#particulatepollution — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #particulatepollution, aggregated by home.social.
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We can't breathe
The Invisible #ClimateChange Effect That Is Most Likely to Kill You
#AirPollution is less dramatic than floods or storms, less inconvenient, and much harder to politicize. It’s also much more deadly.
Liza Featherstone, August 1, 2025
Excerpt: "In #NewYorkCity, I’m lucky enough to enjoy better air quality than many other places. We are only the fiftieth most #polluted city in the world, way behind #Chicago, #Dubai, #Jakarta, #Delhi, and numerous (enormously populous) cities in #China. But for a few days early this week, it was hard to breathe and our phones were buzzing with alerts warning that the most vulnerable—the very young and the very old, and those with poor respiratory health—should stay indoors, due to smoke from Canadian wildfires. But the elderly, the asthmatic, and the babies weren’t the only ones feeling it; my son, a college soccer player, got headaches training outside, as did his friends—all fellow rain-or-shine athletes. Yet for the most part, the problem has gone unremarked.
"Compared to a flood, a fire, or a heat wave, a bad #AirQualityAlert isn’t that inconvenient even when it’s happening. You can still go to work and otherwise go about your day. If you own property, it won’t be damaged. And because #AirPollution lacks visuals, it doesn’t lend itself to morbid #doomscrolling or panicked media coverage.
"Yet compared to floods, fires, and heat waves, bad air is much more deadly. In fact, the danger is barely even comparable. The World Health Organization estimates that air pollution kills about seven million people every year. The direct death toll from heat waves is under half a million, although that’s getting worse. The number of people who die in floods annually is in the thousands, and the direct death toll from wildfires is much smaller than that, though these threats are also getting worse. "
#AirQualityAlert #AirQuality #AirQualityIndex #AQI #AirPollution #AirIsLife #ParticulatePollution #ParticlePollution
