New Delhi Air Pollution Forces Public Health Emergency as Chief Minister Compares City to a 'Gas Chamber'

Suffocating smog forced the Indian capital of New Delhi, a city of more than 21 million people, to declare a public health emergency on Tuesday.
As a thick grey haze settled on the city, the government announced Wednesday morning that schools would be closed for the rest of the week as air pollution worsened and criticism escalated over Indian government's failure to curb pollution levels.
By Wednesday afternoon, the U.S. embassy air pollution tracker said the level of PM 2.5—tiny particulate matter that enter the lungs and bloodstream—reached 1010 AQI. Any PM 2.5 level from 301 to 500 is considered "hazardous" to the general population, according to the U.S. embassy tracker.
Pollution trackers are showing that smog has reached its most dangerous level of the year, making the air more detrimental to human health than smoking 50 cigarettes a day, according to health officials.
"Delhi has become a gas chamber," chief minister of Delhi, Arvin Kejriwal tweeted.
"Every year this happens during this part of year," Kejriwal continued, referring to smoke caused by crop burning in the northern Indian states neighboring Delhi.
Delhi has become a gas chamber. Every year this happens during this part of year. We have to find a soln to crop burning in adjoining states— Arvind Kejriwal (@Arvind Kejriwal)1510036188.0
Each year farmers in the northern states of Haryana, Punjab and Rajasthan burn millions of tons of crop waste in October to clear the land for winter planting. An estimated 35 million tons of crops are burned every year in Punjab and Haryana, contributing to New Delhi's smog.
Vehicle emissions, dust from construction sites and industrial pollution also contribute to the crisis.
Last November saw similarly high levels of pollution, the worst in nearly 20 years, which forced a million children to miss school and caused thousands of workers to report illnesses.
"Every possible step required to tackle the situation has been already identified, and the need of the hour is to put them into action," federal Environment Minister Harsh Vardhan wrote on Twitter.
The air quality in New Delhi is likely to worsen in the coming days. A northwesterly wind is expected to blow in toxic smoke from burnt crops in Punjab and Haryana as farmers prepare for winter planting.
Emergency measures are now being considered, according to Delhi's deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia. The government banned the entry of trucks into the capital and may suspend all construction activities if the pollution levels rise further.
In October, the Environment Pollution (Prevention and Control) Authority (EPCA) ordered the shutdown of diesel generators and a power plant. It also ordered that some brick kilns and trash burning cease.
On Tuesday, the EPCA also recommended raising parking fees for private vehicles by four times, inside the capital's city limits.
A recent report by the Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health that looked at data from 2015 found that pollution led to 2.5 million deaths in India alone.
The report concluded that in 2015 pollution killed nine million people worldwide—about one in six deaths—three times more than AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined.
Of those nine million deaths, air pollution was linked to 6.5 million of them. The vast majority of these deaths occurred in developing countries.
Air Pollution Kills 9 Million, Costs $5 Trillion Per Year https://t.co/tnehcjNhiK @greenpeaceusa @Sierra_Magazine— EcoWatch (@EcoWatch)1508544052.0
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The speed and scale of the response to COVID-19 by governments, businesses and individuals seems to provide hope that we can react to the climate change crisis in a similarly decisive manner - but history tells us that humans do not react to slow-moving and distant threats.
A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
<p>As well as devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world, melting polar ice could set off another tipping point: a disablement to the AMOC.</p><p>This circulation system drives a northward flow of warm, salty water on the upper layers of the ocean from the tropics to the northeast Atlantic region, and a southward flow of cold water deep in the ocean.</p><p>The ocean conveyor belt has a major effect on the climate, seasonal cycles and temperature in western and northern Europe. It means the region is warmer than other areas of similar latitude.</p><p>But melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet could threaten the AMOC system. It would dilute the salty sea water in the north Atlantic, making the water lighter and less able or unable to sink. This would slow the engine that drives this ocean circulation.</p><p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/atlantic-conveyor-belt-has-slowed-15-per-cent-since-mid-twentieth-century" target="_blank">Recent research</a> suggests the AMOC has already weakened by around 15% since the middle of the 20th century. If this continues, it could have a major impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere, but particularly Europe. It may even lead to the <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/39731?show=full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cessation of arable farming</a> in the UK, for instance.</p><p>It may also reduce rainfall over the Amazon basin, impact the monsoon systems in Asia and, by bringing warm waters into the Southern Ocean, further destabilize ice in Antarctica and accelerate global sea level rise.</p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major effect on the climate. Praetorius (2018)
Is it Time to Declare a Climate Emergency?
<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
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