8 November 2018

Deadly Smog Covers Much of India This Morning.

Posted by Dan Satterfield

The smog in Delhi has reached near toxic levels this morning. Current air quality readings have reached a level labeled “Extremely Hazardous. This smog is being greatly aggravated by the autumn burning of fields and fireworks from the Diwali festival. The BBC reports that efforts to get residents to not set off the gunpowder failed. The results are clearly visible from space.

NASA Terra Satellite in true colour. Click image for larger version.

This will be a killer smog event.

NASA Terra satellite. Note how widespread the dense smog is over the Indian Subcontinent. Environmental pollution always hits the poor the hardest, and this is true from hazardous oil refinery pollution in Louisiana and Mississippi to Delhi.

A visual picture of the intense need to switch to clean energy and away from fossil fuels. Burning coal and oil shortens lives and we now have the technology to leave them in the ground. We had better do so because we are now dangerously interfering with our once stable climate.
There is some good news this week: Com January, the new head of the House Science Committee in Washington will be someone who accepts that the world is over 100,000 years old. The last one (just re-elected) refused to believe the basic science about that and almost everything else in every 7th-grade science book around the world.

Let’s celebrate that at least.