Prior to the Olympics in Beijing, China solved a pollution problem they previously claimed they never had by banning all cars except those for communist party elites. It did little for CO2, Beijing had a PM10 (smog) problem, but it showed drastic interventions could help the air.read...
read moreWhen smog was prevalent, it was easy to see. Particulate matter 10 microns in size hover in the air, the famous London Fog was not natural moisture, it was PM10 pollution. In one event, nature combined with smog in London to kill 12,000 people.After that, wealthier nations engaged in pollution control, and then PM10 and its health issues began to dissipate. In the 1990s and with much cleaner air,...
read moreYou wouldn't know it from listening to epidemiologists inside EPA or local weather personalities, but American air quality is better than it's been in 150 years. So clean they had to define "clean" down and start touting small micron particulate matter (PM2.5) one quarter the size of real smog, so small you need an electron microscope to see it, as a concern.Well, it isn't. No one has ever died...
read moreThe United States has some of the cleanest air in the world, at least when it comes to actual dangerous smog, PM10 - particulate matter 10 microns in size. It is a clear killer, at one point leading to the deaths of over 10,000 in London during a weather anomaly that caused it to stay low.read...
read morePrior to the 1980s, most thermometers were both inaccurate and not placed using scientific methodology. But tree rings need time and ice cores even longer, which means for recent periods of time have to rely on observational claims and hope to control for their accuracy.read...
read moreEveryone knows droughts are bad. They increase risk of wildfires and damage life in the affected region. They are not always predictable, when I lived in Pennsylvania in the early 1990s there was a drought with no known mechanism involved, but they are often cyclical, which makes them at least broadly predictable.The Dry 2 Dry program at Ghent University believes droughts are not only...
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