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Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide

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Re: Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide

#31

Post by nephihaha »

timeon wrote: post #13
fragebogen wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming a large contributing factor is all the coal plants now running to sustain Germany's independence from nuclear? Berlin's air quality has also tanked a lot since the energy crisis started.

Why would you jump to this conclusion? I wonder why some people on internet are repeating narratives like drones. Poland has largest use of coal in EU. Czechia and Germany are behind. Poland is including energy from sun and wind now a lot but there is still long way. Unlike surrounding countries they never had nuclear for some reason. https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/PL/live/

Polish coal is said to have a high sulphur content which won't help either.

Re: Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide

#32

Post by scotty79 »

fragebogen wrote: post #4
danduma wrote: post #2

But... how?

Assuming a large contributing factor is all the coal plants now running to sustain Germany's independence from nuclear? Berlin's air quality has also tanked a lot since the energy crisis started.

Berlin's air quality is on par with what you find in the middle of the forest in Poland. I've done my measurements in both places.

Re: Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide

#33

Post by inglor_cz »

nephihaha wrote: post #27
inglor_cz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL, Slavic humor at its best :) I live in Ostrava, some 160 km away. Entire Upper Silesia is a bad place for air quality in winter, it can often be seen on continental maps as a sore red spot. Fortunately most of the coal burning is gone, but individual people still burn all sorts of shit in their homes. PET bottles etc.

Is it in a valley?

The official term is a Basin:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostrava_Basin

We tend to suffer from "inversions" here, and way back in the coal times, the air quality used to be comparable to London during the Great Smog of 1953. Nowadays it is better, but still quite bad compared to rest of Europe.

In December 2024, I traveled from Ostrava to Warsaw and back via train, so through both Czech and Polish Upper Silesia. The Silesian part of the journey was a pea-souper, like riding through a yellowish cloud. (Warsaw itself had crisp chilly air.)

Re: Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide

#35

Post by madjam002 »

dmos62 wrote: post #30
melting_snow wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Burning coal and wood wouldn't be that bad. Unfortunately its quite common that people burn their trash

Not sure what your gauge for bad is, but low-temperature burning of coal and wood, which is what you get with cheap wood heaters, produces smoke that is definitely polluting and unhealthy. You can get a wood burner that re-burns well and is very efficient and burns the smoke so completely that you mostly get CO2 and water vapor coming out of the chimney, but they're expensive. Care to share more about trash burning?…

I was travelling a lot a couple of days ago across the countryside just outside of Krakow, and people are definitely burning plastics and trash, you can smell it even inside your car in the early hours of the morning.

It's coming from the surrounding areas, not the city itself.

Re: Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide

#36

Post by my_throwaway23 »

I 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, almost like oil.

Re: Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide

#37

Post by krige »

dmos62 wrote: post #17

Warsaw is top 15, Krakow and Warsaw are the only European cities in the top 15. For some added context, it's around -10 degrees celcius there right now. I don't know why Poland stands out here, but I know that older residential areas burn wood (in other Eastern European countries as well), because that's just how you heat an old house: these neigbourhoods are horrible to walk through in winter, because the air just s…

On top of the trash burning, there's also the fact that Krakow is in a valley so all that pollution just stays in (probably for the better /s)

Re: Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide

#38

Post by scotty79 »

nephihaha wrote: post #31
timeon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you jump to this conclusion? I wonder why some people on internet are repeating narratives like drones. Poland has largest use of coal in EU. Czechia and Germany are behind. Poland is including energy from sun and wind now a lot but there is still long way. Unlike surrounding countries they never had nuclear for some reason. https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/PL/live/

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.

Re: Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide

#39

Post by Gravityloss »

lm28469 wrote: post #23
melting_snow wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Burning coal and wood wouldn't be that bad. Unfortunately its quite common that people burn their trash

They burn all kind of shit in very inefficient stoves, modern wood burning stoves are pretty clean

I wonder how expensive it would be to get widespread usage of better stoves, heat pumps or co-generation + district heating with centralized gasified burning. Everything could be locally built.

I don't know about electricity prices there either.

Gas for heating is something every European nation should steer clear from, for strategic reasons.

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