We’re walking back from Lidl and speculating on whether the solid grey of the sky means it’s going to rain. It looked like rain yesterday and did shower briefly - one point for the local television forecast that said it would and nil for the internet forecasts that said it wouldn’t. But it occurs to us that we haven’t recently thought to check the pollution indexes (felt that should be indices, but autocorrect let it go). There are two different sites we use that record Larnaca pollution, giving live, weekly, monthly and yearly results. Slightly confusing, as they don’t list precisely the same factors, but they’re in broad agreement. Pollution high today.
Larnaca generally has quite high pollution in world terms, it can vary considerably over a day let alone a week, and the chief culprit is fine particulate matter. In other words, dust. (Can mean other things such as smoke, pollen, ash, etc but here it’s mostly dust). Fine enough to go into the lungs and even bloodstream, hence the occasional warnings re infants, the elderly, outdoor sports, etc. Today is just grey but there have been times of reddish brown sky, occasionally for several days, as dust has blown in from the Sahara. Not the sort of pollution anything can be done about, of course. Surprising, though to find that Larnaca is usually more polluted than London. Not so in the old days of the Victorian peasouper fogs, in the days before coal fires were banned, when a sulphurous smog killed between 4 and 12 thousand (estimates vary and 4,000 probably conservative) Londoners in four days in December 1952. Chına, of course, has many of the worst cities.
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