Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide

The air in Kraków is fine once you give it a good chew. I don't know why people are complaining.

I used to live in Gdansk, and later Gdynia, and let me tell you - as soon as it's cold outside, people burn all kinds of shit at home, the air's so thick you can practically cut it with a knife. We theorized that the smog's mainly from residential burning of coal, but of course who know's what's in the stove.

All I know, is that it smells really unhealthy, and the smoke coming out of houses is a deep, black colour, almost like oil.

Woah, most of Poland looks... bad https://www.google.com/maps/place/Krak%C3%B3w,+Poland/@50.47...

Fossil fuel heating is _extremely_ polluting, and really costing the population months, up to years of their life.

But it's a silent killer, so let's dramatize fantasy nuclear accidents instead.

Warsaw is top 15, Krakow and Warsaw are the only European cities in the top 15. For some added context, it's around -10 degrees celcius there right now. I don't know why Poland stands out here, but I know that older residential areas burn wood (in other Eastern European countries as well), because that's just how you heat an old house: these neigbourhoods are horrible to walk through in winter, because the air just stinks of smoke.

The page only lists 126 cities, with the bottom three having an AQI of 0.

So the editorialized title is incorrect. It's not "top 5 worst air quality worldwide", it's only top 5 in this list, which is a small subset of the world's cities.

It's a Swiss company but even Switzerland's largest city, Zürich, is missing.

China sure as hell has more than 8 cities and Russia more than 2.

Lyon, France is occassionally right up there too. If the weather (mostly the wind) is right/wrong we can shoot right up the ranking thanks to the geography of the surrounding region.

Few years ago Kraków has forbidden the use of solid fuels which improved the situation significantly. Days like today are happening much less often since then. Moreover, Kraków has probably one of the densest network of pollution sensors in the world, which is why we talk about it at all. There are places in Poland that are much worse off, but there's not that much data to back it up.

We got a whiff of that in Berlin a few weeks ago when we got some cold wind from the east. Really noticeably bad air quality when I went outside to enjoy the snow and the cold. When I checked the map, I saw that we are basically getting Poland's pollution blowing our way. Most of the time the winds blow from the west and it's fine. Berlin has a bit of traffic but not a lot of coal plants or industry. It would be better if it got rid of a lot of the heavy diesel traffic in the city. That's slowly happening. But it's not that bad here most of the time.

The point of pollution is that it stinks (literally) and is bad for your health. Pollution kills people, shortens expected life times by years, causes respiratory issues for children, etc. Those are some good reasons to do something about it. There are good alternatives to coal at this point. Mostly this is just inefficient legacy infrastructure that we pay extra for to keep going to "protect jobs". From a macro economic point of view, that stopped making sense quite some time ago. Which is why coal plants are going extinct in a lot of places.

Even gas plants are a big improvement. I think of them as a stop gap solution that might be economically risky long term. Wind, solar, and batteries are cheaper. Maybe with some nuclear here and there (expensive but clean). However, gas plants are undeniably a pragmatic compromise between cost and polluting. Unlike nuclear they are easy to switch off when not needed and can act as a fallback solution when wind/solar fall short in the winter. LNG is not cheap though and that makes gas plants long term risky as renewables plus batteries marginalizes their use to the point where they are deeply unprofitable.

There's a base load argument that often pops up in these discussions. Gas plants are nice because they can be switched off. Base load is basically the type of power that is expensive to switch off. Mainly coal and nuclear. This is actually problematic in a grid with a lot of intermittent power supply (wind/solar). Dispatchability is more important. Gas power is good because it is rapidly dispatchable. Batteries act as a buffer and minimize the need for gas plants to run.

The list appears to contain some inconsistencies. For example, Jaipur, India has an AQI of approximately 175, yet it does not appear in the top rankings, despite being larger in both population and geographic size.

I've been living there for 15years and it's the reason I've moved away. Frankly I love the city enough that I would sabotage my health for it. Not my kids health though. Asthma related problems in kids are widespreada and of course bad air quality is related to tons of other negative consequences.

I wonder though how do they compute the number (is it average across points measured in the city?). Because within city borders air quality varies wildly. There are some regions where it is actually pretty good.

I love Poland, love the people. In many towns though (ie I was in Bielsko-Biała recently) it smells like many things run on coal (like residential heating).

I live in Bangkok and we also get inversions during the "cold" (for Thailand haha) season, the same time that farms slash and burn, making this the worst time of year for our air quality as well.

It's much better this year but incredibly hard to police since officials often don't have jurisdiction where the pm2.5 originated, before getting trapped in the inversion

I had a job offer there 8 years ago. When I visit there I saw pictures of people wearing masks to avoid bad air. Didn't take the job :)

Just check the air quality in small cities around Poland. The air quality is twice as bad as in Kraków. Around 450 mg/m2

Kabul, Manila and Amsterdam have an index of 0. I'm not sure how reliable this data is.

And I thought Milan (19th) was bad

Keep in mind this shows the “live most polluted major city ranking, 11:00–12:00” (EEST time), so rather short-term measurements.

IQAir has shit coverage. I live in Kazakhstan in a city at the eastern part of the country, near the border with Chinese Xinjiang, where PM2.5 levels regularly exceed 1000 µg/m³ (that's right, it's not a typo). The highest concentration I've seen this winter is 1900 µg/m³ just a couple of days ago.

SO₂ pollution is also extreme, with levels of 1000 µg/m³ being exceeded on a regular basis, and 5000-8000 µg/m³ not unheard of. Yes, I am sure of these numbers, it's not a typo.

Right at this moment there's some wind and the pollution has somewhat subsided, but it won't last: it's an exception. For example, the average PM2.5 concentration over the last month is around 250 µg/m³, depending on the exact place.

We have extensive network of air sensors, but it's not currently public (it only started working a couple of months ago and is in the process of being made available to the public). I can only recommend looking at https://aqicn.org, which has much better coverage than IQAir, and speaking of our country specifically, it collects data from our old sensors provided by the government.

Disregard anything that looks suspicious (some of the sensors are not working and show zero levels of pollution -- they're simply broken).

My city is the worst one, but actually most Central Asian cities have terrible air quality due to harsh winters and outdated heating methods with zero emission control. Much, much worse than anything in Poland or Europe generally. You won't see them on IQAir because AFAIK they mostly collect data through their own sensors, which are expensive and not used here.

Let me guess: an unusually cold winter and coal.

Funnily enough, Kraków region has the longest live expectancy in Poland (see https://stat.gov.pl/en/topics/population/life-expectancy/lif...).

Which is interesting, as either air quality does not matter that much or those data are just bogus.

Well, air quality matters probably, so we are left with the data. Let's check what is the origin of this information: https://www.iqair.com/poland/lesser-poland-voivodeship/krako...

6 stations. One from "corporate contributor" named Arek (common Polish first name, short from Arkadiusz so does not look like a big corp) plus 5 other individual contributors.

What equipment those 6 stations have? No idea. Are the instruments calibrated properly? No idea. Are they placed in the right spot, not on the balcony near the chimney? No idea. Are they placed evenly across Krakow to give reliable city-wide data? Looking on the provided locations - not really.

Iqair seems to "crowdsource" their measurements so they get "crowdsourced" data, which can be total crap. Do they even verify those data? How? No idea.

But... how?

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I am sceptic of that listing. Normally, the bigger a city, the more waste it would accumulate. So why are almost all cities in China and India, ranked below? Save for two in India. Something is strange with that listing. Also if you do an image search on Google, Krakow is nowhere ugly or dirty. Yes, these images have a bias too, but compare it to the megacities in India. There is just no comparison here.