San Francisco and Portland Ranked Most Polluted Major Cities in the World (Live) | Hacker News Reader

San Francisco and Portland Ranked Most Polluted Major Cities in the World (Live)

iqair.com

14 points0x2a21 comments

Probably worth adjusting the title -- air quality is not just a measure of pollution. In this case, both SF and Portland are filled (unfortunately) with wildfire smoke, rather than a man-made pollutant...

Why do you want the title adjusted? It’s sadly just a fact that the air pollution is bad in SF today.

If bad air pollution is caused by factories do people in those towns come and make similar arguments?

because the title is no longer correct? it's no longer the worst. not denying that pollution is bad in SF.

That’s just semantics, it was the worst very recently?

I assumed the title meant man-made pollutants. That's colloquially what pollution refers to. It's pretty clearly misleading.

the fire was man-made

Is smoke not considered a pollutant? The list is just a ranking of current PM2.5 AQI levels.

Generally when people are talking about pollutants they're talking about man made pollutants.

As climate change was a key driver of these fires and those in Australia earlier this year, then I feel like it's perfectly reasonable to say this is man made pollution.

Coal and oil are also a "natural" fuels, but we burn those too and we say it's man made pollution.

WHO includes smoke in their overview page on air pollution as does Wikipedia.

- https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution#Sources

Most smoke that is air pollution is caused by farmers burning crops.

You can include smoke in air pollution numbers, while not considering wild fires to be pollution.

this isn't an accurate title at all. And at the time i clicked the link, SF isn't even #1 anymore... Portland is.

its just a list of cities sorted by their Air Quality Index and has very little to do with pollution.

Well, since there's a major forest fire nearby...

It's like saying my fireplace is the scene of one of the hottest temperatures on the planet (updated live)...

38 mins after this was posted it looks like Portland passed San Francisco by. Portland is at 220, SF is at 181.

Yea - the title of the article is definitely a click bait. If the positions are going to switch so fast, there is no point in calling that out.

Updated title to include Portland.

It's been fluctuating throughout the day. PurpleAir is showing even worse levels in SF currently (over 300 US PM2.5 AQI).

- https://www.purpleair.com/map?opt=1/mAQI/a10/cC0&select=5435...

- https://i.imgur.com/9N6ua2G.png (screenshot)

The wildfires are wrecking havoc for the air across California.

I would say a more interesting data point there is that Jakarta air pollution on a normal day is the same as San Francisco air pollution on a historic wildfire day.

SF air pollution levels on an average day is very low.

Came here to exactly say this, living your life in a non-emergency situation in some parts of the world like Delhi is close to current living conditions in the Bay Area (+surrounding states) under unprecedented wild fire in the modern history!

Now let that sink in :(

emergency is becomingly unfortunately normalized with regards to wild fires in the western part of the country. also, “living your life” infers a generalized comparison and if that’s the case you must consider the destructive impact (homes/businesses) of the fire that lives on well beyond the actual event. - bad air quality from pollution isn’t destructive in that manner

Reply on news.ycombinator.com