Iamon lyme: Wrong...

http://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/5615

"As Jaffe explains, the commonly heard phase “air pollution knows no boundaries” takes on a new meaning when we start to understand how pollution is travelling around the globe. The pollutants pumped out into the air never disappear into thin air, as we might like to believe.

Typical westerly wind flows across the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere mean air pollution from China is often carried over the Pacific Ocean. If the weather conditions are right, contaminants including mercury, ozone, sulphur and nitrogen oxides, black carbon and desert dust, can reach the west coast of the US within days.

The most visible recent examples were the giant dust storms originating from the Gobi desert in 1998 and 2001, which carried significant levels of pollutants across to the US. At the time, researchers feared this could be the start of an era of Chinese pollution dumping itself on the US. However, a similar large event has not occurred since, although smaller dust storms are still frequent.

Far more common, says Jaffe, have been the ozone events. These are not visible in the same way as giant dust storms, so haven´t garnered the same level of interest, but have proven to be damaging to public health and air quality standards. Levels of ozone detected at the mountaintop research centre have been "creeping up" over the past decade, according to data collected at the site, a result linked to, among factors, rapidly increasing vehicle emissions from Asia."

..........."Ironically, the US could also be contributing to its own mercury pollution too if it pushes through plans to scale up the export of coal to China.

US coal is already being exported to China through Canada. Just south of the west coast port city of Vancouver, the Westshore Coal Terminal ships 22 million tonnes of coal a year, of which 59% goes to China. There are now plans to build dozens of new terminals in the states of Washington and Oregon, on the west coast of the US, and export 150 million tonnes of coal a year to Asia.

"It's a classic jobs versus environment," says Jaffe, who lives in Washington state, which is phasing out its only coal-burning power station. "It's a dumb idea. We ship coal to China, they burn it and we get the pollution back.""