<story><title>Schoolchildren ordered indoors as air pollution cloaks Shanghai</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/06/schoolchildren-air-pollution-shanghai-eastern-china</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Sharlin</author><text>I wonder how this compares to the worst smogs experienced in London and elsewhere before the West got its act together with regard to particulate pollution. Apparently the Great Smog of 1952 &lt;i&gt;killed&lt;/i&gt; on the order of 10000 people in just a few days. I&amp;#x27;m not sure many young people nowadays realize how horrible the situation was just half a century ago.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_1952&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Great_Smog_of_1952&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>saalweachter</author><text>It really irks me whenever there&amp;#x27;s a talk about nuclear energy.  Nuclear power may have its own set of challenges, but coming from the baseline of &lt;i&gt;coal&lt;/i&gt; it&amp;#x27;s hard to do worse.</text></comment>
<story><title>Schoolchildren ordered indoors as air pollution cloaks Shanghai</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/06/schoolchildren-air-pollution-shanghai-eastern-china</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Sharlin</author><text>I wonder how this compares to the worst smogs experienced in London and elsewhere before the West got its act together with regard to particulate pollution. Apparently the Great Smog of 1952 &lt;i&gt;killed&lt;/i&gt; on the order of 10000 people in just a few days. I&amp;#x27;m not sure many young people nowadays realize how horrible the situation was just half a century ago.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_1952&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Great_Smog_of_1952&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Lagged2Death</author><text>&lt;i&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not sure many young people nowadays realize how horrible the situation was just half a century ago.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is a great point. We&amp;#x27;ve made so much progress in this area that &amp;quot;pollution&amp;quot; can seem like an abstraction. This is something we should be impressing upon our children, in a more serious way than stories about walking to school uphill in the snow both ways, etc.&lt;p&gt;I was two years old when this picture was taken in my home-town. I remember summer days in the following years that looked like this, with the brown air leaching colors from the sunlight itself.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/infocus/documerica111611/s_d03_A-550175.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;cdn.theatlantic.com&amp;#x2F;static&amp;#x2F;infocus&amp;#x2F;documerica111611&amp;#x2F;s...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;From here:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/11/documerica-images-of-america-in-crisis-in-the-1970s/100190/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&amp;#x2F;infocus&amp;#x2F;2011&amp;#x2F;11&amp;#x2F;documerica-images...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;It didn&amp;#x27;t compare to the Great Smog, of course, but for Americans, it&amp;#x27;s closer to home and of course also closer to the present.</text></comment>