A Hazy Shade of Beijing

The world has reached an epoch in conscious environmental thinking. With so much action and awareness going on around the world like the Climate Summit in Paris, there is at last a light in the distance.  This week an article popped up that seems to recur every couple of months or so in the popular science and news websites, about one particular environmental issue:  The smog that envelops Beijing.  

 

Outside the Forbidden City, Beijing.  Photo taken by author during trip to Beijing, 2014

 

A couple of years ago I spent a week in Beijing visiting all the regular tourist spots including the Great Wall of China.  Prior to my departure the news reports were showing images of Beijing cloaked in a dirty grey haze that blocked out the sun and choked people as they went around their everyday lives.  I was nervous heading over.  Did I need a face mask?  Was this environment dangerous to my health?  And would I need to watch the sunrise on the big screen in Tiananmen Square?

I was pleasantly surprised on my drive from the airport to my hotel that it was light, sunny, and more a shade of white than grey.  Nowhere near the extreme images I had seen on the news, and I only saw two people with face masks on during my whole visit.  But there was a distinct haze, high up, shielding the blue sky.  Though it was sunny, you couldn’t see the sun, and it felt like you were in a giant dome of some sort.  Perhaps I was lucky that week to get a lower level of smog than the city endures on other days, but even still, to never see blue sky wasn’t quite right.

The Great Wall of China.  Photo taken by author during trip to Beijing, 2014

 

Smog is a dangerous side-effect of our industrialised world.  A mixture of particulates, nitrogen oxides, sulphur oxides, ozone and water vapour (Conserve Energy Future, n.d.), smog is caused by emissions from cars, factories, and fires.  It has the potential to cause and inflame a number of respiratory ailments, it can cause eye, nose and throat irritation, and sometimes it can lead to death in the elderly and infirmed (Conserve Energy Future, n.d).

According to an article on theguardian.com this week, Beijing had its second “red-alert” this month, with pollution levels recently reaching nearly 15 times the World Health Organisations safe limits (Phillips, 2015).  When the smog reaches the highest levels the city is basically shut down; people are told to stay indoors and businesses, factories and schools are closed.  But the government in China is putting in place a lot of initiatives to curb the rising pollution problems, including strong restrictions on vehicle use, banning of outdoor barbeques and fireworks when pollution is at its peak (Reuters, 2015), and clamping down on factories with fines for over-polluting (Phillips, 2015). It recognises that, in this instance, the people’s health is more important than the economy, and they are doing what’s necessary to protect that.  Not an easy task in a city with a population of 23 million (Phillips, 2015), but let’s hope that one day the Great Wall of China will forever have blue skies above.

REFERENCES:

Conserve Energy Future. (n.d.). How smog is formed?  Retrieved from http://www.conserve-energy-future.com/SmogPollution.php

 

Phillips, T. (2015). Beijing’s ‘airpocalypse’: city shuts down amid three-day smog red alert.  Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/08/beijing-smog-city-shuts-down-amid-red-alert

 

Reuters. (2015). Beijing grinds to halt as second ever ‘red alert’ issued over severe smog.  Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/18/beijing-pollution-second-ever-red-alert-smog-china

A Big Step Forward to Save our Wine?

If I said that something was potentially threatening the Bordeaux wine you’re drinking, or the olive oil you’re cooking with, or that lovely piece of fresh fish that’s in the pan sizzling, would you want to know what?  Would you want to know how to stop it?  If it threatened our everyday luxuries of course we would!  But if we mention climate change these days, many of us just roll our eyes as the topic is becoming repetitive, mundane, or we think: “Yes!  I want a warmer summer!”

Today, more than 190 countries from around the world signed an agreement to help stop climate change.  They hope to limit the warming of our planet to no more than 1.5 ⁰C above pre-industrial times (Vidal, Goldenberg, Taylor & Boffey, 2015).  The rising temperatures are often blamed for the weather patterns getting more severe; more floods, more storms, more drought and fires.  The ice-caps are melting causing rising sea levels, and the oceans are becoming more acidic.  And yes, we can see our weather changing, and the pictures of polar bears on tiny little ice blocks, but it still doesn’t “affect” us in a direct way.

(Anderson, 2013)

Now what if you knew that this small, tiny change in temperature could mean that one day your Bordeaux style wine could no longer be grown in Bordeaux?  That the olive oil and lavenders farms in Provence would be gone?  An article on nationalgeographic.com stated that this week.  It’s been suggested that in 30-40 years, a large amount of the wine-growing regions we know today will no longer be able to produce wine due to changes in temperatures, weather patterns, and insect behaviour (Welch, 2015).  The same is expected for olive and lavender plantations (Welch, 2015).  A winery I deal with, Champagne Taittinger, announced this week their purchase of land in England with the intention of planting grapevines as the climate there is getting milder.  Perhaps England will become the new Champagne or new Bordeaux.  Maybe Germany will be the new olive growing capital of the world.

But it’s not just crops affected. Animals andbreeding earlier, and populations are moving out of their normal territories (Than, 2005) which could potentially lead to ecosystem changes.  The warming waters are moving fish populations out of their usual regions as they search for cooler seas (Press, 2014).  If this is already happening after only a small change in temperature so far, what would a greater change do?
insects are

Let’s be glad that our nation’s leaders have managed to come to today’s agreement, and that hopefully this small step will be the big step our environment needs so that we can forever drink Bordeaux from Bordeaux!

References:

 

 Anderson, H. (2013).  Wine tasting notes: red Bordeaux.  Retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/wine/10086303/Wine-tasting-notes-red-Bordeaux.html

Press, R. (2014). The oceanadapt website: Tracking fish populations as the climate changes. Retrieved from http://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/stories/2014/12/oceanadapt_trackingfish.html

 

Than, K. (2005). How global warming is changing the wild kingdom.  Retrieved from http://www.livescience.com/3864-global-warming-changing-wild-kingdom.html

 Vidal, J., Goldenberg, S., Taylor, L., & Boffey, D. (2015).  ‘A major leap for mankind’: world leaders hail Paris deal on climate.  Retrieved from www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/13/world-leaders-hail-paris-climate-dealVidal

Welch, C. (2015). Provence’s legendary lavender and olives threatened by a changing climate.  Retrieved from http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/12/151211-paris-climate-lavender-wine-olives-truffles-provence/

 

A Tale of Two Sides

What a week!  A few nights ago I found myself sitting in the middle of the floor with all my articles printed out (sorry trees) and spread out around me so I could try to make sense of all the ideas and statistics I now had at my fingertips.  The opposing side had alluded me for a while, until the light bulb moment arrived:  What benefits are there of recycling?  What benefits do plastics have?  Why am I trying to demonise something that has given us so much?

On “my side”, there was a study out just this year that had been cited in several newspaper articles, “Plastic waste inputs from land into the ocean”.  What’s so special about this article?  The big problem I had was finding quantitative data on New Zealand specifically.  Here in one small paper (and one very large supplementary table), Jenna Jambeck and her team had pulled together data from 105 countries, including New Zealand, to estimate the amount of plastic waste entering the oceans.  

The supplementary table gave details of total waste generated, the percentage of plastic waste, and the percentage of mismanaged waste from each of the 105 countries.  For New Zealand these results do not sound at all clean or green.  The amount of actual plastic waste generated is staggering; 1,272,006 kg per day. From this over 25,000 kg of plastic waste is littered every day. 

With all the data the team collated from around the world, they estimated the total amount of plastic waste entering the oceans to be between 4.8 and 12.7 million metric tonnes and that this will increase as populations grow.  They recommend waste reduction and improving waste management immediately for single-use plastics, which is a stance hard to argue with when looking at these figures.

Perspective two: “Applications and societal benefits of plastics”.  There’s a reason plastics have become so popular.  This article by Anthony Andrady and Mike Neal points out these benefits including reference to attributes such as being lightweight, cheap, durable, strong, and versatile.  Due to these properties, plastics have opened up a whole new world for packaging food and water safely.  Single-use plastic for wrapping food is an hygienic and healthy alternative to older food storage methods.  And plastics have helped us to make great improvements in technology, such as lighter cars and planes that are more fuel efficient.  

They also go on to describe the benefits of recycling plastics.  He considers recycling to be an “energy-saving strategy” that makes sense from an environmental point of view.  A way of conserving the materials that are used in their production.

So to love it or hate it, how do we find the middle road where we get the benefits but not the environmental fall out?  I still believe strongly that single use plastics are used more than is absolutely necessary.  That we should not be wasting energy recycling something that we wasted energy in creating in the first instance.  And so the debate will go on.  

REFERENCES:

Andrady, A. L., & Neal, M. A. (2009). Applications and societal benefits of plastics. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 364(1526), 1977-1984. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2008.0304

Jambeck, J. R., Geyer, R., Wilcox, C., Siegler, T. R., Perryman, M., Andrady, A., … Law, K.L. (2015). Plastic waste inputs from land into the ocean. Science, 347(6223), 768-771.  doi: 10.1126/science.1260352

Jambeck, J. R., Geyer, R., Wilcox, C., Siegler, T. R., Perryman, M., Andrady, A., … Law, K.L. (2015). Plastic waste inputs from land into the ocean: Data S1 [Supplementary Table]. Science, 347(6223), 768-771.  Retrieved from http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6223/768/suppl/DC1