China Crisis: Imagine Having To Flee Your City Because The Smog Is So Bad

For some reason, these Chinese students were forced
to take exams outdoors in a thick, toxic smog.  

The only thing obscuring the skies over my house in relatively clean Vermont today is pure white snowflakes.

Which makes me doubly glad I don't live in northern and central China, where the smog has gotten so bad people are fleeing the pollution-choked cities.

According to the Guardian newspaper:

"Tens of thousands of 'smog refugees" have reportedly fled China's pollution-stricken morth after the country was hit by the latest 'airpocalyse, forcing almost half a billion people to live under a blanket of toxic fumes.

Hugh swaths of north and central China have been living under a pollution 'red alert' since last Friday when a dangerous cocktail of pollutants transformed the skies into a yellow and charcoal-tinted haze"

These winter time smog attacks in China have been creating health hazards for years now. In the winter, temperature inversions often form, with warm air overlying cold air near the surface.

That warm air forms a lid, trapping pollutants in the cold air instead of letting it escape. Sunshine often breaks up inversions, allowing the pollution to drift away. But the weak winter sun is often incapable of breaking inversions like the stronger spring and summer sun can.

The Guardian said Ctrip, China's leading online travel agent, said it expected 150,000 travelers from China to head to places like Australia, Indonesia, Japan and the Maldives to escape the killer smog.

More from the Guardian:

"Yang Xinglin, who also fled to Chongli (a mountain resort away from the pollution) said she requested time off from her job at a state-owned real estate firm so she did not have to inhale the smog.

'You ask me why I left Beijing? It's because I want to live,' Yang, 27, told the Guardian."

Some who wanted to flee the smog couldn't because the poor visibility associated with the pollution was grounding hundreds of flights.

One particular source of outcry over the pollution came when a school headmaster in Henan province forced eighth grade students to take exams outdoors all day in the thick smog, despite the obvious health risks.

As you can see by the photo in this post, you can barely make out the students in the smog.

Chinese government authorities had ordered schools closed because of the smog, but the principal of the school decided to go ahead with the exams anyway since they'd already been organized, said the Straights Times. 

It's unclear why the school made the students take exams outside in the heavily polluted air instead of indoors, where it might have been a little safer.

The principal of the school has since been suspended.

The air is even worse than usual in China this winter because the government is pumping stimulus into polluting industries to prop up the economy. Greenpeace said poorly regulated steel producers are adding to the smog even more than in past winters.

Greenpeace says there is hope in China that things could get better in future winters because use of coal is expected to decrease and the government is investing in cleaner industry and environmental regulations.

Inversions A Wintertime Topsy Turvy Fog And Smog Creator

This visible satellite image taken Sunday morning
and provided by the National Weather Service in
Burlington, Vermont shows low clouds
and fog in the valleys, and clear skies
in the higher elevations. 

Here in Vermont on Sunday, the early morning forecast called for sunny skies during the day with unseasonably warm temperatures.

That forecast proved spot on, especially in higher elevations. Some of the state's valleys, however, stayed foggy, overcast and chilly most of the day.

What happened? It's called a temperature nversion, and they are generally most common this time of year, when the sun angle is low and the days are short.

Normally, the temperature drops as you go up in elevation.  Sometimes, though, there's a layer of warmer air above some chilly air trapped in lower spots, like valleys. The normal elevation temperature regime is inverted. You have an official inversion. Congratulations!

Inversions happen often at night, when cold air drains down into valleys on clear, calm nights. These inversions usually break up quickly in the morning, especially in the warmer times of the year.

That's because the sun comes up, heats the air right near the ground, which starts to rise, which mixes with the warm air above. The atmosphere in these cases sorts itself out, and you go back to the normal circumstances of it getting colder as you get higher up.

This time of year, though, the sun angle is pretty much at its lowest point. The sun isn't able to heat the ground easily, and it's not above the horizon for all that long. Which means it's sometimes too feeble to break the inversion.

That happened in much of the Northeast Sunday, and it was happening again in parts of eastern New England this morning.

For much of Sunday morning, the landscape was shrouded n many areas by dense fog or dense freezing fog.

Freezing fog is merely fog that occurs when the temperature is below freezing. Water droplets that make up the fog stay in liquid form despite the subfreezing tempertures. The droplets stay in liquid form, that is, until they touch something, when the instantly freeze.

The frozen droplets in dense fog cause beautiful rime ice on trees, but also black ice on roadways.  The beauty and the beast, I guess.

On Sunday, mid and high elevations in the Northeast in the warm air above the valley chill  enjoyed a sunny, mild day. The inversion also broke up in some valleys when enough sun broke through to disrupt the inversion.

Other areas stayed firmly in the foggy inversion. Montpelier, Vermont, for instance, had fog or freezing fog pretty much all day Sunday, and the temperature only barely rose above freezing to a high of 34 degrees.

However, Saranac Lake, New York, at a relatively high elevation and normally the coldest reporting station in the North Country, reached a sunny 45 degrees Sunday afternoon.

Another danger from temperature inversions is pollution, especially if the inversion lasts a long time.

I was in Rutland, Vermont on Sunday. The inversion sort of broke for a time, and the fog lifted. But the inversion re-established itself. It was dry enough by then that fog did not re-form.

But with so many people burning wood to heat their homes, and cars driving around and such, you could actually see a layer of brown smog hugging the populated valley floors around Rutland, West Rutland and Proctor.

Believe it or not, considering we're talking about "clean" Vermont, the area around Rutland in particular is prone to air pollution alerts in the winter because that valley is especially likely to get some persistent inversions during the cold season.

Elsewhere in the world, inversions can be more persistent, and last much longer. Salt Lake City, Utah often goes for days and days on end shrouded in fog and smog as inverstions take hold in the Salt Lake Valley.

And the type of dangerous, thick smog that has blanketed Beijing, China recently is also a product of wintertime temperature inversions.  I'm told the smog is back big time in today in Beijing, too.

This kind of thing used to happen in the United States, too. Most famously the industrial town of Denora, Pennsylvania suffered a smog inversion that killed perhaps 20 people and sickened thousands more in the late autumn of 1948.

Here in the Northeast, wintertime inversions usually don't last long. A storm system will come along with a bunch of wind, and the wind mixes up the atmosphere and breaks up the inversion. However, even then, inversions are a risk.

When a storm has a warm front approaching your area in the winter, sometimes onrushing mild air, which is lighter, goes up and over the dense cold air near the surface. The result is dangerous freezing rain.

Calm high pressure is likely to hold over much of the Northeast for at least the first half of this week, so we're likely to see more inversions, more fog or freezing fog, and maybe some smog in spots.

It's one of those cases that if you like sunny, mild weather this time of year, head for the hills.







except in  of the state's all

Parts Of China Shrouded In Dangerous Smog, Again

Thick smog in Beijing, China during the day Tuesday.

Over the past couple of days, Beijing, China has been shrouded in smog so thick that the World Health Organization says is 20 times above the level considered healthy.

It's interesting that the smog really peaked as the UN Climate Summit in Paris got really rolling.

The smog is caused by China's reliance on coal burning, and the fact that it has a big steel producing industry. That industry uses a zillion tons of coal to produce that product. The result is these terrible smog outbreaks.

When I bring up climate in terms of China's smog, I don't mean to suggest the smog itself directly contributes to global warming. The smog consists of particulates, which, in high doses as in China, can cause cancer and a host of respiratory illnesses, some fatal.

The smog gets thick when a temperature inversion forms. It's colder in the valleys around Beijing and other major cities than it is in the air a few thousand feet up. The warmer air up above forms a lid, preventing pollutants from blowing away. The pollution just sits and accumulates dangerously in the cities instead.

To combat the immediate problem, China has ordered schools closed, reduction in factory output and less driving untill the weather pattern changes and the smog dissipates some.

Some estimates suggest China's smog outbreaks are shortening life expentancy by five years. Tsignhua and Peking University studies indicate air pollution from coal consumption caused almost 700,000 deaths last year, Fortune reports.

As I mentioned, the smog isn't a direct contributor to global warming. However, the coal burning that is causing the smog DOES contribute to global warming, usually more so than oil or natural gas.

Fortune says China's environmental minister says that despite the smog, the country has achieved targets for reduing major pollutants. The government reported emissions of sulfur dioxide dropped by 13 percent from levels five years ago, and water pollution was down, too.

This isn't the first time smog has risen to extremely dangerous levels in China. There were repeated bouts of smog at this level last winter, and the smog has been increasing in China for decades.

Clearly, though, China has a lot more to do clear the air and save its citizens from potentially early deaths.