• Chinese Air Pollution Work Its Way Around the World in This Scary NASA Animation

Chinese Air Pollution Work Its Way Around the World in This Scary NASA Animation
By Rafi Schwartz

Baoding, a heavily industrialized city in China’s northeast, has been awarded the dubious honor of having that country’s most polluted air. 

It’s an impressive, if disheartening, achievement, considering that in 2014 90 percent of Chinese cities failed to meet national air quality standards — ones put in place to combat the growing pollution created during the past thirty years of Chinese industrial growth. 

But while Baoding’s dirty atmosphere represents a major environmental and health concern for that city’s 11 million residents, climatological research shows that industrial air pollution in China doesn’t stay in China for long. 

This newly released NASA animation demonstrates how fast and far air pollution, much of it from China, flows through the planet’s atmosphere in just a matter of months.

Chinese air pollution is also responsible for stronger, more destructive weather patterns seen across the Pacific ocean.
In an article released alongside their video, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory researcher Yuan Wang explains that “pollution from China affects cloud development in the North Pacific and strengthens extratropical cyclones.” 

Those extratropical cyclones, in turn, are responsible for heavy snowfall and bitter cold in the United States. 

In other words: More pollutants in the atmosphere lead to heavier clouds, stronger storms, and worse weather such as, Wang speculates, the extremes felt during the winter of 2013.
If Baoding’s recent recognition is any indication, this is a trend that is likely to continue for the immediate future, and is already altering the way climatologists see the world.
According to Wang’s co-researcher, Jonathan Jiang:
“Before, we thought about the North-South contrast: the Northern Hemisphere has more land, the Southern Hemisphere has more ocean. 

That difference is important to global atmospheric circulation. 

Now, in addition to that, there's a West-East contrast.
Europe and North America are reducing emissions; Asia is increasing them. 

That change also affects the global circulation and perturbs the climate.”

It’s a stark reminder just how interconnected—and fragile—our planet truly is. 

Enviro-Equipment, Inc.
 Shared publicly - Feb 2, 2015

Beijing Fighting Air Pollution by Closing 300 Companies

: The official Chinese news agency Xinhua reports that Beijing Mayor Wang Anshun plans to close 300 companies in Beijing later this year to help reduce choking air pollution in the Chinese capital.

Beijing is "determined to migrate the capital's non-core functions," said Xinhua, citing the city's mayor, Wang Anshun. The city is actively adopting a coordinated development strategy laid out for the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, it added.

The Chinese government recently required some 15,000 of the country's biggest factories to post hourly online reports of air emissions and wastewater discharges.

Beijing closed 392 manufacturing and polluting firms last year, Xinhua said.

Beijing taken several steps to fight air pollution in recent years. In 2013, the city government limited the number of new vehicles on the roads and ordered the closure or upgrade of the facilities at 1200 companies.

The city's fine-particle emissions, which cause lung and heart ailments, peaked at 35 times the World Health Organization's recommended limit in 2013—the same year China's health ministry reported that 71 of 74 cities there failed to meet air-quality standards. The effects are felt even across the Pacific. "If you live in California," Linda Greer of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) says, "nearly a third of the air pollution you breathe comes from China."