Hopefully, in the near future, the main source of CO2 will be our sighs of relief!
(This is the second installment of a 2-part blog. The first installment was released yesterday.)
Dear Fellow Earthlings, I don't know what the exact air quality reading for Reltonia (my land in Oregon) was yesterday, but I DO know that the reading for Salem, Oregon, located some 25 kilometers east of Reltonia was 23 µg/m3 of PM2.5. That is considerably higher than the 10 recommended by the WHO. Actually I am not surprised by the fact that the reading was 23, for you see, I have noticed that during the past 20 years the amount of dust that accumulates on windowsills and furniture at my house on Reltonia does so at a much faster rate than it used to. Back in 1995 I could get by with dusting them off once a month. Now I find that they need dusting even after only 2 days. The winds are bringing the pollution from Asia right over to Oregon...
The cities with the worst air quality on Earth --- after Zabol, Iran (mentioned in yesterday's installment) -- are Gwalior (in India: 176 µg/m3), Allahabad (in India: 170), Riyadh (in Saudi Arabia: 156), and Al Jubail (in Saudi Arabia: 152).
The chief sources of Gwalior's bad air pollution are coal-fired power plants, automobiles, and low-efficiency energy use in buildings. Rounding out the list of the 10 cities with the dirtiest, most dangerous air are: Patna (in India:149 µg/m3), Raipur (in India: 144 ), Bamenda (in Cameroon 132), and (tied for 9th/10th place) Xingtai and Baoding (both in China) 128.
How sad for me to think that the air of cities in places where I have traveled (except for Cameroon) – and even lived (in the case of Saudi Arabia) -- is the most polluted of that of any cities on Earth!
A few years ago when I was staying in Beijing, I felt choked whenever I tried to breathe. That city continues to be shrouded in smog -- and yet is not on the list of the bottom ten most polluted cities on Earth. Indeed, much of northeastern China experiences days on end of air that is unfit to breathe. As I release this blog the cities of Xingtai and Baoding are the only Chinese cities to be on the "bottom ten" list of the world's cities having the filthiest, most dangerous air.
WHO guidelines call for no more than 10 micrograms of PM 2.5 per cubic meter of air -- and 35.5 PM 2.5 is the level at which major health concerns begin, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. But the World Health Organization recommends keeping yearly average PM 2.5 levels three times lower than that.
The most polluted cities on Earth -- as you have seen in this blog -- have anywhere between 11 and 20 times that amount — based on the newest WHO data from cities that collect it.
According to the WHO, poor outdoor air quality is currently killing some three million people per year. We humans have got to curtail our use of fossil fuels immediately!
Steve Walker Earthsaver and Jingles Creator
© 2013 Steve Walker, The Jingles-The Japan Foundation for English Pronunciation, Summit Enterprises.