Deadly New Delhi Air Pollution Keeps Getting Worse

At certain times of year, some immense cities in the world become cesspools of extreme air pollution, putting the lives of millions of people in danger.

Extreme air pollution in India this past week. Photo by Arushree
Fadnavis./Reuters

In recent days, New Delhi, India has probably topped them all. The pollution was so thick, so dangerous, that you couldn't measure it.

A widely used air qualilty index measures ground level ozone, particulates, carbon monoxide, sulfer dioxide and nitrogen dioxide.  If the index is at 50 or lower, the air is clean and great to breath.

Up to 300, the air is a bit iffy - unhealthy for people with underlying health issues or other sensitivities, but the rest of us can probably manage, though with some potential health effects. If you get over 300, the air is downright dangerous for everybody.

We don't know how high the air quality index got in New Delhi, because the measuring devices only go to 999. I imagine the pollution levels were at least four times higher than what is considered dangerous for everybody.

 Here's how Time magazine describes what this is like:

"By one estimate, breathing Delhi's air for one day has the health impacts of smoking at least 25 cigarettes. Although Delhi typically experiences marked increases in air pollution around Novermber, this year's pollution prompted Delhi's Chief Minister, Arvind Kejriwal to call the city a 'gas chamber.'"

Time says New Delhi's experience with air pollution is part of a global trend that is causing roughly 7 million premature deaths annually.

Inversions, in which warm air traps cooler air beneath it, is the root meteorological cause of these pollution episodes. That warm air aloft acts as a lid so that pollutants can't escape and blow away. As cars, trucks, agricultural fires, factories and everything else loft stuff into the air, it just accumulates under this "lid," with toxic results.

In New Delhi's case, it started with an annual celebration called Diwali, in which lots of people set of fireworks. Those add a lot of smoke to the air.

This is also the time of year that farmers in land surrounding New Delhi to set fires in fields to clear land for the next round of crops.  Add to it the millions of cars, trucks, factories and scooter and you get a real disaster.

By the way, we here in Vermont are not immune from pollution problems caused by inversions.  These inversions often happen in the winter.  That can trap pollutants from things like cars and wood stove smoke in our Green Mountain valleys, elevating pollution levels.

The area around Rutland, for instance, is shaped like a bowl, and is sometimes subject to wintertime air pollution alerts. Of course, and thankfully, Rutland will never get as bad as New Delhi.

Indonesia Wildfires Turn Earth Landscape To Mars

Dense smoke from Indonesian wildfires have changed the air
to a post-apocalyptic color

Wildfires in Indonesia are choking that region of the world in toxic, awful haze, causing all kinds of health problems, interfering with airports and just making people miserable. 

According to the Guardian:

"Forest fires are an annual occurrence in Indonesia, a result of slash and burn techniques used to quickly ad cheaply clear land for mostly oil palm plantations, but this year, due to a protracted drought, they are more severe.

The crisis has pushed air pollution indexes off the charts in Sumatra and Indonesian Borneo, forced cancellation of scores of flights, the closure of hundreds of schools across Indonesia and Malaysia, caused diplomatic tension and made hundreds of people sick.

On Monday, Indonesia's disaster mitigation agency said that almost one million people were suffering from acute respiratory infections caused by haze and forest fires."

The video below has had no editing.  The atmosphere was really this red as the sun interacted with all the dense smoke particles in the air. Definitely looks toxic. And post-apocalyptic:

Matthew's Legacy: Massive Agricultural Pollution, Maybe Higher Meat Prices?

From Mother Jones, this areal photo of a farm
with a manure lagoon swamped by flooding and \
manure flowing into the river was taken by
Rick Dove of the Waterkeeper Alliance.

The floods from last week's Hurricane Matthew continue to devastate large swaths of North Carolina, and it continues to get worse in spots.

River crests are slowly making their way downstream, and more towns and cities are flooding as a result. 

So far, 22 people in North Carolina have died in the flooding.

That's the most tragic part.

Beyond the grieving, the thousands of ruined houses and businesses, and the long cleanup, are other long lasting effects that will affect many people, including some of us far from the flood zone.

The area most affected by the North Carolina flooding has a high concentration of massive chicken and pork farms and producers. Millions of chickens have drowned in the flooding, as have many pigs.

This could raise meat prices across the nation. Paying a little bit extra for meat pales in comparison to the people actually suffering through the floods in North Carolina, but it's still an effect.

Also, according to Mother Jones magazine, the affected chicken and hog farms also had their huge manure lagoons flooded and breached by raging, flooded nearby rivers. That's a major pollution problem to say the least.

Says Mother Jones: 

"Hog manure is loaded with pathogenic bacteria, including antibiotic-resistant ones, antibiotic residues, and plenty of nitrate, with fouls drinking water and also feeds dead zone algae blooms. "

The pollution will likely mostl affect lower income African communities, notes Mother Jones 

The harm will probably be widespread. In 1999, Hurricane Floyd caused massive flooding in the same chicken and hog farm location as Matthew hit. Back in 1999, the resulting flooding and manure pollution created a 350 square mile dead zone in coastal estuaries.

It's too soon to say whether the pollution will be as bad as Floyd in 1999, but the fact that there are more chicken in hog farms in the flood zone than back then, and the flooding is very severe this time, it doesn't bode well.

Indonesian Peat Forest Fires Big Disaster, Plus Worsening Global Warming

Viewed from space: Peat fires emit smoke on
the Indonesian island of Sumatra in September.
Image from NASA Earth Observatory. 

Bad land management practices in Indonesia, El Nino and global warming are teaming up to cause a nasty disaster in and around Indonesia, and this particular mess will actually worsen global warming a bit.

Farmers and land owners and others set fires in peat forests to clear land. Most of the land clearing is illegal, by the way.

Largely because of El Nino, that periodic warming of the eastern Pacific Ocean that's underway now, there's a drought in Indonesia.

The fires have developed into these hard to put out underground fires in peat that area really, REALLY smoky. Peat is soil consisting mostly of partly decayed plant material often found in wetlands.

Of course these Indonesian wetlands dried out in the drought, and are now ablaze.

The smoky fires blanketed the region in a thick, thick haze, causing respiratory harm in a wide area, including Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Singapore, as well as Indonesia.

The smoke and haze could kill, or at the very least contribute to the deaths of at least 10,000 people, making the Indonesian peat fires the deadliest disaster of 2015, notes Dr. Jeff Masters in his Weather Underground blog.

Masters also said an estimated 120,000 people have already sought medical attention because of respiratory illnesses related to the Indonesian peat fires.

The fires are also described as "carbon bombs" because they're emitting huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The peat normally stores the carbon dioxide, but when it burns, it goes into the atmosphere.

Since carbon dioxide is the main gas contributing to global warming,  this is a bad thing. By some estimates, the current Indonesian peat fires are emitting as much carbon dioxide as the entire nation of Germany does in a year.

The Washington Post notes that the peat fires contribute perhaps 20 percent of the annual carbon emissions in the world.

Regular forest fires emit a lot of carbon dioxide, too. But when the trees grow back, some of that released carbon dioxide is sequestered back into the returning trees and is thus removed from the atmosphere where it can do harm.

Not so with the peat fires. The peat has been slowly accumulating for thousands of years, and once it's gone in a fire, it's gone. The released carbon dioxide just sits in the atmosphere, worsening global warming.

Here's a compilation video from Greenpeace showing the extent of the fires and the haze from these peat fires in Indonesia. It's pretty scary.