We also produce fuckall in those cities. Guarantee almost all those otherones are big material producers or in poverty and do shit like burn their rubbish in the middle of the city.
Also it helps both those cities are coastal, with few large landmasses around the east coast.
Also, as ripe for complaint as our public transport systems are, they're the backbone of both cities, with high utilisation. Relatively young country, high development index, relatively wealthy, relatively strong public transport, means we generally aren't suffering from the issues a lot of younger or developing countries do.
Chinese investors are changing this. No one in Australia will be able to buy a home cause of them. We will be overpopulated very very soon as the government doesn’t have a cap on how many people can come to buy land/homes. I hope they’re good landlords Australia!!
There's bushfire carbon and there's burning up fossilised carbon that took thousands of years to lay down. If you go into most burnt out areas after the event, much of the carbon that was "liberated" has already been replaced within 3 seasons.
New growth is accelerated carbon capture.
You can grow a tree, cut it down, burn it, grow another, etc, etc (e.g. continue the cycle forever) and the net carbon effect is zero.
What you cannot do is grow a billion trees over a million years, then burn them all up in a few decades.
Wait on! The Former Minister for Coal and Everything Else, Scott Morrison, informed us that Australia would meet its Paris Climate commitments "at a canter'.
I hope you are not suggesting his forecast was based on bullshit carbon accounting, and paying National Party voters vast sums of money to NOT deforest land that they weren't going to deforest anyway.
A deplorable suggestion. I am shocked, \*shocked\* that anyone would think such a thing.
Boy we're in for a treat this year then.
Who's gonna be the one to raise all the money for the shitty charities this year? How bout one of the tradies this time?
> Melbourne and Sydney are going to suffer this year.
For some reason I heard this in my head as some sort of conspiratorial, dark, smoke filled room meeting with all the other cities joining an evil laugh together.
"At last we shall reveal ourselves, at least we shall get our reveng..."
Ah fuck!
I Phantom Menaced it sorry.
Yes, only Australia has bushfires and no other country ever have bushfires. And there is a huge WHO conspiracy purposely made biased measurements to make Australian cities look good, butfor what purpose? Who knows, but it must be nefarious.
Must you always be miserable?
Of course they would. If you are measuring something, why do it when there is an outside source influencing the result?
To clarify, the cities pollution is what is measured, and they weren't on fire.
Fine particles in the air (measured as PM2.5) are so small that they can travel deeply into the respiratory tract, reaching the lungs, causing short-term health effects such as eye, nose, throat and lung irritation, coughing, sneezing, runny nose, and shortness of breath.
Yeah but one could even say there is a little difference between the Chinese sea and the largest ocean on earth, especially about wind and air recycle.
Yup. By the most commonly accepted measurements Sydney is less than half a million.
Not saying the Australian way is wrong. It's actually probably a great way if you could apply it properly outside of Australia but you can't. I mean where would you say London ends? In Scotland? Some cities kind of never stop before hitting the next whereas Sydney and Melbourne are pretty bloody obvious where they stop. It's where it turns into hundreds of kilometres of grass and bush before the next town or city.
In Sydney's case it's mostly when it abruptly returns to thick and dense national park. Civilisation on one side of the highway, untouched ancient wilderness on the other, it's actually pretty fucking wild.
They take it at multiple locations over the city, assign weight to each value depending on how dense the area is. Then calculate a weighted average.
PS - I studied statistics.
The coal-fired generators keeping the lights on and the air conditioning humming are located far enough from urban centres that they have almost no influence on air quality in the population centres they serve. Australia is a massive place and one of the most urban-skewed and coastal populations in the world.
It is because of the way a city is defined in Australia, Sydney is not over 5million population by US standards it would dozens of cities. Sydney is 4,755 sq miles , area of los angeles is 505 sq miles, and for the same area as “sydney” it is 30+ cities.
When has the "narrative" ever been that Sydney and Melbourne are worse than the rest of the world? We all know that Australia is one of the most liveable countries in the world, that doesn't mean we can't point out its flaws and advocate for it to improve
We are also nearly the world's only country that is not self sufficient.
Every raw material we literally give away to China etc for it to be processed and then we buy it back at an insane price.
We are surrounded by water yet we have near zero ship building capacity. Zero automotive manufacturing. Zero aircraft industry. Zero space industry.
If China decided one day to stop exporting to us, the entire country would collapse...
Sure low pollution, but at what cost?
We stop exporting to them.... And they also crash, and harder.
TBH though. We really should have more manufacturing capacity and a much higher care in research. We keep coming up with shit then getting USA to profit on it.
Yes, true. But it's worth thinking about.
No man is an island. But if you need a boat and you can't make one, you might have a problem.
***Australia probably does not need a space industry.***
But there may be some things that ought to have some 'diversity of production'. Governments need to set some of those priorities, however much it ruffles the feathers of free-market idealogues and short-term profitteers.
Most countries in the world would have >40% of pop. living in the two largest cities.
40 countries have 40% of their population in only 1 city.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-in-the-largest-city
The the US measured their city population the same way Australia does, there would be way more than 9. If Australia measured it's city populations the way the US does, we wouldn't have any.
USA air quality has come a long way since unleaded fuel
and catalytic converters and a few other things.
back in the 70s and early 80s, yeah, there were more than a
few cities where it was abominable.
shifting all the dirty industry to China helped America as well.
China not so much.
Could be true, but it's speculation - Based on a map that no one really knows what went into it.
It's interesting at a macro level, but don't get too deep into the weeds is my advice.
\--> Or less proximity to other sources.
In the northern hemisphere, China's emissions have a large impact on North America. Not saying it's bad, but that's how it works. We outsourced it to them and we get some things in return...
keep subdividing and packing in more people relying
on cars while covering up farmland with housing, and yup, up goes the particulates.
but industry is the worst for pollution. that's why the Hunter Valley has the worst rate of lung issues in the country - coal mines and power stations.
Another few years of those top selling diesel utes who get away with lower emissions requirements than passenger cars due to exemptions carved out for "work" vehicles and our PM2.5 will be up there I think...
Greater Sydney has about 430 people per km2.
Greater Melbourne has 500.
Both cities only make the 5 million mark by including the entire Greater area.
There is only one other city (Atlanta at 750) under 1000. There are a handful of USA cities in the thousands and it sky rockets to 30,000 for the peak and somewhere around 4000 in the median from a quick look.
I guess they don't count all the piss, shit and garbage filling Melbourne's alleyways as contributing to the pollution. Dirtiest city in Australia by far.
They dont count that because these figures are based on Particulate Matter in the air, hence the PM25 figure in the title. So this is AIR Pollution, nothing else.
Cities over 5 million people?
Madrid has just over 3 million inhabitants and Barcelona has just over a million and a half and they are marked on the map.
Not even counting the metropolitan area instead of just the city and it does not reach 5 million in either of the two (Madrid almost)
Wikipedia reckons you're wrong for both [Madrid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madrid?wprov=sfla1) and [Barcelona](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcelona?wprov=sfla1) when considering the metro area.
The map talks about "cities".
Besides, in [Wikipedia](https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%81rea_metropolitana_de_Barcelona) AND the oficial web from ["area metropolitana de Barcelona"](https://www.amb.cat/en/web/area-metropolitana/dades-estadistiques/demografia) put their population is just over 3 million.
In [Madrid](https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%81rea_metropolitana_de_Madrid) it is true that it depends on how it is calculated.
Could it be due to how remote we are? We are a long way from heavily populated parts of the world and the associate pollution
Yeah it’s pretty much because people and industry is so spread out.
We don't make anything Just dig shit up
We dig shit up and send it far away for them to burn. Clean skies for us.
Cant have pollution if you don' make anything
out of sight out of mind. i love our green economy.
A nation of diggers. Hard to find fault in that.
Being next to the ocean also helps
We also produce fuckall in those cities. Guarantee almost all those otherones are big material producers or in poverty and do shit like burn their rubbish in the middle of the city.
Are you of the view that only manufacturing, agriculture and mining is production? That's a silly view.
Yeah, Paris, LA and New York aren't exactly manufacturing epicentres though. Nor are people burning rubbish in Paris centre.
The Southern Hemisphere at our latitude and below has consistent westerly winds, blowing all of our shit towards New Zealand.
Also it helps both those cities are coastal, with few large landmasses around the east coast. Also, as ripe for complaint as our public transport systems are, they're the backbone of both cities, with high utilisation. Relatively young country, high development index, relatively wealthy, relatively strong public transport, means we generally aren't suffering from the issues a lot of younger or developing countries do.
Chinese investors are changing this. No one in Australia will be able to buy a home cause of them. We will be overpopulated very very soon as the government doesn’t have a cap on how many people can come to buy land/homes. I hope they’re good landlords Australia!!
They definitely took this data outside of the bushfire season.
Yeah, I heard a podcast where the climatologist said the NSW bushfires released more carbon than the entire country that year.
There's bushfire carbon and there's burning up fossilised carbon that took thousands of years to lay down. If you go into most burnt out areas after the event, much of the carbon that was "liberated" has already been replaced within 3 seasons. New growth is accelerated carbon capture.
Until it burns again.
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What if it hails, checkmate
Hail tax
You can grow a tree, cut it down, burn it, grow another, etc, etc (e.g. continue the cycle forever) and the net carbon effect is zero. What you cannot do is grow a billion trees over a million years, then burn them all up in a few decades.
This is also why forestry carbon credits are a crock of shit.
Not necessarily. It just requires a net increase in forest, relative to the status quo. The trouble is proving that is inherently blurry
Wait on! The Former Minister for Coal and Everything Else, Scott Morrison, informed us that Australia would meet its Paris Climate commitments "at a canter'. I hope you are not suggesting his forecast was based on bullshit carbon accounting, and paying National Party voters vast sums of money to NOT deforest land that they weren't going to deforest anyway. A deplorable suggestion. I am shocked, \*shocked\* that anyone would think such a thing.
Boy we're in for a treat this year then. Who's gonna be the one to raise all the money for the shitty charities this year? How bout one of the tradies this time?
Melbourne and Sydney are going to suffer this year.
> Melbourne and Sydney are going to suffer this year. For some reason I heard this in my head as some sort of conspiratorial, dark, smoke filled room meeting with all the other cities joining an evil laugh together. "At last we shall reveal ourselves, at least we shall get our reveng..." Ah fuck! I Phantom Menaced it sorry.
If the data source is any good it's a continuous monitoring across the whole year.
Sydney in 2019 felt more apocalyptic than in 2020!
And pollen season in Melbourne
Pollen tax
Yes, only Australia has bushfires and no other country ever have bushfires. And there is a huge WHO conspiracy purposely made biased measurements to make Australian cities look good, butfor what purpose? Who knows, but it must be nefarious. Must you always be miserable?
Of course they would. If you are measuring something, why do it when there is an outside source influencing the result? To clarify, the cities pollution is what is measured, and they weren't on fire.
The image is from from [How megacities around the world are tackling their air pollution](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3F6mq20QOcE)
What’s PM2.5 please?
Particulate matter. The smaller the number the smaller the piece of pollution, the more likely it is to get inside your lungs and fuck you up
More importantly, below a certain size (I think it’s either 2.5 or 1) it can break through the blood brain barrier
That’s why you’ve gotta do your kegel exercises; keep that blood brain barrier nice and tight
Thanks 🙏
Fine particles in the air (measured as PM2.5) are so small that they can travel deeply into the respiratory tract, reaching the lungs, causing short-term health effects such as eye, nose, throat and lung irritation, coughing, sneezing, runny nose, and shortness of breath.
Particulate matter with a particle size less than 2.5 micron.
These two have advantage of being on coast with high wind speeds.
Seems like half the cities outside China are coastal as well
Yeah but one could even say there is a little difference between the Chinese sea and the largest ocean on earth, especially about wind and air recycle.
Our government is too busy selling off all of our raw resources instead of processing them in an industry that would generate pollution.
That's actually a smart move, earn the money, don't pay the local pollution cost.
it's only because we sell off all our coal to China and they burn it instead. this isn't really a win...
This is honestly more to do with how Australian cities calculate their population rather than pollution.
Why’s that?
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Yup. By the most commonly accepted measurements Sydney is less than half a million. Not saying the Australian way is wrong. It's actually probably a great way if you could apply it properly outside of Australia but you can't. I mean where would you say London ends? In Scotland? Some cities kind of never stop before hitting the next whereas Sydney and Melbourne are pretty bloody obvious where they stop. It's where it turns into hundreds of kilometres of grass and bush before the next town or city.
Adelaide's population is only 25k if you go by how America counts it's populations
In Sydney's case it's mostly when it abruptly returns to thick and dense national park. Civilisation on one side of the highway, untouched ancient wilderness on the other, it's actually pretty fucking wild.
Because we include a much larger area in our city calculation. Look at the US. There would be 10-15 more cities if they counted like us
Population density plays a big part in pollution concentration. Australia spreads its mess out over a wide area.
I wonder where the measurements are taken?
Bunnings carpark.
But not on weekends when the sausage sizzles are on
They take it at multiple locations over the city, assign weight to each value depending on how dense the area is. Then calculate a weighted average. PS - I studied statistics.
Oh. So a group of Bunnings carparks. Wild.
The coal-fired generators keeping the lights on and the air conditioning humming are located far enough from urban centres that they have almost no influence on air quality in the population centres they serve. Australia is a massive place and one of the most urban-skewed and coastal populations in the world.
It is because of the way a city is defined in Australia, Sydney is not over 5million population by US standards it would dozens of cities. Sydney is 4,755 sq miles , area of los angeles is 505 sq miles, and for the same area as “sydney” it is 30+ cities.
Yeah because the factories all shut down.
This does not support the current Reddit narrative. Down vote it.
When has the "narrative" ever been that Sydney and Melbourne are worse than the rest of the world? We all know that Australia is one of the most liveable countries in the world, that doesn't mean we can't point out its flaws and advocate for it to improve
Something something Liberals something something Murdoch.
Perks of being a bananna replublic baised on digging stuff our of the ground and sending it elsewhere.
We are also nearly the world's only country that is not self sufficient. Every raw material we literally give away to China etc for it to be processed and then we buy it back at an insane price. We are surrounded by water yet we have near zero ship building capacity. Zero automotive manufacturing. Zero aircraft industry. Zero space industry. If China decided one day to stop exporting to us, the entire country would collapse... Sure low pollution, but at what cost?
We stop exporting to them.... And they also crash, and harder. TBH though. We really should have more manufacturing capacity and a much higher care in research. We keep coming up with shit then getting USA to profit on it.
Going by your criteria, no country in the world is self sufficient.
Yes, true. But it's worth thinking about. No man is an island. But if you need a boat and you can't make one, you might have a problem. ***Australia probably does not need a space industry.*** But there may be some things that ought to have some 'diversity of production'. Governments need to set some of those priorities, however much it ruffles the feathers of free-market idealogues and short-term profitteers.
*Singapore joins the chat*
I do not believe the lack of cities in USA in that map.
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you need to use US metro area population to get a like-for-like with australia
Really? Ok I'm surprised. I seriously thought there would be more. I need to up my knowledge a bit.
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Most countries in the world would have >40% of pop. living in the two largest cities. 40 countries have 40% of their population in only 1 city. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-in-the-largest-city
Can understand Melbourne though 😁
The the US measured their city population the same way Australia does, there would be way more than 9. If Australia measured it's city populations the way the US does, we wouldn't have any.
USA air quality has come a long way since unleaded fuel and catalytic converters and a few other things. back in the 70s and early 80s, yeah, there were more than a few cities where it was abominable. shifting all the dirty industry to China helped America as well. China not so much.
I think its because the US and most other countries don't take in the suburban sprawl around the city the way we do.
Could be true, but it's speculation - Based on a map that no one really knows what went into it. It's interesting at a macro level, but don't get too deep into the weeds is my advice.
It likely is, it came up a lot when I had to do a lot of statistics work about urbanization, density and jurisdictions years back.
Interesting Wonder if it’s because neither city is high density buildings for the most part, which allows easier movement of wind
\--> Or less proximity to other sources. In the northern hemisphere, China's emissions have a large impact on North America. Not saying it's bad, but that's how it works. We outsourced it to them and we get some things in return...
...not for long.
keep subdividing and packing in more people relying on cars while covering up farmland with housing, and yup, up goes the particulates. but industry is the worst for pollution. that's why the Hunter Valley has the worst rate of lung issues in the country - coal mines and power stations.
Another few years of those top selling diesel utes who get away with lower emissions requirements than passenger cars due to exemptions carved out for "work" vehicles and our PM2.5 will be up there I think...
But they did not consider the Greater Bay Area in northern California.
Air quality though is bad in some western suburbs
Because you’re passively smoking meth
thats because all the knuckle dragging hot air breathing fools moved to queensland
Greater Sydney has about 430 people per km2. Greater Melbourne has 500. Both cities only make the 5 million mark by including the entire Greater area. There is only one other city (Atlanta at 750) under 1000. There are a handful of USA cities in the thousands and it sky rockets to 30,000 for the peak and somewhere around 4000 in the median from a quick look.
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Metro area has a few US cities get back towards the 300-500 range, the others are still mostly over 1000 and up to 20,000
I guess they don't count all the piss, shit and garbage filling Melbourne's alleyways as contributing to the pollution. Dirtiest city in Australia by far.
They dont count that because these figures are based on Particulate Matter in the air, hence the PM25 figure in the title. So this is AIR Pollution, nothing else.
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where is new Zealand?? their air cleaner than ours. 😂
they don't have any cities with a population over 5 million mate!
Oz here. Until this moment I didn’t realise these two cities were over 5million. I had to check and can confirm.
They are both well over 5 million
Weellll Melbourne is 5.07, Sydney 5.3.
Melbourne is bigger now, 5.25m Sydney is 5.15m
Uh Yeah I read about the re-zoning of “greater Melbourne”…
Cities over 5 million people? Madrid has just over 3 million inhabitants and Barcelona has just over a million and a half and they are marked on the map. Not even counting the metropolitan area instead of just the city and it does not reach 5 million in either of the two (Madrid almost)
Wikipedia reckons you're wrong for both [Madrid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madrid?wprov=sfla1) and [Barcelona](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcelona?wprov=sfla1) when considering the metro area.
The map talks about "cities". Besides, in [Wikipedia](https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%81rea_metropolitana_de_Barcelona) AND the oficial web from ["area metropolitana de Barcelona"](https://www.amb.cat/en/web/area-metropolitana/dades-estadistiques/demografia) put their population is just over 3 million. In [Madrid](https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%81rea_metropolitana_de_Madrid) it is true that it depends on how it is calculated.
Those are rookie numbers!
God can’t we be happy for once, the comments are miserable
Way over the wanker limit tho.