“Air pollution went from bad to worse in Beijing yesterday, a day after residents of the capital and surrounding areas again found themselves inundated in thick smog, leading to broader calls for a solution.” [South China Morning Post]
“Air pollution went from bad to worse in Beijing yesterday, a day after residents of the capital and surrounding areas again found themselves inundated in thick smog, leading to broader calls for a solution.” [South China Morning Post]
When Human Beings broke the social contract with Mother Nature long ago in their pursuit of building bigger cities and destroying large areas of forest they blatantly or ignorantly upset the ecological balance and did irreparable damage to the Environment. Mother Nature cannot be disobeyed. At the end of the day we are the recipients of climatic changes and air pollution in whatsoever fashion we polluted the air. Sooner or later we would all be suffocated by the poor air quality. And we thought that we were intelligent and above all living things on Earth.
Here’s a link about London’s killer smog (wikipedia, but they get some things right): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog.
Now of course that was a different situation. There’s no sign yet of immediate deaths due to Beijing’s severe smog and it’s hard to know exactly what role the “Big Smoke” played in premature deaths in 1952. Specifically, there’s nothing known to show that the “Big Smoke” deaths were related to PM2.5 toxicity.
There are probably some people who have health problems that make them sensitive to pollution events like the Big Smoke or the Beijing smog just now. It’s a little like the role cigarettes play in cancer or COPD: some people smoke and never develop those problems and some people have those problems but never smoked.
Mr. Milloy acknowledges that Beijing’s smog issue is a long-term health threat, of course. His point as I understand it is that the PM2.5 standards of our own EPA are based on flimsy science about their short-term effects on normal, healthy individuals.
Let us know if you see any bodies.
I am in Beijing now….and it is pretty bad. Have not needed a mask yet, but tonight and tomorrow I will.
There was one thing they really wanted, access to everything we have, cars, electricity, phones.
I had to do a job way back with the Maasai in Kenya, I asked the local nurses how their health was, she said generally very good. They live in huts with a fire in the centre. I went in one, in seconds my eyes were smarting from the smoke.