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Delhi’s air pollution monitors have recorded the highest levels they can measure
- mehly 8y agoMake the chart bigger.
- brianjking 8y agolol, clearly the best solution. (please note sarcasm.)
- ioquatix 8y agoTime for logarithmic scale?
- ramshanker 8y agoWell, well, unlike winter, when vehicular emission and neighboring farm burns pollute the sky, this time it's mother nature lifting sands off the desert and dust from the fields. Approx 2 more weeks to go when the monsoon arrives and everything would be back to normal.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> everything would be back to normal Which is the 11th most polluted city on the planet by PM2.5 particulate matter concentration [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_polluted_cities_by_particulate_matter_concentration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_polluted_cities_b...
- krtkush 8y agoIt'll be years or maybe even decades before things will be back to normal in Delhi.
- wcoenen 8y agoAre there any indications that things will get better instead of worse in the next decades?
- ShorsHammer 8y agoNot at all, Delhi's population has consistently grown by 1 million a year for the last decade and shows no signs of letting up. The trend towards urbanisation is strong. The prospect of clamping down on agriculture burnoffs that plague the city during winter is limited too. Meanwhile China has cleaned up it's award winning polluted cities quite quickly and continues to do so.
- Retric 8y ago> dust from the field That's a man made problem. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl
- seanmcdirmid 8y agoChina (mainly northern but sometimes western) has dust storms in spring that have similar effects. It got better with tree planting, but once many of those trees died it got worse again.
- wewake 8y ago> Approx 2 more weeks to go when the monsoon arrives and everything would be back to normal. Wow, that's a very indifferent take on such an alarming matter.
- deepGem 8y agoMan, I am appalled at your response. What we are seeing in Delih is beyond alarming. In fact, even the so called normal in Delhi is alarming by the global pollution standards. Please avoid making such flippant comments. PM2.5 is at a hazardous level in Punjabi Bagh. http://aqicn.org/city/delhi/punjabi-bagh/ http://aqicn.org/city/delhi/punjabi-bagh/
- wet_grass_sound 8y agoClean up your air india!
- vinni2 8y agoI landed in delhi yesterday I could not see anything on the land until the flight descended very low for landing. There was an eerie orangish glow blocking thesun. It lookeed like a doomsday scenario.
- hn_throwaway_99 8y agoI was in Delhi a couple years ago when the pollution was also literally off the charts - at the time it was the worst pollution in over a decade. It totally reminded me of Blade Runner. Whenever the illustrious recent leaders of government in the US talk about loosening environmental restrictions that are killing jobs, I wish they could spend a week in Delhi (with no air filters) every time they said that.
- deathhand 8y agoI am not Indian so please take this with a grain of salt. My senior project was creating a business plan for India. I guess the professor was farming for ideas. The one thing he berated over and over was that due to the multiple municipalities and mass corruption, conducting business between their states is not a trivial matter. This means that there is no group cohesiveness. Pollution knows no borders and I do not think this will be an easy problem for the Indian people to solve due to said internal struggle.
- state_less 8y agoNeither am I, so take with two grains, but from an outside westerner's perspective, it seems the government is quite impotent. I was surprised to find how small the roads are for New Delhi's size. If they can't raise better roads with their clear time saving advantages, perhaps millions of hours per day, it's hard to imagine how they can do much. In this case, the health of the entire population is at risk and the governments apathy rings through it all. If I had to guess, the cause could be due to how much focus is spent on non-secular issues. There is little time left for issues like better air, water, roads, etc... If this hurdle is cleared, you then have to get past the selfishness and corruption built into the system. Set your gods, ideology and your selfishness aside for half a minute so you can at least breath a little easier. It's going to take some work and sacrifice, but in reality it's not that bad.
- Thriptic 8y agoTo be fair, many US cities also have severe transportation infrastructure problems which governments at many levels are too weak to address
- cobbzilla 8y agoExperience a traffic jam in Delhi first-hand and your analogy to US cities might acquire some nuance. It's really not even close.
- wil421 8y agoThere’s a difference between government being too weak to address and the voters not wanting something. It comes up a couple times a decade in Atlanta and the suburbs vote against public train expansion. I see parallels with the housing issues in SF and California. How does a local government do something if their constituents flat out refuse it?
- yadavmahesh 8y agoBeing from the region, The couple of days in question were more to relate with climate change than man made pollutants. There was dust over most of northern India for about 4 days, that was carried by dry winds from the desert in west India and Pakistan. Having lived in North India (Chandigarh) for more than 30 years, i don't remember such an earlier episode. Earlier the city i live witnessed seasonal storms, but the sky was clear as a storm passed. But this time the sky was filled with small dust continuously for about 4 days and at noon Sun was looking like moon. The rains have made things normal. But it was a first of an episode as per my experience.
- overcast 8y agoI mean the article blatantly says this was the dust storm, in the second heading. Followed by a photo of the storm, with a caption saying it's a dust storm.
- onetimemanytime 8y agoisn't pollution a price we, kinda, have to pay to move to the next step? See USA until EPA, China etc... You reach a certain level of industrialization and then let other countries choke
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> isn't pollution a price we, kinda, have to pay to move to the next step? Not this much. When the West industrialised, we didn’t have natural gas or nukes. Today we do. The problem is (a) Coal India is a jobs factory and (b) India’s massive corruption makes regulation more challenging than it was in the West or is in China. (China has done an excellent job of moving pollution away from population centres.)
- onetimemanytime 8y ago>>When the West industrialised, we didn’t have natural gas or nukes Is natural gas cheap in India? Nukes have their own issues. See Chernobyl and Fukushima...unless you build them 1000 miles away in a desert (not feasible--water and transmission issues.) Pollution in horrible and takes lives, but so does poverty. The lesser of two evils might be found somewhere in the middle. >>(China has done an excellent job of moving pollution away from population centres.) But they had it there initially. So did the USA, you can still see the old chimneys
- cfadvan 8y agoNukes have their own issues. See Chernobyl and Fukushima...unless you build them 1000 miles away in a desert (not feasible--water and transmission issues.) This is like saying that airships have a lot of issues because of the Hindenburg disaster. Technology has come a long way since either Chernobyl or Fukushima were built! Nuclear plants can be made very safe, and as a bonus won’t contribute to the deaths of millions from pollution.
- alienallys 8y agoStraight out of the article: "India’s air quality crisis is usually most acute after the Hindu festival of Diwali in autumn, when hundreds of thousands of Indians release firecrackers". I think Indian Hindus should go easy on their festival celebrations, especially given how it pollutes the already messed up air.
- jaldhar 8y agoFireworks are the best part of Diwali. Banning them would go over as well as mandating tofurkey on Thanksgiving. This is a big problem with environmentalism IMO. Thing which propenents think are just common sense get viewed as attacks on a way of life (aided and abetted by exploitative politicians.) and what could be rational public policy debate details into kulturkampf. I think there is a better solution. Last year New Jersey legalized firework sales and we celebrated Diwali with an arsenal which could make an Afghan warlord jealous. One of our guests visiting from India marvelled at how little smoke there was. So the best course would be to improve the quality of Indian fireworks then everyone wins.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ronzensci 8y agoThe air pollution event that the article refers to was for a very short duration & was an episodic event due to a meteorological phenomenon. The dust storm in the western region started on 13 June around 18:00 hrs and ended on 16 June around 05:00 hrs. The data from the official monitors in one of the western regions of Delhi NCR can be seen here: http://bit.ly/CPCB_Haryana_1Jun-16June2018 http://bit.ly/CPCB_Haryana_1Jun-16June2018 The headline in the above article is over-dramatic & is lacking a proper understanding of the actual ground-level monitored situation of those two days. What is more harmful is sustained levels of 500 ug/m3 of PM2.5 pollutants rather than a couple of spikes (each lasting less than a few hours) of 999 ug/m3.