• CrawlMarks [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    12·
    21 小时前

    Worth noting in that during the same period in california when I was working with a school district there were days we had to cancel recess because of air quality concerns

  • Justice@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    17·
    23 小时前

    It was so bad in <not-Ohio-but-perhaps-not-far-from-Ohio> this afternoon when I went outside to walk my dog that I stepped out and immediately thought my house or neighbor’s house was on fire. The smoke was that thick. I spent like 5 minutes trying to figure out which house nearby had to be burning down and why no one was freaking out… just to see that Canadians are doing their now-annual prank on America where they apparently burn their entire country down and make us breathe it. It was funny the first dozen times… getting a bit old, Canada.

  • tacosanonymous@mander.xyzEnglish
    23·
    1 天前

    It seems that 385 being hazardous means 800* should have a different rating? Unless the scale is really large, I guess.

  • spectre [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    12·
    1 天前

    There are some really amazing pictures of Beijing and other cities not that they are getting decent air quality a lot of the time

  • pillowtags@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    8·
    1 天前

    So China’s air quality was…what? Just fine? Derp derp? Shitty air quality anywhere is bad for anybody who lives there, but it seems like you’re absolving China because somebody else also fucked up…

    • purpleworm [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      44·
      18 小时前

      The problem isn’t that China actually had good air quality, the problem (besides that China, as the manufacturing hub of the west, being blamed is acting as a sin-eater rather than representing real critique) is that in one case it’s a problem that is considered characteristic and an indictment of the whole society while in the case of America that’s just one city’s problem and it’s just the way things are.

      I’m sure you’re familiar with this in other contexts even with China, where they do something bad and we need to mention it every time the PRC comes up but America does something bad and it’s aw shucks but it’s in the past now and it was a different time etc. etc. or it’s in the present but it’s actually Russia’s fault or the Republican’s fault or a DINO’s fault or whatever. When they do something bad, it’s a reflection of their fundamentally evil character, and when America does something bad, it was an exception to or merely a shortcoming in its essentially beneficent character. Clumsy giant and all that.

    • Krem [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      45·
      1 天前

      China, the north especially, had bad air quality due to many things like rural people burning firewood and coal during the winter, dust storms, rapid urbanisation (and a sudden increase in car use) and less-well-regulated heavy industry during the more liberal late 90’s and early 2000s.

      most of those things have been reversed. China has the best air quality in east Asia probably, and I don’t think you’ll find a city of over 10 million people in the world that has better air quality than a chinese megacity. for example Taipei, so beloved by liberals, has air quality much worse than any city in the mainland

      • bjc@scribe.disroot.orgEnglish
        12·
        1 天前

        this is bullshit. i was in china 10 years ago for a week in hangzhou and i never saw the sun. i could only barely tell where it was in the sky. that was perfectly normal. in contrast, in the new york megalopolis, it is shocking when the sun is hidden by haze.

        edit: i said this implying there was no way on earth they could have improved air quality that much in only 10 years. it was shocking to me how bad it was. in all my life i had never seen anything like it, even when new york was filthy. odd days where things were hazy, but nothing at all like this, and it never ended. you just did not ever see the sun. i was there for a week, but everyone there i spoke to said that it was always this way. 10 years isn’t long enough.

        and, indeed, you can see for yourself:

        hangzhou: https://aqicn.org/historical#!city:hangzhou new york: https://aqicn.org/historical#!city:usa/newyork

        anyone who tells you that china’s air quality is anything but fucking terrible basically all the time is trying to work you

        • Blakey [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          22·
          22 小时前

          So I followed your link, because I also went to china ~10 years ago and was sceptical about how much it could change and right now, monitoring stations near Hangzhou range between 24 and 57-ish AQI, and while Tokyo stations appear to be between ~50 and 150. They’ve also, over the last ten years or so, gone from having no days in the green zone, to what appears to be about half the year. So… What were you saying? To me it looks like there has been a staggering improvement.

          • AstroStelar [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
            5·
            15 小时前

            Talking about air quality in China is a mess because it depends so much on which time of the year and where in the country you are. Across the board you’ll find an improving trend, but air quality still tends to be bad in the winter months and generally worse in northern, inland cities. Tokyo is way ahead here, even Seoul is better despite it being an industrious, car-infested metropolis in spite of all the trains there, so “best air quality in East Asia” is definitely not true.

            I got these graphs from https://waqi.info/, up top you see air quality for 2026, and below the data for previous years.

            Hangzhou is a wealthy, coastal city and over ten years bad air quality has gone from two-thirds of the year to one-third (approximately); in summer most of the days are green but in winter there’s still bad air quality on many days.

            Xi’an is located inland, nestled in a valley surrounded by mountains and close to the Gobi Desert and coal mines to the north. With colder winters, these months of the year are worse than in Hangzhou but in summer they’re not far off.

            Tokyo has had environmental initiatives since the 1970s (look up the “Garbage War”) and has a mature and VERY extensive rail network, and urban expressways that have fewer lanes and lower speeds. Fun fact, the city with the worst traffic in Japan is Naha on Okinawa, despite a population of only 300,000 (the US made it car-dependent during their occupation of Okinawa until 1972)

            Because of influence by the US and car-making chaebols, Seoul was built to be very car-dependent. Its vast rail network has been a very recent development, but it’s showing in the improving air quality when it used to have a similar reputation to Chinese cities, which sometimes gets blamed on pollution literally blowing over from China.

            • Blakey [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
              1·
              12 小时前

              Interesting that Xi’an is still so poor, it really didn’t seem that bad when I visited (although it’s also just a really fascinating place so perhaps I was distracted… I swear I spent 6 or 7 hours at the Terracotta warriors)

              But thanks for doing the homework! It’s super impressive how far they’ve come! (which seems to be the story of china generally)

        • purpleworm [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
          16·
          22 小时前

          anyone who tells you that china’s air quality is anything but fucking terrible basically all the time is trying to work you

          This isn’t a generalization that follows from your statement.