I’ve been doing the same commute between West L.A. and El Segundo for almost nine years, and before that either Culver City or the area around Fairfax and Washington. And, during the late 1990s and early 2000s I had begun to notice that those days of ugly brown haze had actually become rather rare. Most days, it seemed, as I drove home on the 405 I could clearly see the observatory domes and the Hollywood sign, and in the past such days were rare. Now those days are becoming rare again, and I’m wondering why. Sure, there are more people coming in all the time, but I didn’t think it was that many more. Are pollution controls being relaxed? Are there more people driving illegal vehicles that couldn’t pass the smog test? Or does smog increase with a gradually warming climate?
You folks had a wicked wildfire that was contained fairly quickly but generated beaucoups smoke on Friday, April 20. In the short term, this might be a contributing factor.
The fire started up the hill from the Warner Bros. lot. Sure was something. I watched it as I drove west on the 210 past Pasadena towards Glendale.
Cartooniverse
Maybe it’s your eyesight getting worse?
More vehicles and bigger engines are offsetting the previous gains from emission restrictions. California has slipped from being ahead of the world in emission restrictions to falling behind (Europe, at least), because they haven’t tightened them since the early 90s IIRC.
A hotter world will make it worse but that will not have caused any visible effect yet.
It seems to me that this past rainy season was much lighter than in previous years. I wonder if that’s true–and if so, maybe that has something to do with it? Less rain to pull the smog out of the sky?
Cite?
I can tell you that California’s smog requirements for cars have gotten a lot stricter over the last 15 years. At current time California’s and Sweden’s smog regs for cars are very similar if not the same.
In addition, emissions controls have reduced across the board. Even a big American V8 SUV is putting out barely 10% of unburnt hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides of what a compact car built in 1980 was exhausting. Carbon oxides (CO, CO[sub]2[/sub]) are going to be worse, all things being equal, for a vehicle with a larger engine than a smaller one by virtue of burning more fuel, but these don’t contribute to low hanging smog.
Stranger
Actually as engine controls have gotten more exact CO levels have gone down, way down. CO2 has gone up, but from a smog point of view this is good. More CO2= less CO.
We did actually have–actually still are having–some major fires in L.A. which I was unaware of when I posted the OP. Yesterday driving in I noticed a particularly thick and ugly brown layer, but it appears it was mostly smoke.
Yeah, the Griffith Park fire yesterday was nasty.
I heard yesterday that LA is back to the #1 most polluted city in the nation (no official cite, just something I head on drive time radio). So something must be going on because we had been dropping down that list for a number of years. (I can’t believe we have worse air than Houston :smack: ) I wonder if our lack of rain this year is the cause.
It is nothing like the 70’s, when we would be breathing through wet washcloths and the air still hurt your lungs.
Bolding mine, and that’s quite the understatement. Not only is it lighter than previous seasons, but we’re very much on track to have the lowest rainfall totals on record since such records were kept (1877, I believe). The figures are something like 14+ inches being a normal amount of rainfall in a season versus a total of just over 3 inches recorded so far this season.
I’m trying to find a cite for this, but I’m hitting a wall so far. However, they’ve mentioned this on the local news almost daily for the past several months.
I’ve heard that too; I think it’s mainly population growth, as well as more people who don’t actually live in L.A. but are driving in every workday. Given the fact that L.A. has been experiencing negative net domestic migration, one can conclude that most of the increase in popuation consists of poor immigrants, which, I suspect, may be a factor in the kind of cars that are being added to the roads. Old cars pollute more.
Oh, and I forgot to add this- that was at the beach, not in some inland valley… :eek:
Yes, I overstated; they don’t seem to have changed since 2000/2001 rather than the early 90s (my ever fallible memory at work again):
I’m talking about road vehicle emission controls and fuel consumption mandated at build-time rather than things like residential waste burning, etc, which they do seem to have been making progress on.
Now I am really confused. Residential waste burning has not been allowed in Los Angeles since the late 1950’s. I know that, I grew up here then. Pretty much all the progress we are going to make about residential burning was made about 50 years ago.
Smog controls are all required at build time, I have no clue as to what your point is.
The state of California has never mandated fuel mileage numbers, that is CAFE which is a federal requirement.
You cite shows 2001 as the last change, what it does not show is that in those pieces of legislation are time lines for increasing tight requirements. Systems that were legal and worked under the 2001 regulations are not sensitive enough and do not meet the 2005 requirements. For example, in 2001 our leakage detection systems would find and trip a check engine light for a leak that was 1 mm or larger. In 2005 that requirement was 0.5 mm.
I can tell you that at our factory when they started testing the PZEV California cars they had to buy new test equipment, the old stuff was not sensitive enough to show anything but straight zeros for emissions levels.
I had a slide in one of my emission presentations that showed the different allowable maximums for HC CO and NOX. The overall shape is a large rectangle. Inside that were smaller and smaller rectangles. at the very bottom is a very small box That tiny box which is about 1/10 the size of the big box is the current PZEV requirements. The big box is the 1993/4 tier 1 requirements.
The kicker is at the bottom of that tiny box there is a base line that goes like this:
****__
The fat part that line is the emissions level of a PZEV car when it is shipped from the factory.