Global warming hasn’t stalled at all,” Matthew England, a professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia and lead author of the paper, told Grist. “There’s just more heat going into the oceans at the moment.”

Since the turn of the century, the IPO has been in a negative phase, which is marked by strong trade winds in the Pacific. Researchers used models to simulate the effects of these winds on ocean currents and discovered that the strong winds increase the amount of warm water that sinks below the surface, while increasing the amount of cold water that burbles up from ocean depths near the equator.

And that has helped bury extra heat at sea — for now.

From the paper:

Here we show that a pronounced strengthening in Pacific trade winds over the past two decades … is sufficient to account for the cooling of the tropical Pacific and a substantial slowdown in surface warming through increased subsurface ocean heat uptake. …

The net effect of these anomalous winds is a cooling in the 2012 global average surface air temperature of 0.1–0.2◦C, which can account for much of the hiatus in surface warming observed since 2001. This hiatus could persist for much of the present decade if the trade wind trends continue, however rapid warming is expected to resume once the anomalous wind trends abate.

This isn’t the first time in recent history that the oceans have absorbed more than their normal share of extra heat. The paper describes a similar surface-warming hiatus that occurred from the 1940s to the 1970s — the last time the IPO was in this pronounced negative phase.

When the cycle inevitably reverses, the scientists warn that some of the extra heat that’s currently swimming with the fishes will rise up out of the ocean and come back to haunt us landlubbers.

“The IPO oscillates roughly every 20 to 25 years, but the timing is quite unpredictable. What we do know is that when we switch back to a positive IPO phase, the trade winds will be much weaker,” England said. “Longer term, regardless of when the winds relax, this temporary slowdown in surface warming will be overwhelmed by greenhouse gas increases.”


Source
Recent intensification of wind-driven circulation in the Pacific and the ongoing warming hiatus, Nature Climate Change

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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There’s no “warming pause” — trade winds are burying heat in the Pacific

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When the Landscape Is Quiet Again: North Dakota’s Oil Boom

by AbbieBenes Posted on February 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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North Dakota native Sarah Christianson has made a career out of photographing her home as only a local can—with a keen eye to subtleties and nuances in the landscape that make a place like the plains so beautiful. Christianson’s past work focused very close to home. In her first book, By Friday Morning, Christianson said goodbye to her grandfather by documenting the mile-long drive between her grandparents’ farm and the cemetery where he was buried. Last year’s highly praised Homeplace (Daylight, 2013) documents the 1,200-acre farm on which she was raised. Her parents are the fourth and last consecutive generation to farm the land. The plaintive black and white photos frankly, but lovingly, convey the no-nonsense plains farmers’ lifestyle. It’s a world away from the splashy wild west atmosphere of the boom towns that’ve sprung up around drilling sites.

Still focusing on her home state, Christianson’s newest body of work examines the current oil and gas boom in North Dakota, along with the remnants of booms past. In addition to stepping away from photographing more personal spaces, When the Landscape Is Quiet Again is the first project Christianson has shot in color.

And while the color palette and subjects have broadened, Christianson’s photos still have a strong, careful, quiet presence to them. A lot of the beauty in a place like the Plains is exceptionally subtle. These photos capture that stillness that just washes over you and juxtaposes it with the scarring interruption of drilling operations.

New well pad carved out of bluffs near the Badlands.

Natural gas flare from oil well adjacent to cattle pasture, White Earth River Valley.

Drilling rig near Little Missouri National Grasslands, near Charbonneau.

Vertical well abandoned in 1983, south of Williston.

Pipeline constructed on land seized by eminent domain, White Earth River Valley.

Saltwater pipeline spill, near Antler.

When the Landscape Is Quiet Again will be shown for the first time at SF Camerawork in downtown San Francisco, from February 12 to April 19, 2014, with an opening reception on February 13.

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When the Landscape Is Quiet Again: North Dakota’s Oil Boom

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Will Obama do the right thing on ozone and smog this time around?

by AudreaEQQE Posted on February 6, 2014

Will Obama do the right thing on ozone and smog this time around?

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Barack Obama has been just as bad as George W. Bush when it comes to curbing ground-level ozone pollution. But soon he’ll have another chance to get ozone regulations right.

Ozone rocks when it’s up in the stratosphere, protecting us from UV rays and skin cancer. But when it’s at ground level, where it’s the main component of smog, it can cause respiratory infections, asthma, and other ailments. Ground-level ozone pollution is produced when sunlight triggers reactions involving the chemicals that are spewed out of factories and tailpipes. Naturally, oil companies and other polluting industries don’t want to be required to rein in this pollution.

In 2008, the last year of the Bush administration, the EPA finalized new rules on ground-level ozone, allowing 75 parts per billion in the air. Clean air advocates and enviros had called for a lower limit of 60 ppb, saying it was needed to protect public health. In 2011, the EPA was poised to tighten the standard, but the Obama White House cravenly quashed the effort, fearing backlash from industry the year before a presidential election. At the time, John Walke of the Natural Resources Defense Council called this “the most outrageous environmental offense of the Obama administration.”

Under the requirements of the Clean Air Act, the EPA was supposed to revise its ozone rules in 2013, but it missed the deadline. Now it’s being sued by environmental and health groups for its tardiness.

As EPA slowly moves toward crafting new ozone rules, its experts are taking another look at the science. And — surprise, surprise — those experts have found that the current Bush-era rules could be exposing Americans to dangerously high levels of ozone pollution.

From E&E Publishing:

In a draft document released [Monday], U.S. EPA staff say that based on available scientific evidence, the agency should consider tightening its current ozone standard to a level as low as 60 parts per billion. …

In a separate health and risk exposure assessment, agency staff says that setting a standard in the 60-70 ppb range would result in reduced child exposure, lower hospitalization and mortality rates, and reduced risk of lower lung function.

The documents are meant to inform agency scientists and policymakers ahead of a meeting of the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee at the end of March. Following that meeting, the agency is expected to release a proposal, although the administration has not specified a timeline.

As Bloomberg BNA reports reports, “A stricter ozone standard would lead to new requirements for emissions controls on sources that emit nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds, which contribute to ozone formation, including industrial facilities, power plants and vehicles.”

Now that he doesn’t have to worry about reelection, will Obama endorse stronger ozone rules? We’ll be watching.


Source
EPA Draft Policy Document Says Science Justifies Stricter Ozone Air Quality Standard, Bloomberg BNA
EPA draft eyes tightening ozone standard to 60 ppb, E&E Publishing

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Will Obama do the right thing on ozone and smog this time around?

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How the Feds Are Ripping You Off To Benefit Big Coal

by BenitoStingley Posted on February 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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Federal coffers are missing out on what could be billions of dollars in lost revenue due to shoddy accounting work by the office that handles leases for coal mines on public land, according to a report made public today by the investigative arm of Congress.

The Government Accountability Office was asked by Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.), a stalwart climate hawk, to look into whether the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management routinely sells leases to coal mining companies for far less than their market value. Investigators found that BLM agents in Wyoming (by far the country’s largest coal producer) set prices based on coal’s historic value, but, in contradiction of the department’s own rules, fail to take into account how much it will likely be worth in the future. Similar problems were found in other coal-producing states. As a result, the GAO report claims, many leases were sold far beneath their true market value, depriving taxpayers of additional royalties (which, as it stands, come to about $1 billion per year) that are normally skimmed from the mines’ profits.

“As a net result, the public is getting screwed,” said Tom Kenworthy, an energy analyst at the Center for American Progress who has kept tabs on Interior’s longstanding problems with coal lease valuation.

That the leases are selling for less than they’re worth seems clear; what’s less obvious is exactly how much money is at stake, since the values were never properly set in the first place (the GAO report doesn’t specify a number). A 2012 analysis of federal lease records by former New York State Deputy Comptroller Tom Sanzillo for the independent Institute for Energy Economics found that undervalued coal leases cost the Treasury $28.9 billion in lost revenue since 1983, or almost $1 billion every year. Meanwhile, analysis by Senator Markey’s office put the figure at $200 million, although a spokesperson would not specify the time period to which that applied, as the underlying data are considered proprietary to the Interior Department, he said.

Since 1990, the federal government has leased 107 parcels of public land for coal mining; these parcels typically account for 25-40 percent of the roughly one billion tons of coal produced annually nationwide. That adds up to a massive carbon footprint: Fossil fuels produced on public land create roughly a billion metric tons of greenhouse gas pollution every year, about as much as 285 coal plants.

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How the Feds Are Ripping You Off To Benefit Big Coal

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Tunisia’s new constitution calls for climate protection

by LadonnaClune Posted on February 4, 2014

Tunisia’s new constitution calls for climate protection

By

Katherine Herriman

Tunisia, the country that kicked off the Arab Spring in 2010, has now finalized a new constitution. It ensures gender equality and rejects Sharia law. And it does another awesome thing that only two nations before it have done: It commits the country to contribute to the protection of the climate for future generations. Responding to Climate Change explains:

Before today only Ecuador and Dominican Republic had included climate change in their constitutions.

Speaking to RTCC from Tunis, [Member of Parliament] Dhamir Mannai, who proposed the inclusion of a climate amendment, said legislators were concerned about the potential impacts a warming world could have on Tunisia.

“This opens the door for legislation for both the environment and climate protection,” he said.

“As MPs we wanted to tackle the issue head on, and then tackle it through climate legislation, and hopefully put us in a position where we can demand that other countries do the same.”

This isn’t just a case of saying nice words about an environmental crisis. The constitution obliges the government to act against global warming – and experts say that obligation could spill over into international arenas. Here’s the Toronto Star with more on that:

“What Tunisia has done is something relatively new in terms of world constitutions … it is a big step,” said David Estrin, a senior environmental lawyer with Gowlings, a large Canadian law firm.

Tunisia, he said, has not only given its citizens the right to ask their government to deal with climate change — it has also “elevated the concept (of climate change) to one of an international law.”

Basically, it could open doors for one country to sue another on climate change, he said, and “eventually allow bodies like the International Court of Justice to act on complaints that one country is causing harm to another by not abating its emissions.”

This is an important step, said Estrin, who has practised environmental law since 1971. “Right now we are almost in a lawless rule when it comes to (climate change).”

Oh, and one more cool thing: Tunisia’s constitution also says the “state shall provide the necessary means to eliminate environmental pollution.”

Well played, post-revolutionary state. Well played.


Source
Tunisia embeds climate change in constitution, Responding to Climate Change
Tunisia embeds protection of climate in new constitution, Toronto Star

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Tunisia’s new constitution calls for climate protection

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Coal plant accident spews coal ash into North Carolina river

by TammaraMog Posted on February 4, 2014

Coal plant accident spews coal ash into North Carolina river

By

Duke Energy

The Dan River Steam Station during less spilly times.

Retiring a coal power plant in North Carolina wasn’t enough to prevent it from fucking up the environment.

Tens of thousands of tons of coal ash and tens of millions of gallons of polluted water have burst out of Duke Energy’s shuttered Dan River Steam Station, severely soiling the Dan River — a waterway popular with hikers, campers, fishing folks, and recreational boaters. The pollution can be seen miles downstream.

The power plant operated from 1949 until 2012, and the coal ash being stored on site was residue left behind after coal was burned. Coal ash contains poisonous heavy metals including arsenic, mercury, and lead. A state agency and environmentalists have been suing Duke in an effort to force it to clear out 14 such coal-ash dump sites across the state, including the one that just ruptured.

But Duke insisted that its dump sites were safe. Just last month, Duke spokeswoman Erin Culbert told the Asheville Citizen-Times that the utility was monitoring groundwater around its coal-ash storage sites to ensure that its neighbors are protected. She rejected environmentalists’ calls for the coal-ash ponds to be cleaned up. “[S]pecial interest groups rely on emotion, not facts, to advance their mission to phase out coal,” Culbert told the newspaper.

It gets worse.

“We are confident,” Duke’s general manager at the power plant told the EPA in a 2009 letter, “that each of our ash basin dams has the structural integrity necessary to protect the public and the environment.”

We sure hope it felt nice to be so confident about that.

Specifics on the spill are still hard to come by, but it appears that a 48-inch stormwater pipe burst at the power plant, releasing enough ash from a 27-acre storage pond to fill 20 or 30 Olympic-sized swimming pools. According to company estimates, 50,000 to 82,000 tons of ash flowed into the river, along with 24 million to 27 million gallons of tainted water.

The pipe gave way on Sunday, and the company is being criticized for waiting until Monday to tell anybody about the disaster.

Cue inevitable statements from environmentalists about Duke’s utter irresponsibility in allowing this disaster to happen. From the Charlotte Business Journal: 

“This is the latest, loudest alarm bell yet that Duke should not be storing coal ash in antiquated pits near our state’s waterways,” says Frank Holleman, an attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center.

He noted that two South Carolina utilities have taken steps to remove coal ash from earthen ponds and called Duke “grossly negligent” for not doing the same.

It’s not like this is the first time such a disaster has happened. After more than a million gallons of coal-ash slurry escaped from a Tennessee Valley Authority power plant in late 2008, the EPA vowed to craft new regulations to help prevent such disasters from happening again. We’re still waiting for those promised regulations.


Source
Coal ash spills into Dan River from closed Duke Energy plant, Charlotte Business Journal
Broken pipe spills coal ash in Dan River near Eden Read more here, The Associated Press
Groups seek to join Duke coal ash lawsuits, Asheville Citizen Times
Update on Dan River Steam Station ash basin release, Duke Energy

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Coal plant accident spews coal ash into North Carolina river

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Which is more likely to drive people from their homes — floods or heat waves?

by Emily Collins Posted on February 3, 2014

Which is more likely to drive people from their homes — floods or heat waves?

By

Anduze traveller

It’s mighty dry out there …

Floods get a lot of attention in our warming world. They can kill people and livestock, inundate crops, destroy infrastructure and homes — and they make great photo ops. Less attention — and less international aid — is directed to victims of intense heat waves that are also linked to climate change.

But it is these heat waves that are most responsible when Pakistanis leave their villages, new research suggests.

Pakistan is a depressing climate case study because its residents are so vulnerable to global warming. The country is poor, it floods easily, and it can be hotter than hell (if your idea of hell is, say, Afghanistan, just to Pakistan’s north).

Researchers analyzed weather records and 21 years worth of survey data of 522 households in rural Pakistan in an attempt to figure out which extreme weather phenomena might be driving villagers from their homes. Migration rates were rather low — about 1 or 2 percent of residents left their villages during the 21 years. But when they did leave, the reason for the migration was often linked to a heat wave. Heat waves are worsening in the region as the climate changes.

Women and men were found to respond to heat waves by leaving their villages, but men were more likely to move vast distances. From the scientists’ new paper, published last week in the journal Nature Climate Change:

Pakistan is highly vulnerable to climate change and involuntary displacement. …

Agricultural income suffers tremendously when temperatures are extremely hot — wiping out over a third of farming income. Non-farm income also experiences losses from heat stress, but to a lesser extent (16%). …

We find that flooding — a climate shock associated with large relief efforts — has modest to insignificant impacts on migration. Heat stress, however — which has attracted relatively little relief — consistently increases the long-term migration of men, driven by a negative effect on farm and non-farm income.

Floods play better than heat waves on television, but this research, combined with growing scientific alarm over skyrocketing numbers of deaths around the world linked to heat stress, highlights why we also need to be paying attention to some of the less photogenic symptoms of a warming globe.


Source
Heat stress increases long-term human migration in rural Pakistan, Nature Climate Change

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Which is more likely to drive people from their homes — floods or heat waves?

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It hasn’t rained this much in England since 1767, or maybe since ever

by Christopherd3o Posted on February 3, 2014

It hasn’t rained this much in England since 1767, or maybe since ever

By

Rob

There aren’t many things bleaker than a soggy English winter, and this winter has really provided something for the Brits to whinge about.

Nearly six inches of rain fell on southern and central England in January, triggering floods and producing the heaviest monthly drenching since record-keeping began at an Oxford University weather station in 1767. And the mid-winter deluges have continued into these first few days of February. 

Hitherto-unprecedented flooding such as this has been forecast to afflict the region as the climate changes.

The head of the country’s Environment Agency warns in an op-ed in The Telegraph that it can’t afford to protect both rural and urban areas from floods:

The south of England has had its wettest January since 1910. Roads have been impassable, train and plane travel disrupted and 250,000 homes have been without power.

Environment Agency staff have been working the whole time to help communities at risk. They’ve been running pumping stations, erecting defences, issuing warnings and clearing blockages from rivers — often in the most challenging conditions. …

Yes, agricultural land matters and we do whatever we can with what we have to make sure it is protected. Rules from successive governments give the highest priority to lives and homes; and I think most people would agree that this is the right approach.

But this involves tricky issues of policy and priority: town or country, front rooms or farmland?

Flood defences cost money; and how much should the taxpayer be prepared to spend on different places, communities and livelihoods — in Somerset, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, or East Anglia? There’s no bottomless purse, and we need to make difficult but sensible choices about where and what we try to protect.

What role is climate change playing here? [Insert boilerplate statement about how hard it is to attribute individual weather events to global warming.] Still, these wet conditions in England are precisely those that have been forecast by climate models.

“The frequency and severity of the flooding seen over the past few months is likely to become more commonplace in the future due to climate change,” a flooding expert told The Guardian. “This means maintaining investment in flood defences in the longer term, but also making buildings and infrastructure more resistant, and being better prepared to actively respond to flooding.”


Source
Difficult choices, as the flood waters rise, The Telegraph
Heavy rain and wild weather forecast for southern England and Wales, The Guardian

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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It hasn’t rained this much in England since 1767, or maybe since ever

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Great Barrier Reef will be smothered with silt, because coal

by GudrunHVOfytumz Posted on January 31, 2014

Great Barrier Reef will be smothered with silt, because coal

By

Shutterstock

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Marine Park — a supposedly protected natural area containing thousands of reefs, which together are visible from space and attract nearly $6 billion a year in tourism — is a pretty terrible place to dump loads of silt. But it’s happening: The federal agency that governs the reef approved plans to dump up to 3 million cubic meters of silt that will be dredged from the marine park to help carve a superhighway for tankers ferrying coal to Asia.

It’s the final piece in Australian Prime Minister (and known climate denier) Tony Abbott’s already-approved master plan to dredge the shipping lane, expand an existing coal terminal, and extensively mine the northeastern state of Queensland for coal.

Reuters reports that backers of the coal export project, including two Indian firms and the heiress to an Australian mining empire, hope to deliver an estimated $28 billion of coal to Asian markets once it’s complete.

Dredging a new shipping lane through the reef to deliver all that coal will generate as much as 3 million cubic meters of silt. That’s an abstract number, but, if you can imagine 150,000 dump trucks all dropping loads of sand into the sea, then you have a sense for the volume.

The silt will be dumped 15 miles out to sea from the expanded port at Abbott Point. “It’s important to note the seafloor of the approved disposal area consists of sand, silt, and clay and does not contain coral reefs or seagrass beds,” the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority’s chair said in a statement Friday.

Scientists and conservationists say that doesn’t matter: Ocean currents are always moving sand around on the sea floor. “The best available science makes it very clear that expansion of the port at Abbot Point will have detrimental effects on the Great Barrier Reef,” 233 of them wrote in a letter to the federal government. “Sediment from dredging can smother corals and seagrasses and expose them to poisons and elevated nutrients.”

It’s worth noting that the U.S. is complicit in Australia’s fossil-fuel export blitz. The U.S. Export-Import Bank, a lending body, is providing about $5 billion in financing to international energy companies to help them build a pipeline from the Queensland mainland to the hitherto pristine Curtis Island, which is inside the marine park, and to construct coal-seam gas processing facilities there. These projects will also involve dredging.

It all sounds like an environmental nightmare, but Australia’s über-conservative government wants you to know that the conditions it’s imposing on all these projects “will result in an improvement in water quality.” Awesome. And if you’re willing to believe that, the prime minister has some even better news for you: Everything you have ever heard about climate change is “absolute crap.” Fantastic!


Source
Strict conditions placed on approval for Abbot Point permit, Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority
Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority approves plan to dump Abbot Point spoil, Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Australia permits dredge dumping near Great Barrier Reef for major coal port, Reuters

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Great Barrier Reef will be smothered with silt, because coal

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Indian bummer: Is Delhi the smoggiest city in Asia?

by paczaizmon Posted on January 30, 2014

Indian bummer: Is Delhi the smoggiest city in Asia?

By

Jean-Etienne Minh-Duy Poirrier

Delhi smog.

I cough a lot.

It’s a pervasive pulmonary curse here in Delhi where I live, courtesy of the city’s soupy winter smog.

The air pollution in India’s capital during the wind-deprived cold season is abominable. The sources are numerous and perpetual: It’s caused by soot spewed out of coal-burning power plants and from vehicles idling on congested roads. It’s caused by fires — large ones used to remove crop residue from surrounding farms, and small ones used for cooking and warmth by city dwellers.

Sometimes data shows that the air in Delhi is worse than it is in Beijing, that presumed global capital of vaporized carbon. Sometimes data shows the opposite. So which of these two polluted Asian megacities has dirtier air overall?

An unusual international brouhaha has just erupted over that very question, fueled by media coverage of Delhi’s pea-soup smog.

In separate articles published this week, two prominent newspapers concluded that Delhi’s pollution is worse than Beijing’s. Both articles have been challenged. A scientist with the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) — a joint project of Yale and Harvard — says a Hindustan Times page one article was based on a misinterpretation of the project’s latest report. And a similar story in the New York Times that had nothing to do with the EPI has been criticized by the Indian government for leaning heavily on limited data.

I’m familiar with the challenges of comparing air pollution levels among cities in developing countries. I wrote a piece for Slate last winter about World Health Organization data showing that Delhi is among 26 cities, most of them in Asia, that consistently endure worse air pollution than Beijing. But the WHO data was cobbled together from a variety of sources, and a lack of air-quality monitoring standards makes precise scientific comparisons impossible.

Indian officials have been scrambling to repudiate the recent news reports, pointing out that their own hopeless air-testing regimes mean that nobody can say with certainty whether their air is worse than Beijing’s. The Wall Street Journal explains (in an article written by my wife — and, yes, this is the kind of thing that we talk about over dinner):

An accurate comparison of air quality in any two cities requires data from consistently calibrated ground stations. Beijing reports data on PM 2.5 concentration on an hourly basis over a publicly accessible platform, according to EPI. There are several air monitoring stations throughout the Indian capital and at least two different government-funded sites that report their results. But one rarely works and the other makes an assessment based on 24-hour-averages.

To be sure, Delhi has a pollution problem. But a scientist here who monitors the capital’s air quality says that recent comparisons to Beijing made in both the Hindustan Times and the New York Times are speculative.

“The air quality in Delhi and in India is very bad,” said G. Beig, a program director at a research department under the Ministry of Earth Sciences. “But certainly it is not as bad as Beijing’s,” he added.

The answer to the question of which city is more polluted is less important than the debate itself. The debate is a reminder that although China is notorious for its air pollution, the problem of filthy skies is one that stretches almost throughout Asia. Few regulations govern the rampant burning of coal and other fuels in developing Asian countries, which are desperately trying to catch up to Western levels of wealth.

Media reports that focus solely on China’s pollution woes have tended to understate the vastness of the world’s air-pollution problem — a problem that scientists blame for millions of deaths every year (most of them in Asia). A lot of Asia’s air pollution ends up blowing over the Western U.S., fueling at least one extra smog day in Los Angeles every year. Soot blown mountainward also traps heat and settles on glaciers, hastening their demise.

But media focus on China’s pollution may have helped spur some of the country’s recent environmental reforms. And if that’s the case, then the growing focus on Delhi’s deadly air pollution is warmly welcomed by this cough-wearied environmental reporter.


Source
Delhi vs. Beijing: How to Read Pollution Statistics, Wall Street Journal
Beijing’s Bad Air Would Be Step Up for Smoggy Delhi, New York Times
Delhi world’s most polluted city: Study, Hindustan Times
Delhi says air ‘not as bad’ as Beijing after smog scrutiny, Agence France-Presse

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Indian bummer: Is Delhi the smoggiest city in Asia?

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