New Delhi, India, Choking In Toxic Smog

Thick smog in New Delhi this month. Photo by Altaf
Qadri/Associated Press

In 1952, a deadly smog enveloped London, England.   

In those days, coal and polluting fuels heated homes and businesses and basically powered the city.

During one of those famous London fogs, all those pollutants got trapped within the fog, causing a four-day dense cloud of smog that killed an estimated 4,000 people.

London has literally cleaned up its act, and pollution there rarely gets to dangerous levels.

Not so in other cities in the world.  Beijing, China is famous for its toxic pollution.

So is New Delhi, India, which is now enveloped in a smog so bad that it's being compared to that terrible London smog of 1952.

The smog cloud in New Delhi, like most pollution outbreaks is caused by an inversion, which is warm air over the top of cooler air that acts like a lid, preventing pollutants and smoke and such from rising and moving away. So it sits there.

Illegal crop burning at farms surrounding New Delhi, vehicle emissions and construction activity and dust are pouring into the New Delhi air, and the pollutants keep accumulating under this inversion.

The Straights Times says New Delhi is trying to deal with the immediate crisis by reducing the number of cars allowed to be driven on its streets each day, banning commercial trucks unless they're carrying essential commodities, new construction has been stopped and charges for parking cars has quadrupled to force people into public transportation. Schools are shut down.

But that's not really doing the trick. There has been a 20 percent spike in hospitalizations due to heart and lung problems. The amount of microscopic particles in the polluted air is 75 times what the World Health Organization considers safe. Breathing the air is the equivalent of smoking two packs of cigarettes per day. 

And this pollution attack isn't a one-off. It's happening with increasing frequency in New Delhi and other cities in India and elsewhere in Asia.

And remember how I said London and England's air is cleaner? That's true, but it's still too polluted even there. Of 51 British towns and cities in a WHO database, 44 have too much air pollution, the Independent said.

Meanwhile, in the United States, air quality has also improved since the 1960s and 1970s but still sometimes falls short.

Don't expect even cleaner U.S. air in the coming years. Robert Phalen is an appointee to a Trump White House environmental panel. Phalen has said that "Modern air is a little too clean for optimum health."

He claims that children should be exposed to some dirty air to teach their immunie systems to ward off irritants, or something like that.

Hope you love breathing microscopic, toxic particles, folks!