One of the only things that I don't like about living in Chiang Mai is the burning season where the air pollution gets so bad that it actually blocks out the sun on most days. It is quite ominous to look out your window and rather than seeing the sun you see an illuminated haze. On some days you can see the outline of the sun but the air pollution is so bad that it is a bit frightening.
In the past week or so things have started to look a bit better as far as the official numbers are concerned but they vary so much from one location to another that I kind of question whether or not the officials in charge of this are really accurately portraying what the real numbers are.
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When you consider that most of the time Chiang Mai is in triple digits, and often well past the 200 mark, a day of 70 is pretty damn great. There is one thing that kind of concerns me though and that is that the government could possibly be in charge of providing us with this information and no offense to Thai people of course, but the government here lies a lot more often than it doesn't. We only need to look at this real-time map to have some indication of the impossibility of this overall number
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Look at those numbers and then explain to me how the overall average comes to 70? It doesn't make sense. Also, if these readouts are at all accurate and I don't really believe that they are, how is it that a place that is just a few blocks from another AQI measurement device is getting results nearly double of the other one? It couldn't possibly unless there was a diesel truck parked out in front of whatever the place is that measures this.
If this scale doesn't mean anything to you just know that anything over 100 ppm is considered dangerous for anyone with existing respiratory issues and anything over 200 is considered dangerous for anyone at all.
I don't have any existing respiratory issues but I also wake up with strange "smokers lung" on some days even though I don't smoke. This is something that is kind of frightening to me because do we really know what the long-term exposure to air quality like this does to a person? It can't possibly be good.
There have been times in the past where Chiang Mai had the worst air quality in the world for a few days or so, which is really alarming because it beat out cities like Shanghai and they have 10 times the population of Chiang Mai.
I am in a privileged position because I can simply leave if it gets too bad. For some people though, they have no choice but to stay here because of family or industry. For those people, I worry about the long-term affects for them. We'll probably find out about it once it is too late. In the meantime the government keeps making idle promises about how they are going to fix this and this is why I believe the numbers that we are seeing on these charts might be doctored. Think about it ok? Which is easier? Correcting a problem that is caused by hundreds of different factors including industry and farming or to just fiddle with the numbers a bit and claim victory? I know which one most governments would likely opt for.