Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s in the valley and because Polish state is kinda weak they cannot enforce nearby villages to stop burning garbage to heat their homes.
at least try to hide your racism
I’m Polish, I don’t have to hide anything.
Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide
141–150 of 158 posts
Re: Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide
#142I used to live in Gdansk, and later Gdynia, and let me tell you - as soon as it's cold outside, people burn all kinds of shit at home, the air's so thick you can practically cut it with a knife. We theorized that the smog's mainly from residential burning of coal, but of course who know's what's in the stove. All I know, is that it smells really unhealthy, and the smoke coming out of houses is a deep, black colour, a…
I live in Germany and when I see a Diesel car with black smoke coming out of the exhaust pipe it turns always out to be a Pole who removed the soot filter to save some Cents of Diesel.
Re: Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are people not aware that is absolutely terrible for their health?
Freezing to death is even more terrible for their health. It's also much more immediate. And so is being poor. Breathing dust and smoke is a minor inconvenience in comparison. Any negative health effects will become noticeable in decades if at all. Doesn't help that most of the people responsible likely remember themselves or their parents breathing even worse stuff most their lives, with no ill effect being seen. He…
I understand keeping warm, but the idea of burning garbage seems like there could have been many steps to avoid that. Raiding nearby forests. Finding scrap wood. Informal charcoal industry. I guess the trash is "free" and "effortless" but I don't understand how the smell alone doesn't put people off. I guess it has been going on so long to be normalized.
Re: Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Freezing to death is even more terrible for their health. It's also much more immediate. And so is being poor. Breathing dust and smoke is a minor inconvenience in comparison. Any negative health effects will become noticeable in decades if at all. Doesn't help that most of the people responsible likely remember themselves or their parents breathing even worse stuff most their lives, with no ill effect being seen. He…
It's not just poverty, but education about pollution and a common view in the post-communist countries that the common good (clean air in this case) isn't so important. It's the same with things like noise or graffitis for instance. In Latvia you commonly see rich people with BMW SUVs behaving like this. My friends see no problem with having coal barbecue or very heavy music in the center of Riga. We often have to re…
I wonder why post communist countries lagged behind so much in this regard? Seems like this awareness only really hit the US in the late 90s and early to mid 2000s, well after the iron curtain came down. I guess mass media must have been still siloed by language and there might not have been much english language media presence by that point sharing these ideas.
Re: Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Polish coal is said to have a high sulphur content which won't help either.
Sulfur can counteract warming (although not the carbon dioxide itself obviously). There was a brief period, right before the world stepped back from releasing sulfur into the atmosphere, when our carbon dioxide emissions were completely countered by our sulfur emissions, when it comes to global temperatures only.
Sulphur produces acid rain though, which is bad news.
Re: Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
They burn all kind of shit in very inefficient stoves, modern wood burning stoves are pretty clean
If the somehow-trendy wood-burning stove a friend has recently had installed in the UK is anything to go by — and it was expensive — then "pretty clean" is relative. The air stinks outside his house, and the air stinks inside his house. I don't understand the appeal at all. I was shocked on a recent trip to England where there was the smell of wood smoke in suburbia.
> I don't understand the appeal at all.
Renewable energy, one of the cheapest source of heat kwh/$, doesn't require electricity to function, cheap to buy/install if the place was designed for it, &c. I'm building right now and my main heater will be a wood stove.
If the air stinks both inside and outside of his house I would assume he's doing something wrong, even my cheap cottage fireplace insert from the 80s doesn't smoke the inside of my house.
Re: Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's an interesting coping mechanism (verging on the conspiracy theory) popular on some Polish forums, namely that the abysmal data comes from abundance of sensors combined with them being placed (by whom and why? here's where the conspiracy part kicks in) in the most polluted spots. Here's a debunk by a popular Polish fact checking portal (in Polish): https://demagog.org.pl/analizy_i_raporty/smog-nie-taki-zly-j..…
Until recently, I've been a smog-skeptic; I figured it must be an overblown issue, as regardless of what the digital sensors and pretty graphs say, having spent almost my entire life in Kraków, I never saw it, never felt it. Still don't. Air in Kraków feels perfectly fine to me. And every time I saw someone complain, it was because of "see the PM2.5 PM10 thru the roof omg zomg!", not any actual health-related issues…
To be frank, having a poorly functioning sense of smell is not exactly a great excuse for ignorance. Are you rejecting everything that you can't verify with your (or your relatives') senses?
Re: Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
The placebo effect is wonderful, isn't it?
"Open fire with the products ending up in the room has no negative influence on the air quality in the room" is the hypothesis you failed to prove.
Did you read the part in their paper where they were only able to measure any change in air quality by taping up all the vents and sealing the room, and then actually burning food in the pan?
How often do you cook in a completely sealed airtight box?
Re: Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sulfur can counteract warming (although not the carbon dioxide itself obviously). There was a brief period, right before the world stepped back from releasing sulfur into the atmosphere, when our carbon dioxide emissions were completely countered by our sulfur emissions, when it comes to global temperatures only.
Sulphur produces acid rain though, which is bad news.
Yup.
Re: Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's an interesting coping mechanism (verging on the conspiracy theory) popular on some Polish forums, namely that the abysmal data comes from abundance of sensors combined with them being placed (by whom and why? here's where the conspiracy part kicks in) in the most polluted spots. Here's a debunk by a popular Polish fact checking portal (in Polish): https://demagog.org.pl/analizy_i_raporty/smog-nie-taki-zly-j..…
Until recently, I've been a smog-skeptic; I figured it must be an overblown issue, as regardless of what the digital sensors and pretty graphs say, having spent almost my entire life in Kraków, I never saw it, never felt it. Still don't. Air in Kraków feels perfectly fine to me. And every time I saw someone complain, it was because of "see the PM2.5 PM10 thru the roof omg zomg!", not any actual health-related issues…
Actually, if the PM2.5 and PM10 are high, you can see it very easily.
If you can't see it, that means the air isn't polluted. Obviously some people confuse fog with smog, or can't see haze in some situations (failure to see).
But it's always there and always visible. You can't have pollutions at that scale and not see them.