December 8, 2013

How polluted does it have to be before "choking smog" makes the headlines in China?

The photo illustrating the article has the caption: "Heavy smog seeps into Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport." It's a photo of the inside of the airport! And good luck getting out of there. Flights get cancelled, and everyone's stranded.

26 comments:

Bob Boyd said...

Its coming from all those vagi-stools they have over there.

Titus said...

Why do some Chinese wear masks over their mouths?

There is always a tour of them in Harvard Square and at least one has a mask over their mouth.

George M. Spencer said...

"The Mist"

Stephen King....

....shudder...

Oso Negro said...

Thank goodness they keep loaning us money to buy their stuff. That way we don't have to consider the fact that they have such a large percentage of the world's manufacturing jobs and run such dirty industry that they would make a 19th Century robber baron blush. But, hey, progress.

PB said...

The bodies have to start piling up.

Chef Mojo said...

I don't want to hear another goddamn word about America's "carbon footprint."

Rusty said...

The triumph of communism!

Anonymous said...

Blogger PB Reader said...

The bodies have to start piling up.

12/8/13, 11:19 AM
__________________________________

It's China so it will have to be one hell of a pile.

Lyle said...

I spent about three months in China one summer and I experience a lot of smog. When visiting Xian, which is in a mountain valley, I could never see the mountains entire I was there. The only time I saw them or part of them, was when we were driven right up to them. We could only see several hundred feet in around us.

You could taste the soot in your mouth in Beijing.

And the smog, on a couple of days, but not all, in Xiamen looked like a big white puffy cloud, almost like fog, but it was smog.

There was even a horrid day in Hong Kong where the smog was heavy and yellow, and enveloped the entire place.

Diogenes of Sinope said...

How long will the Communists rule China?

Michael said...

In Beijing in the early 1980s the people heated with coal. Although there were very few cars then the air was a Dickens' London.

lemondog said...

When reading these pollution stories, I wonder why any athlete would have gone to the Beijing Olympics, or for that matter why any tourist would visit China, without bringing their own food, water and gas masks.... or maybe they did and do.

YoungHegelian said...

Do you ever wonder just how stupid and/or corrupt a country has to be to do this to itself?

The 1st world countries have an excuse: they had the learning curve & had to develop the pollution remediation technology from scratch. But the Chinese?

Think about this when some asshat like Tom Friedman talks about the "Chinese economic miracle" & wonder "This is just a visible major fuck-up. What are all the fuck-ups I can't see?".

sean said...

This is the country that Thomas Friedman, and most bien-pensant members of the chattering classes, think we should emulate.

Drago said...

You have to understand that in China they have "Peoples Smog" which is very very different from and quite superior to capitalist smog.

Probably even beneficial!

Unless of course it's funded by Kochs/Romney/Bush/Halliburton etc., then it's immoral and the greatest crime against humanity since the last time Robert Cook wrote something.

Drago said...

Blogger sean said...
This is the country that Thomas Friedman, and most bien-pensant members of the chattering classes, think we should emulate.

Well, yes.

Once again, to the left results are irrelevant.

The only metric that matters is the degree of control the progressives/leftists/communists possess.

Nothing else matters.

Nothing.

n.n said...

Misaligned development. With the first effort to practice intelligent design, around 50 million people lost their lives. With the second wave, around 300 million human lives were aborted. The final wave of consequences will be progressive and realized over generations. Unfortunately, the concentration and quality of development do not favor a moderate correction.

Ambrose said...

As Thomas Friedman would say - if only they could be China for a day, they could pass some rules to solve this problem.

FullMoon said...



The smog came after a week of blue sky days. If the manufacturing pollution is so bad,why is it not smoggy all of the time?

What percentage of days have choking smog?

Construction dust and dust storms contribute to the smog.



Will Cate said...

So *this* is the country that's going to take over the world?

Anonymous said...

For all the progress they've made, China is still a poor country. They'll have clean air once they can afford it.

MadisonMan said...

Construction dust and dust storms contribute to the smog.

Smog is a portmanteau of smoke and fog. Note the absence of dust.

Smog develops when meteorological conditions inhibit horizontal and vertical mixing.

FullMoon said...

From the link:........

Primary sources of pollutants include exhaust emission from Beijing's more than five million motor vehicles, coal burning in neighbouring regions, dust storms from the north and local construction dust.

Anonymous said...

I bought some N95 filter masks from Amazon.com and have been using them daily. The air where I am, in south east China is so bad that buildings in the city are now lost in a haze from a near distance.

Meanwhile, as I ride the buses, the locals avoid sitting next to me out of fear that I have a communicable, even as they see nothing wrong in their fellows coughing, sneezing, and spitting on the buses, unmasked. Recently, someone told me that the locals are accustomed to this. It doesn't bother them. They don't like the face masks (kouzao) so they prefer to inhale the pollution.

So, it will have to be extremely polluted so that they can't see before the locals will wise up.

Me, I like to live.

Anonymous said...

Titus, the why is they are afraid of foreigner germs. That's been my experience on the bus.

gerry said...

Thank goodness they keep loaning us money to buy their stuff.

And they subsidize prices, too, to beat out Japan. Here's a little dual-band amateur radio handi-talkie for $29.95. Amazing. And remember...Althouse is an AMazon portal!