Nearly 9,500 people die each year in London because of air pollution

Adam Vaughn in the Guardian (UK): Nearly 9,500 people die early each year in London due to long-term exposure to air pollution, more than twice as many as previously thought, according to new research. The premature deaths are due to two key pollutants, fine particulates known as PM2.5s and the toxic gas nitrogen dioxide (NO2), according to a study carried out by researchers at King’s College London.

The study – which was commissioned by the Greater London Authority and Transport for London – is believed to be the first by any city in the world to attempt to quantify how many people are being harmed by NO2. The gas is largely created by diesel cars, lorries and buses, and affects lung capacity and growth.

London, Birmingham, and Leeds are among the UK cities that have been in breach of EU safety limits on NO2 for five years, prompting legal action that led to a supreme court ruling in April that the government must publish a clean-up plan by the end of the year.

Previous research attributed 4,267 annual premature deaths to PM2.5s in 2008, based on 2006 levels of the particulates. Subsequent falls in those particulates and a change in methodology that excludes natural sources of the pollutant sees that figure fall to 3,537 for 2010 levels of PM2.5s in the new study. However that fall is more t
han cancelled out by the addition of an estimated 5,879 deaths from NO2 each year, bringing the total early deaths from both pollutants in 2010 to 9,416....

London view from St. Paul's, shot by Ian Buchanan, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Catastrophic Chinese floods triggered by air pollution

Roland Pease at Science News: What atmospheric scientist Jiwen Fan saw on her television in July 2013 appalled her. The worst flooding to hit China in 50 years was happening in Sichuan province, in the same place that had been devastated by a massive earthquake just 5 years earlier. Over the course of 5 days, 73 centimeters of rain pounded the mountains, peaking at 29 centimeters in a single day. Rivers burst their banks and poured through city streets, washing away homes, factories, and bridges. Steep valley slopes collapsed in deadly landslides. About 200 people died, and a further 300,000 were displaced.

But Fan was worried about more than just the immediate effect of the floods. The Richland, Washington–based researcher—an expert on air pollution and climate at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington—wondered how they had gotten so strong so fast. The Sichuan basin, surrounded by mountains that trap smoke billowing from its industrial centers, is “notorious” for its dirty air, she says. Did air pollution play a role? To find out, she and her team of Chinese, American, and Israeli researchers designed precision computer simulations to model what had happened.

Air pollution can affect precipitation in many ways. Sometimes, the aerosol particles in smoke can reduce or delay rain. Sometimes, they can make thunderstorms more intense. Their best understood interaction is in changing how water vapor condenses to form droplets in clouds. But Fan and her team have proposed a first: that pollution also changes some air circulation patterns that lead to rainclouds.

In the case of the Sichuan storms, they write in a paper published online before print in Geophysical Research Letters, soot in particular contributed to the catastrophic flooding. It prevented rainclouds from forming over the basin during the day, leading to more intense rainfall in the mountains that evening. “We were amazed at the scale of the effect the pollution had,” Fan says. “Effectively it redistributed the precipitation from the wide area of the basin into the mountains.”...

From the 2013 flooding in Sichuan, shot by 人神之间, Wikimedia Commons, under the  Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication

South-East Asian haze increases risk of respiratory mortality

Research SEA: Since 1997, the massive burning of biomass in Sumatra and Kalimantan, Indonesia, has affected neighbouring countries such as Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei and Southern Thailand. The burning of biomass has generated a significant amount of haze that travels overseas, affecting the region’s economy and public health.

Haze resulting from forest fires is known to increase the concentration of toxic airborne particles that are smaller than ten microns in size, such as carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and ozone. Previous studies have found that airborne particles can cause serious respiratory effects. In 1997, South-East Asian haze increased the number of asthma attacks by 10.7% in Malaysia alone.

Professor Mazrura Sahani, an environmental epidemiology expert at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, recently conducted a follow-up study on this issue focusing on Klang Valley, the most populated and most affected area on the west coast of peninsular Malaysia. She analysed the association between mortality rates from respiratory illness in Klang Valley and 88 days of recorded haze events from 2000 to 2007. Haze events typically last for seven days.

Professor Sahani collected respiratory mortality data from Malaysia’s Department of Statistics and obtained environmental data from six continuous air quality monitoring stations in Klang Valley. Her results showed that South-East Asian haze has increased the risk of respiratory mortality in Klang Valley as a result of increased exposure to toxic particles during the haze days. By the sixth day of a haze event, daily mortality rates were higher than normal....

Haze in Kuala Lumpur, shot by Krisjohn, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike  2.0 Generic license

Malaysia air quality 'unhealthy' as haze obscures skies

Terra Daily via AFP: Air quality around Malaysia's capital Kuala Lumpur and on Borneo island was "unhealthy" on Tuesday, with one town reaching "very unhealthy" levels as haze -- mostly from forest fires in Indonesia -- obscured skies. Kuala Lumpur residents wore face masks as protection from the choking smog, while visibility was low.

Nine out of some 50 measuring stations recorded air pollutant index readings above 100, which signify "unhealthy" air quality. Readings in Sibu town in Sarawak state on Borneo breached 200 -- designated as "very unhealthy" -- on Monday, but recovered slightly Tuesday.

A reading of above 300 signifies "hazardous" air. In Indonesia, the National Disaster Management Agency deployed a chopper to conduct water bombing to West Kalimantan on Borneo to tame 268 so-called hotspots detected in the province as haze also shrouded skies there and on Sumatra island....

Haze in Kuala Lumpur, shot by Krisjohn, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr,  under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Air pollution linked to cognitive decline in later years

Shereen Lehman in Reuters Health: The tiny particles in vehicle exhaust and other sources of air pollution may hasten cognitive decline in older adults, according to a new U. S. study. “We decided to examine the link between air pollution and cognitive function in older adults because there is growing evidence that fine particulate matter air pollution affects brain health and development, but relatively little attention has been given to what this means for the aging brain,” said Jennifer Ailshire, who co-wrote the report.

 Ailshire is with the Center for Biodemography and Population Health and the Andrus Gerontology Center at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She, along with Philippa Clarke of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, say that based on their results, improvements in air quality may be an important strategy for reducing age-related cognitive decline.

...Routine measurement of air pollution by census tract did not start until the late 1990s, they explain. Cognitive function was measured by math and memory tests and participants got a score based on the number of cognitive errors they made.

...Poverty and other social factors as well as health problems can influence cognitive function, the authors note. And poorer neighborhoods tend to be more polluted. But after the researchers adjusted for education, employment, gender, marital status and several other factors, the differences in cognitive error rates remained.

“The emerging evidence showing a link between air pollution and cognitive function suggests air pollution may harm the brain as well as the heart and lungs,” Ailshire said in an email. “Ideally,” she and Clarke wrote, they would want long-term data and more exact individual pollution exposures to assess the importance of PM2.5 in cognitive function....

Smog over the Louisville, Kentucky, skyline in 1972. From the National Archives

Pollution levels forecast to drop in England and Wales

The Guardian (UK) via Press Association: Air pollution levels remain high across parts of England and Wales but are expected to reduce later today.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) reports that more than 20 areas from northern England down to the South East are still gripped by high levels of pollution this morning.

But a fresh air mass arriving later today is expected to push the pollution eastwards over the North Sea, weather forecasters have said.

Ambulance services reported a rise in 999 calls on Thursday as air quality plummeted across the UK. The London Ambulance Service recorded a 14% jump in emergency calls for help with breathing difficulties, asthma and heart problems, while the West Midlands Ambulance Service has also seen more people with breathing and heart trouble....

Haze over London in 2008, shot by Chris L L, Wikimedia Commons via Geograph UK, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license 

China vows to clean up 60 percent of cities by 2020

Reuters: China pledged on Sunday that it will make sure that 60 percent of its cities meet national pollution standards by 2020, with pressure growing to make cities liveable as hundreds of millions of migrants are expected to relocate from the countryside.

China's environmental problems such as pollution and water scarcity are expected to intensify as rapid migration pushes urban infrastructures to the limit. Almost all Chinese cities monitored for pollution last year failed to meet the standards.

The environment has emerged as a key priority amid growing public disquiet about smog, dwindling and polluted water supplies and the contamination of farmland. Poor air quality is estimated to end hundreds of thousands of lives prematurely each year and has led to a series of riots and public protests....

NASA image of smog in Harbin province, China

Nine Chinese cities suffered more days of severe smog than Beijing

Adam Vaughan in the Guardian (UK): Photographs of a smog-wreathed Tiananmen Square and the iconic headquarters of China Central Television dominated reports of Chinese pollution last year, but analysis shows nine other Chinese cities suffered more days of severe smog than the capital in 2013.

The worst was Xingtai, a city of more than 7 million people south-west of Beijing, which was hit by 129 days of "unhealthy air" or worse – the threshold at which pollution is considered at emergency levels – and more than twice as many days as the capital experienced.

Beijing suffered 60 days of pollution above emergency levels, sparking reports of an "airpocalypse", a boom in sales of air purifiers and masks and measures to tackle the problem including the destruction of open-air barbecues and a crackdown on fireworks for Chinese new year.

Last week, the Chinese premier, Li Keqiang, "declared war" on pollution, saying it was "nature's red-light warning against the model of inefficient and blind development."...

Smog in Harbin, December 2012, shot by Fredrik Rubensson, Wikimedia ommons via Flickr,  under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license 

Beijing steps up air pollution law enforcement

Xinhua: Beijing has launched a "zero-hour" campaign for enforcing the city's first air pollution prevention regulation, which came into effect on Saturday. Over 400 environmental monitoring staff began work at 12 a.m. Saturday to conduct a scrutiny on industrial emissions and dust.

Among the 617 plants and firms inspected, 25 received fines for discharging excessive emissions and 11 others for improper treatment of dust. When inspectors arrived at the Hongxiang Heat Co. Ltd. in Changping District, they found emission from roaring coal-fired heating boilers were discharging sulfur dioxide with a density of 350 milligrams per cubic meter, which is seven times more than the city's permitted level.

Zhong Chonglei, captain of the municipal environmental inspection team, said according to the regulation, the company should be given a fine of between 80,000 yuan (13,018 U.S. dollars) and 100,000 yuan. The fine will be doubled if the company fails a further check in a month.

Beijing's local law on air pollution prevention is widely regarded as a test of the government's resolve to solve air pollution problems. It legislates penalties from hefty fines to imprisonment for polluters, and, for the first time, sets a ceiling on total emissions of major pollutants. A previous guideline targeted only growth of emissions....

Dangerous pollution hits China's capital

Terra Daily via AFP: China's capital was shrouded in dangerous smog on Thursday, cutting visibility down to a few hundred metres as a count of small particulate pollution reached more than 25 times recommended levels.

A grey haze filled the sky, leaving an industrial, burning smell hanging in the air as PM2.5 reached over 500 micrograms per cubic metre in parts of Beijing, according to official statistics. Figures from the US embassy, which also monitors air quality, reached more than 671 in the early morning. The WHO recommends an exposure level of no more than 25 over a 24-hour period.

The official air quality index reached the top of the scale at 500. China's cities are often hit by heavy pollution, blamed on coal-burning by power stations and industry, as well as vehicle use, and it has become a major source of discontent with the ruling Communist Party.

"I can't believe how bad it is," said US tourist Richard Deutsch in Tiananmen Square in central Beijing, which was shrouded in heavy smog. "I have never experienced air this bad," said Deutsch, who is from Vermont. "It's worse than LA. I feel kind of bad for the people. It's taking years off their life."...

Smog in Beijing's Forbidden City, shot by Brian Jeffery Beggerly, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

China blames weather for hampering efforts to banish smog

Adam Rose in Reuters: China's battle against a persistent air pollution crisis, which all but shut down a city of 11 million this week, is being hampered by tough weather conditions, an environmental official said on Tuesday.

Air quality in cities is of increasing concern to China's stability-obsessed leaders, anxious to douse potential unrest as a more affluent urban population turns against a growth-at-all-costs economic model that has besmirched much of the country's air, water and soil. The government has announced many plans to fight pollution over the years but has made little apparent progress, especially in the country's north and northeast.

Harbin, a frigid northeastern city of 11 million people, virtually ground to a halt on Monday when a pollution index showed airborne contaminants at around 50 times the levels recommended by the World Health Organisation.

"This severe smog, first of all, is caused by climate conditions," Fang Li, the deputy chief of Beijing's municipal environmental protection bureau, told reporters....

Beijing issues new measures aimed at curbing air pollution

Reuters: Beijing unveiled yet another slew of measures on Monday to curb a choking pollution problem, including limiting the number of new vehicles on the roads and closing or upgrading the facilities of 1,200 companies. China's smoggy capital has tried everything from shutting factories to a massive subway building program as it battles a severe air pollution problem, but with little apparent effect.

The latest measures are part of a broader plan to reduce the Chinese capital's density of harmful particles in the air by at least 25 percent by 2017. "It's a declaration of war against PM 2.5," the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau said in a statement on its website, referring to tiny particles in the air that pose the greatest risk to human health. "The city will work relentlessly to improve air quality."

The Chinese government has been increasingly alarmed by social unrest caused by environmental disasters and threats to public health, often the result of breakneck industrial expansion and mass migration to new cities. In the newly unveiled measures, Beijing will place tougher restrictions on the number of new vehicles allowed on the roads each year, curbing annual growth to nearly zero...

Smog in Beijing, shot by Berserkerus, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Beijing is not the only Asian city with lethal air pollution

John Vidal in the Guardian (UK): Air pollution in Beijing has been described as "apocalyptic" this week with people choking their way through murky streets, short of breath and their eyes stinging from toxic air. But Beijing is just one of hundreds of cities, largely in Asia, where poisonous air is now the fastest growing cause of death in urban populations.

In the past few months there have been acute air pollution incidents reported in Bangladesh, Iran, Afghanistan, Nepal, and Pakistan. In Tehran, the desperate authorities had to close all public offices, schools, universities and banks twice in the last two months; In Nepal the army has had to give up its cars and in Kabul it has been reported that there are now more deaths as a result of air and water pollution than from conflict.

Statistics are unreliable, with few cities able to monitor accurately either the source or the level of the cocktail of pollutants emitted by traffic, ships, industry, brick kilns and domestic heating. But go to the hospitals and doctors will tell you that up to 80% of people admitted come with respiratory or other chronic diseases linked to air pollution. In Tehran, more than 4,500 people were said to have died last year because of air pollution – but because cancers can take years to develop the true figure may be far higher.

Perhaps because there are no drugs available to counter air pollution, it has never been taken as seriously by governments as other diseases like HIV/Aids or malaria, even though the World Health Organisation estimates more than 2 million people worldwide die every year from bad air and that it is now among the top 10 killers in the world. But governments may have to act as new research shows it to be rapidly worsening....

Smog over Shanghai, shot by Seader, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication

Satellites used to track global smog level

Space Daily via UPI: Israeli researchers say using a trio of NASA satellites has allowed them to measure levels of air pollution over the world's largest cities.

On-the-ground monitoring stations do not always provide the most accurate picture of global smog created by traffic, industry and other human activities, they said.

Using eight years of data collected by the satellites, the researchers at Tel Aviv University tracked pollution trends for 189 cities where the population exceeds 2 million.

More than 50 of these metropolitan areas, including New York, Tokyo and Mumbai, have populations that exceed 5 million.

The researchers used data gathered by three aerosol-monitoring satellites, called MODIS-Terra, MODIS-Aqua, and MISR, which NASA launched from 2000 through 2002....

Smog over China, from a NASA shot

NASA work helps better predict world's smoggiest days

Terra Daily: A research team led by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), both in Pasadena, Calif., has fully characterized a key chemical reaction that affects the formation of pollutants in smoggy air in the world's urban areas. When applied to Los Angeles, the laboratory results suggest that, on the most polluted days and in the most polluted parts of L.A., current models are underestimating ozone levels by 5 to 10 percent.

The results-published this week in the journal Science-are likely to have "a small but significant impact on the predictions of computer models used to assess air quality, regulate emissions and estimate the health impact of air pollution," said Mitchio Okumura, professor of chemical physics at Caltech and one of the principal investigators on the research. "This work demonstrates how important accurate laboratory measurements are to our understanding of the atmosphere," said JPL senior research scientist Stanley P. Sander, who led the JPL team's effort. "This is the first time this crucial chemical reaction has been studied by two teams using complementary methods that allow its details to be understood."

The key reaction in question in this research is between nitrogen dioxide and the hydroxyl radical. In the presence of sunlight, these two compounds, along with volatile organic compounds, play important roles in the chemical reactions that form ozone, which at ground-level is an air pollutant harmful to plants and animals, including humans.

Until about the last decade, scientists thought these two compounds only combined to form nitric acid, a fairly stable molecule with a long atmospheric life that slows ozone formation.

Chemists suspected a second reaction might also occur, creating peroxynitrous acid, a less stable compound that falls apart quickly once created, releasing the hydroxyl radical and nitrogen dioxide to resume ozone creation.

But until now they weren't sure how quickly these reactions occur and how much nitric acid they create relative to peroxynitrous acid. The JPL team measured this rate using a high-accuracy, JPL-built, advanced chemical reactor. The Caltech team then determined the ratio of the rates of the two separate processes….

Smog masks in Los Angeles

Winds could clear Malaysian smog

Edie.net (UK): Malaysia may get a respite from this summer's smog as forecasters in the region have predicted winds will help to clear the haze this week. Smog has been a recurrent feature in Malaysia over the past few decades, which authorities blame mainly on land clearing and "slash and burn" agricultural practices in neighbouring Indonesia.

Last week, weather forecasters warned the smog was set to continue as the number of air pollution "hotspots" in Sumatra was still high. The number of hotspots had peaked at the beginning of the month with nearly 550. Although by the weekend the number of hotspots in Sumatra had dropped to just above 150 hotpots, a lack of rain in Malaysia has prevented the skies clearing.

But the state Meteorological Department told journalists in Malaysia that the haze is expected to clear up this week. A department spokesperson told The Star newspaper: "The skies became hazy about two weeks ago and by next week, we should have clear skies again because of the inter-monsoon winds.

"Because of the morning showers, the dust particles are cleared up quite quickly so the visibility usually improves for a while. "However, fair weather in the later part of the day reduces the visibility again because there is no rain to clear the air."…