14 DAY TRIAL // Air pollution in China is so bad these days that scientists claim that saying it resembles a nuclear winter would not be all that far-fetched.
More precisely, they argue that the amount of smog currently hovering over the country has high chances not only to greatly affect public health, but also have a devastating impact on agriculture by slowing down photosynthesis in plants.
Specialists explain that what the scientific community calls a nuclear winter, or an atomic winter, is basically a hypothetical climatic effect of the detonation of several dozen nuclear weapons.
Should these detonations translate into a series of firestorms, smog and soot would built up in the air, and the amount of sunlight reaching the planet would be reduced for several months in a row.
Besides, these changes in the makeup of the stratosphere would cause temperatures to plummet, they go on to detail.
According to The Guardian, China's air pollution crisis is similar to a nuclear winter in the sense that the country is currently engulfed in so much smog that crops are bound to have trouble growing and developing.
Scientist He Dongxian with the China Agricultural University says that, as shown by a series of experiments that she carried out, plants in greenhouses are the ones most likely to be affected.
Thus, the researcher says that seeds that she planted in a suburban greenhouse in Beijing took about two months to sprout. Seeds kept in a laboratory and exposed to artificial light, on the other hand, sprouted in just twenty days.
The researcher believes that this difference came as a direct result of the fact that, in time, air pollutants came to adhere to the greenhouse in Beijing, and thus limited the amount of sunlight that reached the seeds by approximately 50%.
This means that, unless China moves to solve its air pollution crisis without delay, the country's agriculture and consequently its food supply will be badly affected in the not so distant future, He Dongxian argues.
“Now almost every farm is caught in a smog panic,” the China Agricultural University researcher told the press during a recent interview.
Media reports say that, currently, the city of Beijing and large portions of six of China's northern provinces are covered by a thick blanket of smog.
What's more, it would appear that, on Tuesday night, air concentrations of PM2.5 in Beijing hit an impressive 505 micrograms per cubic meter.
To put things into perspective, it must be said that the World Health Organization considers all concentrations above 25 micrograms per cubic meter to be unsafe.
If specialists are right, China will experience an improvement in local air quality sometime around Thursday.