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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

#71

Post by TeMPOraL »

praptak wrote: post #56
jve wrote: post #44

Woah, most of Poland looks... bad https://www.google.com/maps/place/Krak%C3%B3w,+Poland/@50.47...

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 or discomfort.

What changed my mind about the whole thing was my kids. I may not feel the particulates in the air, but my kids do, especially my eldest daughter (who has early childhood asthma, in remission) - winter comes, particulates go up, they start coughing uncontrollably all day. Particulates go down, suddenly they're healthy again (+/- running nose).

I have limited sympathy for conspiracy theories, and very little for those burning trash in their homes, but I do understand where the smog-skepticism comes from. I still remember when Krakowski Alarm Smogowy became a thing, winter 2012; back then, this felt like a huge fad pushed by young activists on the Internet.

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

#72

Post by Tade0 »

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?…

It's people from surrounding areas who are experiencing energy poverty. City buildings typically have either central heating or gas furnaces.

A common sight in my area at this time of the year is a senior person driving up to a community dumpster in an equally old car with plates indicating not being from around here and looking for loose pieces of wood - typically furniture.

The sale of furnaces that would even fit something like this for burning was banned in IIRC 2018, but there's a backlog of still functioning ones that are used.

Anyone trying this in a city would have the authorities called on them, but deep in rural areas few care.

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

#73

Post by brokegrammer »

rfarley04 wrote: post #62

I live in Bangkok and we also get inversions during the "cold" (for Thailand haha) season, the same time that farms slash and burn, making this the worst time of year for our air quality as well. It's much better this year but incredibly hard to police since officials often don't have jurisdiction where the pm2.5 originated, before getting trapped in the inversion

How long have you lived in BKK for, and has your health deteriorated because of the pollution?

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

#74

Post by jwr »

exitb wrote: post #26

Few years ago Kraków has forbidden the use of solid fuels which improved the situation significantly. Days like today are happening much less often since then. Moreover, Kraków has probably one of the densest network of pollution sensors in the world, which is why we talk about it at all. There are places in Poland that are much worse off, but there's not that much data to back it up.

I might be wrong, but I thought the situation in Kraków improved significantly several years ago due to the efforts of local administration, so much that we were jealous here in Warsaw. Has it worsened again since then?

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

#75

Post by Youden »

The page only lists 126 cities, with the bottom three having an AQI of 0.

So the editorialized title is incorrect. It's not "top 5 worst air quality worldwide", it's only top 5 in this list, which is a small subset of the world's cities.

It's a Swiss company but even Switzerland's largest city, Zürich, is missing.

China sure as hell has more than 8 cities and Russia more than 2.

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

#76

Post by dmos62 »

Symbiote wrote: post #55
lm28469 wrote: post #23

Earlier 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.

Fancy is subjective, but I wouldn't call a burner whose air is fed from the inside fancy. Even if you have a good chimney, but your burner interfaces with the inside air, presuming the house is relatively air-tight (built in the last 15 years), you'll get smoke inside when you use it, especially while the chimney is cold, because there won't be enough draft to pull the smoke out of the house. Where I am it is forbidden to have such burners in a new construction.

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

#77

Post by dmytrokow »

exitb wrote: post #26

Few years ago Kraków has forbidden the use of solid fuels which improved the situation significantly. Days like today are happening much less often since then. Moreover, Kraków has probably one of the densest network of pollution sensors in the world, which is why we talk about it at all. There are places in Poland that are much worse off, but there's not that much data to back it up.

> improved the situation significantly

That's just yet another coping mechanism, I believe.

I lived in Krakow in ~2015, and live there now. It's the same. It smells the same, it looks the same, the polution levels are the same, and the number of days like today in a year is the same.

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

#79

Post by rfarley04 »

brokegrammer wrote: post #73
rfarley04 wrote: post #62

I live in Bangkok and we also get inversions during the "cold" (for Thailand haha) season, the same time that farms slash and burn, making this the worst time of year for our air quality as well. It's much better this year but incredibly hard to police since officials often don't have jurisdiction where the pm2.5 originated, before getting trapped in the inversion

How long have you lived in BKK for, and has your health deteriorated because of the pollution?

I've been here since 2015 with the pm2.5 getting noticably worse from 2017 onwards. Hard to tie it to any degradation in health. I have air purifiers at home and wear N95 whenever I go out and it's bad. I know there were a few big studies around the prevalence of cancer rates that correlated with the pollution getting worse in China. But I'm not nearly qualified enough to comment on or vet those

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

#80

Post by jillesvangurp »

We got a whiff of that in Berlin a few weeks ago when we got some cold wind from the east. Really noticeably bad air quality when I went outside to enjoy the snow and the cold. When I checked the map, I saw that we are basically getting Poland's pollution blowing our way. Most of the time the winds blow from the west and it's fine. Berlin has a bit of traffic but not a lot of coal plants or industry. It would be better if it got rid of a lot of the heavy diesel traffic in the city. That's slowly happening. But it's not that bad here most of the time.

The point of pollution is that it stinks (literally) and is bad for your health. Pollution kills people, shortens expected life times by years, causes respiratory issues for children, etc. Those are some good reasons to do something about it. There are good alternatives to coal at this point. Mostly this is just inefficient legacy infrastructure that we pay extra for to keep going to "protect jobs". From a macro economic point of view, that stopped making sense quite some time ago. Which is why coal plants are going extinct in a lot of places.

Even gas plants are a big improvement. I think of them as a stop gap solution that might be economically risky long term. Wind, solar, and batteries are cheaper. Maybe with some nuclear here and there (expensive but clean). However, gas plants are undeniably a pragmatic compromise between cost and polluting. Unlike nuclear they are easy to switch off when not needed and can act as a fallback solution when wind/solar fall short in the winter. LNG is not cheap though and that makes gas plants long term risky as renewables plus batteries marginalizes their use to the point where they are deeply unprofitable.

There's a base load argument that often pops up in these discussions. Gas plants are nice because they can be switched off. Base load is basically the type of power that is expensive to switch off. Mainly coal and nuclear. This is actually problematic in a grid with a lot of intermittent power supply (wind/solar). Dispatchability is more important. Gas power is good because it is rapidly dispatchable. Batteries act as a buffer and minimize the need for gas plants to run.

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